Obama is on course for victory. But he isn’t ready for the White House

Two Sundays ago, I was sitting in the café in the Borders on L Street in Washington, a table away from a couple of middle-aged black men who were discussing politics over cups of coffee and great piles of books. One of them, wearing a black T-shirt with a Union logo on it and the kind of motley pillbox hat that was popular during the Afrocentric clothing fad of the early 1990s, raised his voice. ‘If they steal it,’ he said, ‘brothers is gonna riot.’ The ‘they’ were Republicans. It was the presidential election and the diagnosis was unsurprising. The belief is widespread among Democrats of all hues, views and regions that Republicans never win elections legitimately. They must either lie to the public or manipulate the vote. My neighbour seemed to anticipate some tampering with the automatic tallying machines made by the Diebold company, a staple subject on left-wing talk radio.

Well, there’s scant danger of that, I thought. That evening’s Hotline poll showed Barack Obama with a solid 5-point lead — and Obama was beating John McCain in states without which no Republican can win. Since then, the signs of a landslide have multiplied. Obama is up by 2:1 margins in New York and California. Twice as many Obama supporters nationwide claim to be very enthusiastic about their candidate. Eleven million people have voted early, thanks to liberalised absentee ballot rules, and they lean Obama’s way. In New Mexico, 69 per cent of the early voters are registered Democrats. In Georgia, blacks (who favour Obama 95 per cent to 5) account for more than a third of early ballots. A quarter of a million absentee ballots have been cast in Obamaphilic metropolitan Cleveland alone. And Obama is wiping McCain out in both fundraising and television ad buys.