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America’s Attachment to Litigation Has Negative Impact

Historically, the United States and its ideals of freedom and opportunity have been symbolized by wholesome and endearing traditions such as apple pie and baseball. More recently, however, the image of Casey at the Bat has given way to Casey at the courthouse, as the civil lawsuit – despite its tendency toward antagonism and manipulations – is increasingly lauded as the American way.

In this land of the lawsuit, opportunity does not spring from a future harvest, but from yesterday’s malfeasance or misfortune. In this respect, America’s love affair with the lawsuit may be reflective of a larger cultural shift in which we are no longer content to pull ourselves up by the bootstraps but instead must “Get Rich or Die Tryin’.”

Whatever the overarching causes may be, we should recognize two specific factors that have contributed to the number of lawsuits in the United States. The first factor is the aptly named American Rule, whereby each party is responsible for their own attorney fees unless there is some contractual or statutory basis for shifting fees to the other party. Courts have mitigated the “side effects” of the American Rule by adopting and applying rules that authorize sanctions against parties who bring frivolous lawsuits.

The second factor is the dearth of opportunities to resolve disputes outside of the court system. Fortunately, with the rising use of various forms of alternative dispute resolution (ADR), this second factor is fast becoming a historical phenomenon. On this point, our court system should be commended for embracing and encouraging the use of ADR.

At the end of the day, the real concern is not the cause of litigation, but its cost. The cost to the parties is often discussed and widely recognized, but the indirect costs of litigation are often overlooked. Indirect costs come in many forms. For example, when court dockets are crowded and the judiciary is overburdened, the costs necessarily fall across all types of judicial proceedings, including criminal matters, since a finite number of judicial resources must be allocated across a larger number of cases.

Moreover, every civil lawsuit imposes indirect costs on the taxpayers because the judicial resources used in disposing of the lawsuit are publicly financed. Some calculations have shown that, on average, each civil case costs the taxpayers around $3,000.

Against this backdrop, courts have increasingly recognized the value of ADR. And many courts have specifically recognized the merits of the National Arbitration Forum (FORUM), its Code of Procedure, and its “impressive assembly of qualified arbitrators.” Marsh v. First USA Bank, 103 F.Supp.2d 909, 925 (N.D. Tex. 2000). For example, a federal court in California recently declared that FORUM arbitration “is without question an inexpensive, efficient, and convenient forum for resolving commercial disputes.” Provencher v. Dell, Inc., 409 F.Supp.2d 1196, 1198 (C.D. Cal. 2006).

Given the substantial and oft hidden costs of civil litigation, all Americans should hope that arbitration and other forms of ADR continue to remain a robust and viable alternative to court litigation.

Tags: America's, Attachment, Impact, Litigation, Negative

America’s Economy is Coming Down!

Facts or suppositions, all Americans have felt it on their pockets that there is something happening to their economy and not towards the positive side. The newspapers have been full of titles like “Oil and gasoline prices skyrocketed”. With the new oil price record of over $135/barrel, the price for food and goods reach new heights as well; keeping in mind that the dollar has dropped by 18% of his international value in 2007. In other words, the slumping American dollar caused the US economy a major hit; the latter shrunk by 16% in the past year when compared to global economy.

The response to what caused the US economy drop is complex; however, some answers can be found in the credit crisis.

Charles Moffat, from The Politics eZine affirms: “Americans have too many mortgages, too many credit cards and too much national debt. They rely on foreign imports from China and other nations and their own economy has become too service oriented and lacks manufacturing.

Imagine you have $10,000 in the bank and the yearly compound interest rate is 5%. Over a year you would get $500 in interest. But imagine for a moment if the value of food, gasoline and all commodities doubled in price in one year. Your $10,500 isn’t really worth the same as it used to be… it is now worth approx. $5,250 in terms of actual purchasing power”.

Economists’ answer

This is the situation in USA at the moment and the most important economists in USA seem to be rather gloomy when referring to the country’s economy:

“The world is set to jump off the top of a waterfall without knowing how deep the water is below.” – Kenneth Rogoff, IMF (International Monetary Fund) Head of Economic Research.

“There’s a 75% chance that the US will experience a currency crisis within five years.” – Paul Volcker, Chairman of the US Federal Reserve.

Stephen Roach, Chief Economist, Morgan Stanley says:”There’s nobody home on economic policy in America right now. It’s an accident waiting to happen.”

Pastors’ answer

To this reality, I’ll let you read on the spiritual answer of David Wilkerson, founder of Teen Challenge, Inc., the worldwide Christian drug and alcohol rehabilitation ministry. He is the author of The Cross and the Switchblade, The Vision, Have You Felt Like Giving Up Lately?, Hungry for More of Jesus, Revival on Broadway and many other books. David and his wife, Gwen, live in New York City, where he serves as senior pastor of Times Square Church.

“. . .Beloved, America is facing God’s judgment–and we will never be the same! In the days to come, literally hundreds of thousands of Americans will lose their homes. Why? They’ve leveraged them with equity loans, so they could play the stock market and try to strike it rich!

I tell you, the stock market has become America’s golden calf! People see it as a financial savior, and they worship it daily–trusting in it, depending on it, giving it all their energy and attention. But it’s going to fall suddenly–and none of the small, individual investors will be spared. They’ll suffer the most, losing their homes, their cars–everything!

I must ask you: “Are you prepared for what is coming? If not, are you acting now to get ready? When I speak of being ready, where do your thoughts take you? Do you think immediately of investments, bank accounts, survival plans, safety for your family?”

Indeed, today – while most of America focuses on its prosperity, God is waking a holy remnant in the church. These saints are on their faces, seeking Him with all their strength and crying out for a true Word from the Spirit of truth.

In recent months, our ministry has received hundreds of letters from pastors and believers who are repulsed by most of what they see in the church: hype, foolishness, entertainment, shallow preaching. They’re crying out, “Enough! We’re tired of seeing our pastors go to conventions and return only to introduce come new gimmick. We’re sick of seeing the flesh accommodated. We’re hungry for truth! We want to hear preaching that convicts us and challenges us to holiness and prayer.”

Believer, you can rest assured–in the coming days of calamity, the true revival won’t come through showboating, big-time preachers or TV evangelists. It won’t come through prosperity teachings or other doctrines of false security. No–God’s revival will come through a hidden company of pastors and lay people who have been in the school of Christ, learning His ways and trusting in Him. These will lead a revival of truth!

Yet not everyone is going to want truth. Many will turn to unbridled lust. Indeed, our society could see Sodom replayed a hundred times over. But, as our nation poises on the brink of chaos, many Americans will begin to seek truth, answers, life.

As for me, I want to face the coming times as “… a workman that needs not to be ashamed, rightly dividing the Word of truth” II Timothy 2:15

I urge you: Ask the Lord to prepare you–His way–for the day “America’s golden calf” comes down. Seek His Spirit of truth in your secret closet. Learn to recognize His voice above all the worldly clamor going on in His church. Then you’ll truly be prepared to face the coming storm.”

Tags: America's, Coming, Down, Economy

America’s Economy is Coming Down!

Facts or suppositions, all Americans have felt it on their pockets that there is something happening to their economy and not towards the positive side. The newspapers have been full of titles like “Oil and gasoline prices skyrocketed”. With the new oil price record of over $135/barrel, the price for food and goods reach new heights as well; keeping in mind that the dollar has dropped by 18% of his international value in 2007. In other words, the slumping American dollar caused the US economy a major hit; the latter shrunk by 16% in the past year when compared to global economy.

The response to what caused the US economy drop is complex; however, some answers can be found in the credit crisis.

Charles Moffat, from The Politics eZine affirms: “Americans have too many mortgages, too many credit cards and too much national debt. They rely on foreign imports from China and other nations and their own economy has become too service oriented and lacks manufacturing.

Imagine you have $10,000 in the bank and the yearly compound interest rate is 5%. Over a year you would get $500 in interest. But imagine for a moment if the value of food, gasoline and all commodities doubled in price in one year. Your $10,500 isn’t really worth the same as it used to be… it is now worth approx. $5,250 in terms of actual purchasing power”.

Economists’ answer

This is the situation in USA at the moment and the most important economists in USA seem to be rather gloomy when referring to the country’s economy:

“The world is set to jump off the top of a waterfall without knowing how deep the water is below.” – Kenneth Rogoff, IMF (International Monetary Fund) Head of Economic Research.

“There’s a 75% chance that the US will experience a currency crisis within five years.” – Paul Volcker, Chairman of the US Federal Reserve.

Stephen Roach, Chief Economist, Morgan Stanley says:”There’s nobody home on economic policy in America right now. It’s an accident waiting to happen.”

Pastors’ answer

To this reality, I’ll let you read on the spiritual answer of David Wilkerson, founder of Teen Challenge, Inc., the worldwide Christian drug and alcohol rehabilitation ministry. He is the author of The Cross and the Switchblade, The Vision, Have You Felt Like Giving Up Lately?, Hungry for More of Jesus, Revival on Broadway and many other books. David and his wife, Gwen, live in New York City, where he serves as senior pastor of Times Square Church.

“. . .Beloved, America is facing God’s judgment–and we will never be the same! In the days to come, literally hundreds of thousands of Americans will lose their homes. Why? They’ve leveraged them with equity loans, so they could play the stock market and try to strike it rich!

I tell you, the stock market has become America’s golden calf! People see it as a financial savior, and they worship it daily–trusting in it, depending on it, giving it all their energy and attention. But it’s going to fall suddenly–and none of the small, individual investors will be spared. They’ll suffer the most, losing their homes, their cars–everything!

I must ask you: “Are you prepared for what is coming? If not, are you acting now to get ready? When I speak of being ready, where do your thoughts take you? Do you think immediately of investments, bank accounts, survival plans, safety for your family?”

Indeed, today – while most of America focuses on its prosperity, God is waking a holy remnant in the church. These saints are on their faces, seeking Him with all their strength and crying out for a true Word from the Spirit of truth.

In recent months, our ministry has received hundreds of letters from pastors and believers who are repulsed by most of what they see in the church: hype, foolishness, entertainment, shallow preaching. They’re crying out, “Enough! We’re tired of seeing our pastors go to conventions and return only to introduce come new gimmick. We’re sick of seeing the flesh accommodated. We’re hungry for truth! We want to hear preaching that convicts us and challenges us to holiness and prayer.”

Believer, you can rest assured–in the coming days of calamity, the true revival won’t come through showboating, big-time preachers or TV evangelists. It won’t come through prosperity teachings or other doctrines of false security. No–God’s revival will come through a hidden company of pastors and lay people who have been in the school of Christ, learning His ways and trusting in Him. These will lead a revival of truth!

Yet not everyone is going to want truth. Many will turn to unbridled lust. Indeed, our society could see Sodom replayed a hundred times over. But, as our nation poises on the brink of chaos, many Americans will begin to seek truth, answers, life.

As for me, I want to face the coming times as “… a workman that needs not to be ashamed, rightly dividing the Word of truth” II Timothy 2:15

I urge you: Ask the Lord to prepare you–His way–for the day “America’s golden calf” comes down. Seek His Spirit of truth in your secret closet. Learn to recognize His voice above all the worldly clamor going on in His church. Then you’ll truly be prepared to face the coming storm.”

Tags: America's, Coming, Down, Economy

America’s $40m Men Feel the Heat

Eight chief executives of US corporations were invited to appear before a senate hearing last week to discuss the scabrous issue of excessive executive pay. None of them showed up, perhaps wisely. How do you defend a $40m (£25m) or $50m pay packet unless with the same kind of lame excuse voiced by football managers, that it is the market rate?

Those who did turn up, including representatives of some of the biggest pension funds in the US, were less afraid to put their opinions forward. Sean Harrigan, president of the administrative board of California’s public employee pension fund, the largest in America and increasingly aggressive on the issue of spiralling executive salaries, testified that chief executives now average 400 times what a production worker earns.

The yawning gap and the continuing escalation of chief executive salaries “continues to have an impact on investor confidence” he said.

The refusal of the eight chief executives to appear at the senate hearing caused barely a ruffle in the American media – despite the sense of outrage that many investors and ordinary workers are beginning to feel.

But the issue is beginning to gain traction in a country where the average chief executive salary makes those in Britain look like pocket change. According to a recent survey published in USA Today, the average compensation package for chief executives in the top 100 American companies was $33.4m in 2002 – nearly one-third of them banked more than $50m in salaries, bonuses and shares.

Over the year, executives took a 15% pay hike, compared with the average worker’s rise of just 3.2%. As for the eight who failed to show, let them be named and shamed here: Larry Ellison of Oracle, Michael Eisner of Walt Disney, Leo Mullin of Delta Air Lines, Edward Breen of Tyco, David Cote of Honeywell International, Scott McNealy of Sun Microsystems, Jeff Barbakow of Tenet healthcare and the former General Electric chief executive Jack Welch.

In the aftermath of the financial scandals that knocked corporate America sideways last year, the greed engendered by massive compensation packages was widely identified as vital, blinding good judgment and tempting executives to cross the line.

Alan Greenspan, the venerable head of the Federal Reserve, spoke of the culture of “infectious greed” during the 1990s. Disgust has been routinely expressed at the massive awards to the likes of Kenneth Lay of Enron and Bernie Ebbers of WorldCom even as their companies crashed.

Warren Buffett, the billionaire investor, has called the issue of executive compensation “the acid test of reform”. At his annual meeting he told shareholders to “rise up” against greedy chief executives. And they seem to be taking note.

A little over a week ago at Hollinger International, owner of the Daily Telegraph, shareholders forced a series of concessions on to Lord Black, regularly accused of running the company like a private fiefdom. They included a cap on the “management fees” he takes from the firm and an independent review of a $73m payment he shared with his lieutenants after the sale of the company’s Canadian newspaper assets.

The shareholding company that brought the bonus payment into the public view, Tweedy Browne, is not otherwise known for its aggressive nature, suggesting that the new activism is catching on.

Richard Grasso, who runs the New York stock exchange, is coming under fire for the size of his $10m salary and the fact that he sits on the board of the retailer Home Depot, one of the companies listed on the market.

At American Airlines, the chairman and chief executive, Don Carty, was forced to stand down earlier this month after an astonishingly crass move. Just a day after wringing $1.8bn in pay cuts and job losses from the company’s workforce to keep the airline in business, Mr Carty quietly put in place some lucrative retention bonuses for himself and a handful of senior executives. It cost him his job.

His replacements have listened to the critics. Gerlad Arprey, the new chief executive, will not take a pay rise on the salary he had previously earned as chief operating officer. Edward Brennan, taking over as chairman, will continue to receive his existing director’s fee but take nothing extra for his promotion.

They are not the only ones to bend to the demands of investors. Mr Mullin at struggling Delta Air Lines pledged not to take some of the compensation his contract allows in 2003. He is giving up a $1m bonus and long-term awards that would have been worth a further $8m after his 2002 package stirred anger in congress.

Sanford Weill of Citigroup and a number of other banking chiefs are foregoing bonuses.

The highest paid executive last year, Mr Barbakow of the Tenet Healthcare hospital chain, made an eye-popping $189m, of which $111m came from exercising share options. Mr Barbakow was forced out of the company last week amid investor concerns about the its slumping share regulators investigated the business. Concerns about its quality of care also arose after the FBI raided a Tenet hospital for information about allegations of unnecessary procedures by two doctors.

Mr Welch at GE agreed to give up some of his more extravagant retirement perks including fresh flowers for his apartment, New York Knicks and Wimbledon tickets and a laundry service.

A shareholder in the company John Hancock Financial Services last week filed a civil lawsuit asking a clutch of senior executives to return some of their pay. David D’Alessandro, the company’s chief executive, took a pay rise last year from $8.2m to $21.7m despite profits falling by 15% and a share price that wilted by 32%.

But the disparity between executive pay and the rewards for shareholders is still glaringly obvious in many companies. Michael Eisner, who runs Walt Disney, was awarded a $5m bonus last year despite the company’s share price falling by 34%.

How long the issue will stay uppermost in the minds of the US public is uncertain and the long term ability of either shareholders or workers to suppress pay is doubtful.

Americans are less righteous than the British about the mere principle of excessive pay. Once investors too are doing well again then the issue is likely to die down and inflation return. That could be sooner than many had thought. The Dow Jones index on Wall Street last week completed its first three-month rise in two years raising the prospect that chief executives might be let off the hook before any lasting damage is done to their bank accounts.

Tags: $40m, America's, Feel, Heat

America’s Moment of Truth

The contrast was compelling. George W Bush went up to Capitol Hill to deliver the eighth and final State of the Union address of a failed presidency already eclipsed by the intense contest to succeed him. His spinners might speak of Bush’s final months as a ’sprint to the finish’, but the ritual applause of Congress fooled no one, not even members of his own party. This is a deeply unpopular president hobbling into the sunset. All the Democrats can agree that he has been a disaster; all the Republicans can agree that they’d really rather not talk about him.

The real excitement took place a few miles away, a few hours earlier, in a sports arena at Washington’s American University. Before a young, multi-racial and delirious crowd, Barack Obama was being anointed as the new John F Kennedy. JFK was no saint, but a link to the legend can add luster to any Democratic aspirant to the presidency. When Bill Clinton was first running for the White House, his campaign’s favorite photograph was of a teenage Bill having his hand shaken by JFK.

Obama is too shrewd a politician to make the boast that he is the heir to Kennedy. After all, the freshman Senator from Illinois was barely out of nappies when JFK was assassinated. But he has to be pleased when others make that claim on his behalf, and gladder still when the crowning is conducted by the members of the Kennedy family.

They didn’t simply endorse him; they presented him to the whooping crowd as a reincarnation of the lost leader. JFK’s sole surviving child, Caroline Kennedy, a rather shy speaker and the more effective for being so, said that she saw in Obama her father’s ability to offer ‘hope and inspiration’. Ted Kennedy, the septuagenarian warhorse of the liberal wing of his party, paid tribute to Obama’s ‘grit and grace’ and roared: ‘I feel change in the air!’ He deployed his rich baritone to declare that ‘with Barack Obama we will turn the page on the old politics of misrepresentation and distortion, we close the book on the old politics of race against race’ – a swing at the Bush era that was also a stinging slap at the Clintons for dealing the race card off the bottom of the deck.

As for the candidate, he had yet to speak and the infatuated students were already chanting: ‘O-Bam-A! O-Bam-A! O-Bam-A!’ As they draped the mantle of Camelot on his elegant shoulders and placed the Kennedy crown on his sticky-out ears, Obama lost the struggle to look humble. He grinned like a cat that has just been given the keys to the dairy.

You can never be sure that a good candidate is going to make a good President. What you can observe is that in terms of rhetorical ability he is qualified to mount the pulpit of the presidency. Having just been compared to one of the great orators, he couldn’t afford to disappoint the crowd by delivering a duff speech. And he didn’t. It contained an affecting personal anecdote about how his father had made the journey from Africa to America with financial help from an education fund set up by JFK. On his way up to his rhetorical peak, Obama placed the election in his preferred frame: ‘The choice is not rich versus poor, young versus old, and it is certainly not black versus white. It is about the past versus the future.’

These tropes now sound a bit stale in the ears of the reporters who have been accompanying him for months, but the fresh eye can see why he rouses crowds to a genuine exuberance that you so rarely see in contemporary politics, here or in Britain. For a noon rally, some of them began queuing at five in the morning. So many wanted to get in, the overflow room overflowed. The young crowds who go into rapture at these rallies may well be starry-eyed, but his is the only campaign generating genuine excitement. With it is coming a surge of cash. His campaign managers say they banked more than $30m in January from mainly small donors – a quarter of a million of them. That will pay for TV advertising in the crucial states. He’s not only got into their hearts. He’s got into their wallets. He also picked up a useful endorsement yesterday from the Los Angeles Times

It’s hard to define charisma; you just know it when you see it. JFK had it. Ronald Reagan had it. Bill Clinton has it. Hillary Clinton wants it, but can’t achieve it. As for the Republicans who are still in this race, John McCain is crisp and can be charming but is also wooden, while Mitt Romney sounds slick and comes over as insincere.

When the gods were handing out charisma, Obama was spoilt with an extra large scoop. The only heckles to interrupt his speech were cries of: ‘We love you Obama!’ Not all the voices were female. On the newscasts that night, Obamania stole the spotlight both from the State of the Union and all his rivals for the presidency.

The endorsement of the Kennedys was another booster rocket on his sensational trajectory from interesting novelty to serious candidate to be America’s 44th President. From his win on the snowy plains of Iowa, via Hillary’s comeback in New Hampshire to his crushing victory over her in South Carolina, he has been on a fantastic roll.

Abraham Lincoln spoke in his first inaugural address of ‘the better angels of our nature’. The essence of Obama’s appeal is that he speaks to the better angels of America’s character. He romances that side of this nation which sees itself as idealistic and inspirational. After years in which its politics have been disfigured by ugly sectarianism, Obama has been tapping the desire to believe that what divides Americans can be transcended by what unites them.

At Hillary Clinton’s rallies, she wonkishly details the government programs she would use to put America right. Obama’s campaign has reams of position papers, but his speeches rarely touch on the concrete. They are all about the oratory of uplift, urgency and unity.

Detractors in rival camps sniff narcissism and you can see why. There was a rally later in the week in the Kansas oil town of El Dorado. He was there to highlight the other branch of his family tree by visiting the home town of his white maternal grandfather. As he wrote in The Audacity of Hope, he has ‘relatives who resemble Margaret Thatcher and others who could pass for Bernie Mac’. It is more accurate to say of Obama that he would be the first mixed race President of the United States.

‘I believe that the dream we share is more powerful than the differences we have,’ he told that Kansas crowd, ‘because I am living proof of that idea.’ All candidates claim they will revive The American Dream. His unique brag is that he is The Dream made flesh.

Politics should be about dreams, but it is also – and nowhere more so than in America – about machines. If the extraordinary journey of Barack Obama is to finish at the White House, The Dream must now prevail over The Machines.

The contest has moved on from the early skirmishes in a few individual states and become coast-to-coast war. Small town politics is giving way to a frenetic struggle across time zones. Twenty-two states go to the polls on Super-Duper Tuesday, among them such delegate-rich territories as California, New York and Illinois.

Given the unpopularity of their party, the contenders for the Republican nomination should be fighting only for the privilege of coming second to the Democrat in November. The Bush era has left the once formidable Republican machine discredited and fractured. Testimony to that is the dizzy way in which contenders to be the Republican nominee have risen without trace and then sunk the same way.

The most humiliating flop has been that of Rudy Giuliani. Once, and for many months, the pollsters’ favorite in the Republican race, the former Mayor of New York flamed out last week after a horribly misjudged campaign left him coming in a poor third in Florida. 9/11 had given him a national fame as Mayor America which he hoped to parley into national power. That, in part, was his downfall. He relied far too heavily on being Mr 9/11, banging on about the event that made him a global celebrity to the rising ridicule of the media and the clear irritation of many voters who wanted a prospectus for the future not reminders of the past. He spent more than $40m to acquire a grand total of one convention delegate. Mike Huckabee, the Bible-belting former governor of Arkansas, is another burst bubble. He is still hanging in there, but to win now he will need a miracle as great as any in the Good Book.

The fight for the Republican nomination has now got down – and down is the word for it; dirty is the other – to a slugfest between McCain and Romney. They locked jaws when they debated in a vast hangar housing Ronald Reagan’s Airforce One at his memorial library in California last Wednesday night. The Senator from Arizona and the former Governor of Massachusetts were sat within spitting distance. And spit they did, exchanging accusation and counter-accusation of mendacity and dirty tricks. Romney ridicules McCain as a very old man in a hurry who will ’say anything to become president’. McCain sneers back at Romney that he will say everything to be President. ‘He has been entirely consistent,’ McCain likes to mock his rival. ‘He has consistently taken two sides of every issue, sometimes more than two.’

They don’t just scrap over the issues. They fight even more viciously about what each other has said about the issues. They cannot even agree on what the issues should be. For McCain, the paramount concern is the threat of Islamist extremism, a subject which plays to his reputation on national security. For Romney, the most pressing issue is the stuttering economy which plays to his curriculum vitae as a tycoon.

The eye-gouging between Republicans is a tremendous spectacle. A party that used the ‘wedge’ politics of fear and hate against its opponents is now riddled with those toxins itself. For all that, it would be foolish to simply dismiss the chances of another Republican following Bush. They won a presidential election they were supposed to lose in 2000. They did it again in 2004. If they pick McCain, they will have a candidate with a known ability to reach out to moderate and swing voters, not least because he has an image as a maverick and a man of principle.

Image is an important word in that sentence. The Vietnam vet may be an ideological heretic to some of the Republican Right – he’s against torture and thinks we should be worried about global warming – but to a European eye he is a rock-ribbed conservative. He’s anti-abortion. He’s against deficits. He says he’ll keep American troops in Iraq for 100 years if that is what it takes.

For all his self-styled ’straight talk’, he’s also shown a willingness to stoop to conquer. Romney is winded and whiney about the blows below his belt he’s been dealt by McCain. If the Senator is prepared to tear the throat of a fellow Republican, he will go for the jugular of any Democrat. The past tells us that Republicans excel at the character destruction of their opponents.

That threat is central to the case made by Hillary Clinton’s campaign that she should be preferred over Barack Obama. Her allies say that she has been through the fire while Obama has yet to feel the heat of a single negative ad. In the past few days, he has even got the endorsement of the New York Post, Rupert Murdoch’s tabloid, which arouses the suspicion that Republicans are only kissing Obama today the better to crush him later. When the battle between the parties is joined, the right-wing press and pundits will suddenly recall his youthful dabbles with cocaine, his relationship with a property developer indicted for extortion and fraud, and dredge every swamp for any slime to paint him as unfit to be President.

That is one reason why Hillary, in her role as the dream-deflater, calls her rival for the Democratic nomination a peddler of ‘false hope’. In the account of her camp, Obama is hopelessly naive and his supporters are recklessly deluded if they believe he can beat the American Right simply with glittery rhetoric about consensus.

If he didn’t appreciate before how nasty American politics can get, he should know now. The Clintons themselves have administered that lesson. I heard Bill Clinton make a speech which included the hilarious claim that his current vocation is ‘post-politics’. The lie to that was given when the former President turned attack dog for his wife. He outraged many liberal commentators and members of his own party by trying to devalue Obama’s triumph in South Carolina by likening it to Jesse Jackson’s victories there in the Eighties. In other words, he’s just another black guy winning black votes, it’s down to the color of his skin and not the quality of his arguments. It was – and it has been seen as such – an attempt to ghettoise Obama as the black candidate he has never wanted to be. The Clintons’ dabbling with racial politics caused a tremendous backlash within the ranks of their own party. It spurred Ted Kennedy – who had angry phone conversations with Bill – into his endorsement. It also prompted the Nobel Laureate Toni Morrison, who once dubbed Bill ‘the first black President’, to back Obama.

I caught up with Bill Clinton at a rally in southern New Jersey, a state with a lot of delegates at stake this Tuesday. The event illustrated why the former President is both his wife’s greatest asset and her most enormous liability. Finding myself there early, a magnificent chrome-and-red diner lured me off the highway and in for breakfast.

The diners knew that the former President would soon be in their neighborhood, but it wasn’t the accomplishments of his time in the White House, ‘the time of peace and prosperity’ that is always lauded at Clinton rallies, that interested them. One entertained his mates with Bill impersonations. The munch of waffles was accompanied by the droll drawl: ‘I did not have sexual relations with that woman.’

Up the road, in a college gym, the crowd for the Hillary rally was warmed up with some rock and pop. Sting sang: ‘Every little thing she does is magic.’ Amid the vast bank of television cameras waiting for Bill, one of the cameramen from a local station sniggered to his neighbor: ‘If everything Hillary does is magic, why did Bill…?’

However much the Clintons might like everyone to have amnesia about it, Americans still remember the grotesque soap opera into which his presidency descended, its darkest hour when he was impeached for lying to a grand jury about his affair with Monica Lewinsky.

Clinton’s claim to his party’s respect is that he is the only Democrat to have given them two terms in the White House since FDR. The New Jersey event illustrated the strength the Clintons have in the party’s establishment. One after another they took to the stage to endorse Hillary: a black female state senator was followed by a trio of white males, the speaker of the state legislature, the governor of the state and the chairman of the state party, who took a swipe at Obama by saying: ‘We need a President who doesn’t need on-the-job training. We need a President who is ready to go.’

Then came the Pit Bill Terrier himself. People have been asking: if Hillary can’t control Bill during the campaign how will she keep him on a leash if they get back into the White House? Bill was a bit muzzled at this event, though he took a bite at Obama for his lack of experience in dealing with international crises or domestic affairs. ‘You don’t have to wonder what Hillary is going to do.’ The charge of inexperience is certainly Obama’s most vulnerable flank. He wants to be President when he has only been a Senator for three years.

Mark Penn, chief strategist of the Clinton campaign, has an explanation for why Obama appeals more to the educated while his candidate gets the support of those at the bottom of the heap. Affluent voters are more seduced by personality. After all, they can afford to be. Struggling voters are more focused on policy which will look after their interests. ‘The egg-heads have become the jug-heads,’ is Penn’s neat phrase for this inversion. ‘The jug-heads have become the egg-heads.’

Bill lauded his wife as the ‘proven change-maker’. It was ‘Hillary thinks’ this and ‘Hillary believes’ that. Only occasionally did he lapse into ‘I’ or ‘we’. But it’s a bit late to put the Billary thing back in the bottle. His prominence in her campaign has raised several specters. One is of a co-presidency. Would America be voting for Hillary’s first term or Bill’s third, the third he might well have won despite it all had the Constitution not forbidden him from running again? And if he is not going to be a co-president, what is he going to do all the long day, the First Laddie roving around the East Wing with time and interns on his hands?

The funniest, and most unintentionally revealing, part of Bill’s performance came towards the end when he got into a nostalgic riff about his time as Commander-in-Chief. ‘Think what being President is like,’ he invited us. ‘They play a song every time you come into the room. You don’t have to sit in traffic – you just zip along in a bullet-proof limo. You don’t have to commute to the office. You live in the nicest public building in America. You have an aircraft so cool that they make movies about it.’ He so misses it.

It is part of the myth of America that anyone can be President. For the past 20 years, it’s been true that anyone can be President so long as they are called Bush or Clinton. If Hillary spends two terms in the White House, family dynasties will have commanded the Great Republic for more than a quarter of a century. At an Obama event in New York, I saw a placard with a potent slogan. It simply said: ‘The White House is not a time share.’

At the end of the week, the two contenders were brought face-to-face at the Kodak Theater in Los Angeles. The Hollywood audience would appreciate that both put in performances worthy of serious consideration for an Oscar as they pretended to like and respect each other. They sat next to each other at a table, taking their turns to speak, looking sideways as the other performed, laughing at each other’s little jokes, like a male-female newsreader combo who can’t stand each other, but have to wear smile masks in front of the cameras. Instead of exchanging venom, they tried to do something much nastier. They viciously competed to out-nice each other. Hillary’s compliments to Barack were designed to make him sound like her junior. He helped her into and out of her seat, projecting himself as a gent and nudging the audience to remember that he is a 46-year-old man and she a 60-year-old woman.

They sparred a bit on policy, but there is really not all that much daylight between them. Both would have a more multilateralist approach to the world, both would leave Iraq, both have a plan for health care which would look very different once Congress had got its teeth in, both would find better uses for money than Bush’s huge tax breaks for the stupendously rich. ‘They are more of the same,’ Hillary said of the Republicans. ‘Neither of us, by looking at us, is more of the same.’ That’s true enough. It will be a first for America whether she is the first woman to be a major party’s presidential candidate or he is the first African-American.

In the polite version of this election, America has moved beyond judging candidates on their pigmentation or the shape of their reproductive organs. In the truer account, gender and race will count. As Michelle Obama told CNN on Friday night: ‘Race is always, in this country, still on the table.’ There is only one black face in the Senate: Obama himself. The first credible female candidate for the White House happens to be the wife of a former President.

Gender and race matter. The unknowable is how much they matter. People rarely admit to pollsters that they are misogynists or racists. I watched the Clinton-Obama debate on a big screen with a youngish crowd in a swanky, large and heaving bar in Upper Manhattan. In this fairly affluent company, no one thought – or, which is a slightly different thing, wanted to think – that skin color would be a problem for Obama.

‘We’re over that,’ insisted one Asian guy. One young white woman reckoned that gender was a larger handicap for Hillary: ‘I’m from Texas and they hate her there. They hate her because she is a Clinton and because she is a woman.’ And it is not just in the south that Hillary sparks the most visceral passions. When the New York Times endorsed her, the readers’ mail ran 50 to one, and virulently so, against the paper’s choice.

Leaving this young, well educated and colour-blind crowd, I caught a cab. The black driver had roughly three decades on the Obama debate party goers. He had a recording of the debate playing on his radio. He did think race would matter. ‘It’s about electability,’ he opined. I had found quite the political analyst behind the wheel of this Yellow Cab. ‘This is a deeply racist country. They will vote for a white woman before they will vote for a black man.’

Because they are close on policy, the contest has become about identity, history and character. In the debate, Obama said: ‘What is at stake is whether we are looking backwards [that's you Hillary] or whether we’re looking forward [that would be me].’ Clinton replied that voters needed to be careful to elect a President who could cope with ‘all the problems that we know about and the ones we can’t yet predict [not some rookie Senator who can make a pretty speech].’

Voters, her husband has said, would ‘roll the dice’ if they chose Obama over his more tested wife. The truth is that both represent risk. Hillary is a polarizing figure hauling a freight train of baggage who will give Republicans something to unite against. The gamble with Obama is that he is not so much a candidate as a wave – and waves eventually break.

Of all the candidates this Tuesday, he is potentially the most transformative president for a country thirsting for a change from political failure, poison and gridlock. Would he be a 21st-century JFK? In some ways, you would actually hope not. Before we get to find out, Americans have to decide whether they prefer dreams or machines.

Tags: America's, Moment, Truth

America’s Last Taboo

Twenty years ago, Barbara Ehrenreich wrote an article for the New York Times in which she pointed out the growing inequality of American society and was promptly denounced, by a rival paper, as a Marxist. “The Washington Times is an extreme-rightwing publication,” she says, so there was no surprise there. But the paper’s reaction underlined a general principle: that while one can say “fairly wild” things about race and gender in the US, there persists a certain coyness about class. “There’s this powerful myth that America doesn’t have classes; that they’re an ancient English or European thing that we abolished. And that if you’re not rich, it’s your own damn fault.”

Now 66, Ehrenreich has devoted most of her career to disproving this maxim. Her 2001 bestseller Nickel and Dimed was an account of the year she spent trying to eke out an existence on the minimum wage, which caused affluent readers everywhere to exclaim guiltily: “We had no idea!” She reported that companies cheat their staff of wages (there are 70 lawsuits pending); limit the number of toilet breaks staff take; forbid them from talking to each other or using “profanity” on the premises, and that the cleaner you hired through a “reputable” firm is probably made to clean your house while sick or injured. The book’s success owed much to the personal journey of Ehrenreich herself, who suggested the idea to her editor for a younger journalist to take on. But she fitted the profile of the invisible worker – middle-aged, female and knackered. Once in situ, she was bullied by various bosses and forced to retire each night to a motel because she couldn’t afford a flat.

Her latest book, which in the US is called This Land Is Their Land: Reports from a Divided Nation, is the animating force behind all this, a collection of columns that almost amounts to a manifesto. The title comes from a Woody Guthrie song, which Ehrenreich can hardly bear to listen to these days. She writes: “I flinch when I hear Woody Guthrie’s line, ‘This land belongs to you and me’. Somehow, I don’t think it was meant to be sung by a chorus of hedge-fund operators.” (The book’s UK publisher evidently didn’t feel Guthrie’s song traveled well, and has opted for the title Going to Extremes instead.)

Ehrenreich’s skill, apart from the sheer quality of her writing, is to illustrate her opinions with wave after wave of examples, of unglamorous labour disputes and everyday injustices that don’t get much of a look-in elsewhere. Through them she details how wealth in America has transferred from the bottom to the top, thanks to tax cuts for the rich and Bush’s reluctance to regulate the markets, and exposes the fallacy that “growth” as measured by GDP is, for the majority of Americans, synonymous with better living.

“It was just so fascinating to me, without being an economist, to see how in the past few years growth has become completely decoupled from wages or the real conditions of what we call working people,” she says. “And the reason they were so decoupled is because of the huge inequality. So you could have many [economic] indicators looking very sunny and good, but you’re talking about a population that is so divided there’s not an average there any more.”

A book about the joylessness of the American right must struggle to avoid matching it with a litany of dreary, rival orthodoxies. But Ehrenreich has never been dour, nor for that matter predictable. She lives in the historic town of Alexandria, just south of Washington DC, in a jolly chaos of papers and magazines. On the mantelpiece is a card that reads, “I am not, therefore I buy”, but she is as suspicious of self-denial as she is of self-indulgence, both of which she sees as affectations. In one unexpected column, Ehrenreich flies at Jane Brody, the health editor of the New York Times, who throughout the 90s championed with great influence the virtues of a low-fat, high-carb diet. As well as questioning the health benefits of Brody’s principles, Ehrenreich calls them a way of enabling the well-off to feel virtuous merely by indulging their own narcissism. “The low-fat diet has been the hair shirt under the fur coat – the daily deprivation that offsets the endless greed.”

The “tireless preaching” that bedevils modern life elicits a resounding screw-you from Ehrenreich. Her latest bugbear is “positive thinking”, the underlying philosophy of much life coaching and motivational speaking, which she came across during the research for Bait and Switch, the follow-up to Nickel and Dimed. In it, she spent a year trying to expose white-collar office life but was scuppered by not being able to get a job. Instead Ehrenreich fell into the hands of the gannets who feed on the unemployed and sell them reassurances that getting a job is just a question of attitude. This was illustrated by cheerful Kimberly, a “co-active coach” whom Ehrenreich employed and ended up wanting to kill. As the economy recedes, you wonder if Kimberly and her ilk will disappear. “I tend to think that the irrational, delusional approaches will persist,” she warns.

Ehrenreich is by training a scientist, with a degree in chemistry and a PhD in cell biology. As a child she saw both sides of the economic divide. Her father was a copper miner from Montana who got an education and eventually qualified as a metallurgist and made it on to the corporate ladder at Gillette. “He was a very exceptional person, as he’d be the first to tell you. But he never – nor did my mother – say about people who didn’t do as well, ‘Oh we did it, so they can do it.’ They recognized that theirs was an unusual trajectory.”

Did they identify as working-class?

“No. I think they would have said middle-class. But I think my father always thought that he didn’t fit in. He was too rough-edged. And he had a lot of contempt for, say, Ivy League types or MBA types.”

What she sees as the stigmatisation of the sick in the US is a reaction in part to a “strange little detail” of her childhood. Her mother, who was politically more radical than her father and whom the young Ehrenreich would look at in alarm sometimes and wonder if she was a communist, had been brought up by her Christian Scientist grandparents. “And in no other way was my mother continuing to be a Christian Scientist, except for one thing: health. It was very bad to get sick. I remember when I had trouble seeing the blackboard in about seventh grade, she said, “People in our family don’t wear glasses.” Ehrenreich smiles ruefully.

Her son is a writer and her daughter a lawyer, (Ehrenreich is divorced; she moved to Alexandria to be near her two grandchildren) and half of her family still lives on low wages; her sister and her husband have just been forced to cancel their health insurance. I wonder if she had ethical qualms about Nickel and Dimed; isn’t there something unsavory about a comfortable journalist pretending to be poor and then being paid a lot of money to write about it?

“Well you know, that never entered my mind . . . what began to bother me a little bit was that there was a deception involved; that I had to tell people that I was working these jobs because I needed the money, which wasn’t true. But I always tried at the end to tell people I had got to know what the truth was. And then you can work off the guilt of any money by giving it away. Easily fixed.”

Until the success of that book she had been freelance, and the security, she says, has been wonderful. She hasn’t had a staff position since her first job working for the New York City government as a health planner, which she left after seven months when she decided that “the government was selling out to private interests” and went to work for a “radical collective” lobbying for better healthcare in the city. “That’s where I started writing, because we had a newsletter and I loved to do investigative pieces.”

Nowadays, people write to Ehrenreich with their workplace horror stories. The most shocking in the new book came from an ex-employee of one large retailer, who told Ehrenreich that in 2003 the company held him captive for six hours and interrogated him for giving a colleague a discount on a video game, before getting him to write a false confession and firing him. A former colleague alleged that such incidents were not unusual.

With Obama ascending there is hope of a sea change, although Ehrenreich remains characteristically cautious. She sees him “tacking to the right” and was disheartened by his choice of economic adviser, Jason Furman, “who was to the far right of the Democratic party and made his reputation as a defender of Wal-Mart [one of her principal targets in Nickel and Dimed]. And so in a way, I thought, OK, I’m not going to pay [Obama] any attention for a while.”

I wonder if the huge success of Nickel and Dimed, and the tax bill that presumably came with it, hasn’t sent Ehrenreich skidding off a bit in that direction. “Ha! I have to watch that kind of stuff. But no. I always say, if I could pay more taxes and be in turn told for sure that there would be decent schools for my grandchildren, that there would be healthcare for them, that there would be social security, if there was something in return, other than wars, it would be a wonderful thing.” She cackles. “As it is, I just get angrier and angrier”

· Going to Extremes: Notes From A Divided Nation is published by Granta (£8.99).To order a copy for £8.99 with free UK p&p go to guardian.co.uk/bookshop or call 0870 836 0875

Tags: America's, Last, Taboo

HSBC Buys Central America’s Largest Bank

The British financial giant HSBC today agreed to buy Central America’s largest bank Banistmo for $1.7bn (£1bn) as it branches out into a new market.

Banistmo owns 99.39% of Panama’s largest bank, Primer Banco del Istmo, and has outlets in Costa Rica, Honduras, Colombia and Nicaragua.

HSBC will pay for cash for Banistmo, with Banistmo investors receiving $52.6 a share – a 25% premium on its closing price yesterday.

HSBC, the world’s third largest bank, said the acquisition will allow it to expand into a region of 83 million people, including Colombia, where large sections of the population do not have bank accounts.

“Banistmo will bring us significant market share and growth opportunities in all markets,” said Stephen Green, the group chairman of HSBC Holdings. “We have little overlap except in Panama, and we expect to benefit from the scale and knowledge that Banistmo brings from operating in the region.”

HSBC sees Latin and Central America as promising areas for expansion to offset slower growth in more markets in Europe, the US and Hong Kong.

The company, which already has a substantial presence in Mexico and Brazil, recently made acquisitions in Paraguay and Argentina, and is seeking permission to operate in Peru.

Banistmo last year had total assets of $6.9bn and shareholders’ funds of $695m. It made a profit after tax of $115m.

In March, HSBC reported the biggest profit ever by a British bank, making a pre-tax profit of £11.5bn in 2005, buoyed by new markets. HSBC, which describes itself “the world’s local bank”, has 129 million customers in 76 countries.

Tags: America's, Bank, Buys, Central, HSBC, Largest

America’s Disgust at ‘perfect Angelina’

She’s one of the most beautiful women in the world, a talented actress who lives with a man many claim is the sexiest man on the planet and she has a penchant for doing high-profile good deeds. But now – perhaps inevitably – the Angelina Jolie backlash has begun. The stunning movie star generates headlines almost every day but now those headlines have taken a distinctly negative turn.

For the backers of her new film, A Mighty Heart, which tells the story of murdered Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl, negative publicity around Jolie’s recent activities is becoming a potential threat to its success.

First was a disastrous PR gaffe after one of Jolie’s overzealous lawyers tried to force journalists to sign a contract before they could interview her for the film’s publicity drive. The document said they could not ask Jolie any personal questions and that the interview ‘… could only be used to promote the picture’.

Though the world of celebrity interviews is often full of such tacit agreements, the existence of a legal contract saw many reporters, including those from USA Today and the Associated Press news agency, cancel interviews. The fact that A Mighty Heart is about the issue of press freedom made the story all the more ironic. ‘Jolie turns out to be a mighty hypocrite when it comes to her own freedom of the press,’ said Fox TV’s Roger Friedman.

But that move was just the latest in a series of press kerfuffles for Jolie’s staff had previously tried to ban Fox journalists from covering her new film’s premiere, until the studio behind the film, Paramount, intervened. At the same time some of the adulatory coverage of Jolie associated with the film has itself become the subject of intense criticism. Men’s magazine Esquire is putting Jolie – barely clothed – on the cover of its July issue. The magazine is also running a lengthy profile and interview with Jolie inside.

Yet instead of drawing people into watching the movie, the piece has been the subject of intense media-bashing. On the popular online magazine Slate the article was trashed under the headline: ‘The worst celebrity profile ever written?’ And elsewhere a review of the film was headlined: ‘The Mariane Pearl movie can’t escape the shadow of Angelina Jolie’ and went on to say that casting had trumped acting because Jolie was an actress whose ‘global recognizability quotient is exceeded only by that of the sun’ and hence we cannot suspend belief long enough to believe she is Pearl. Its a damning turnaround for the actress.

Perhaps some of the backlash is the inevitable consequence of how Jolie and Brad Pitt have skilfully exploited the intense media interest in their lives in return for publicity for charities and causes that they are interested in. But even that has started to backfire. Several US newspapers reported last week that she has abandoned a charity in her eldest son’s name. She established the Maddox Jolie Project to protect the eco-system and watershed conservation values in his homeland of Cambodia. But according to ’sources’ Jolie has stopped funding it.

Other recent stories in celebrity magazines have criticized her child-rearing skills and speculated that Pitt is reluctant to marry her. She is constantly compared with his ex, Jennifer Aniston.

But she still has support. Former Secretary of State Colin Powell last week heaped praise on the actress for her work raising awareness of landmines and refugees. ‘Her work with refugees is not something to decorate herself. She studies the issues,’ he told Newsweek.

Tags: 'perfect, America's, Angelina', Disgust

America’s Self-publishing ‘miracle’

The word “bestseller” doesn’t mean too much nowadays. “Self-published bestseller” does. William P Young’s SPBS, The Shack, has been the “buzz book” in the US for the past 18 months. Young (known as “Paul”, like the apostle) is an Oregon salesman with an interest in web design. He composed The Shack as a gift for his children at Christmas 2005, something that would explain the mysterious ways in which God works.

He typeset the story on his computer and had it bound at the local print shop. His two pastors (kicking in a start-up fund of $300) encouraged him to self-publish. Registering themselves as Windblown Media, they dispatched copies from the Youngs’ family garage. Lots and lots of copies, as the months passed. Word of mouth became word of web. The Shack was blogged and hyped by Christian radio into the bestseller lists. Its American sales are verging on 2m.

The plot is simple. God takes exception to little girls getting murdered by serial killers and posts a bereaved parent a note on the subject. “He” cares. A huge number of readers testify on the web that The Shack brought them closer to their Creator. And, perhaps, their mailman.

Christian fiction is big in the US. In bookshops, that section is usually larger than science fiction (although regular Christian publishers turned down The Shack on the grounds that it was too “edgy”). Young himself calls his bestsellerdom a “miracle”, clearly discerning the kind of assistance you can’t expect from the average publicity department.

Is The Shack the Blair Witch Project of the modern book world? Does it demonstrate that with modern e-tools literary talent can find a way around the cumbersome apparatus of the publishing industry? Is it a portent? Probably not. The famous novelists who have self-published could supply a well-rounded literary education: Mark Twain, DH Lawrence, Anais Nin, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Margaret Atwood, et al. They are proudly listed on self-publishing guru John Kremer’s “self-publishing hall of fame” (bookmarket.com/selfpublish.html). But, like Paul Young, these novelists typically did it at the break-in stage of their careers. Once inside, they signed up quite happily to the mainstream commercial book world.

The Shack, which arrives on our shores this week, is not, alas, being published here with a £150 handout from Radio 4’s Thought for the Day team. It is published by Hodder and Stoughton, in an initial print run of 25,000. They won’t be dispatching it from Mr Hodder’s garage.

Tags: 'miracle', America's, Selfpublishing

Schoolboy Voted in As America’s Youngest Mayor

The new mayor of Hillsdale, Michigan, is a man of the people, ready to listen to their every concern, but only until 6pm. Then he has to do his homework.

The local elections on Tuesday may have been dismal for George Bush’s Republican party, but they were a triumph for Michael Sessions, an independent who emerged as the country’s youngest mayor at the age of 18.

Mr Sessions, who is too young to drink in his own town, won by just two votes after a recount. By 670 votes to 668, he beat the sitting mayor, who is 51, and had all the advantages of incumbency. And he won despite the fact that his name was not even on the ballot.

He was too young to stand by the spring deadline for registration, so after he turned 18 he entered as a write-in candidate – meaning voters had to remember his name and add it to the ballot by hand in order to support him. The circumstances make his triumph all the more likely to be a model for future insurgent candidates.

He started by winning the support of a powerful interest group, the Hillsdale firefighters’ union, who had fallen out with the town council.

The union has a membership of three, but in post-September 11 America it wields symbolic clout. Before endorsing Mr Sessions, its president, Kevin Pauken, called his teachers to check on his credentials.

“The guys were a little leery at first because of his age, but he really impressed us with his openness and his energy,” Mr Pauken told the Detroit News.

To help get his name known, Mr Sessions raised $700 (£400) selling toffee apples over the summer and spent it on posters and placards which were sprinkled around Hillsdale’s lawns by election day. His month-long campaign involved going door to door, explaining his vision of the town’s future in the kitchens of his initially sceptical neighbours.

“They’d look at me, and say ‘How old are you again? How much experience do you have?’ And I say ‘I’m still in high school’,” he recalled.

He promised Hillsdale’s voters he would revitalise the local economy and made his youthful energy his selling point. “I was optimistic the whole time,” he explained. At one point, five days before election day, that enthusiasm threatened to get the better of him. He spent so long out on the streets knocking on the doors, ignoring his mother’s pleas for him to wear a coat, that he ended up in a hospital emergency room with bronchitis. But by then his momentum had become unstoppable.

Mr Sessions insists that his high school obligations will not get in the way of his mayoral duties, pointing out that the $3,000-a-year job is part-time.

“From 7.50am to 2.30pm, I’ll be a student. From 3 to 6, I’ll be the mayor of Hillsdale, working on mayor stuff,” he said.

To help him do the “mayor stuff”, he is assembling a transition team of trusted advisors, who will help him deal with the town council and the town manager, who run the town between them.

The ousted mayor, Douglas Ingles, conceded defeat graciously and prepared to return to running his business, a roller-skating rink, full time after four years in office. “This is a very exciting time for our community. We need to find ways to generate enthusiasm, and I am 100% supportive of any change that makes that happen,” he said.

Tags: America's, Mayor, Schoolboy, Voted, Youngest