Election fever

On Thursday night, almost any politician would have liked to be Barack Obama. Outside of actual power, there can be few things more thrilling than a rapturous response from a crowd of 200,000. Even better, the rally was in Berlin, far from Obama’s home country. This American has clearly become a transatlantic political star. Gordon Brown, for example, almost certainly would have preferred acknowledging massive applause to dealing with a humiliating by-election defeat for his Labour party. The UK...