Bill and Hillary Clinton are miffed that the American media have fallen in a collective swoon for the phenomenon that is Barack Obama. You can't blame them.

The tone and even the content of so much of the verbiage that pours from television and newspapers on the subject of the man seems to channel Rodgers and Hart, via Ella Fitzgerald:

I'm wild again, beguiled again,

A simpering, whimpering child again

A race like a crackpot Dynasty

The contest between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton matches any fiction

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BACKGROUND

• The ascent of Barack Obama, Mr Charisma

• Decay, jobs and guns fall under the spotlight

• Free trade: Clinton/Obama's mistakes

Bewitched, bothered and bewildered...am I.

In fairness, though, the beguiling of the American liberal mind by this first-term senator from Illinois looks like sober contemplation compared with the ecstasy he has induced in the synapses of the rest of the world.

The Germans call him, without irony, the Black JFK. The BBC evidently thinks he's the best thing to come out of America since, well, in their rather limited worldview, since Jimmy Carter. If you listen carefully you can hear grown men wandering the corridors of London, Brussels and Berlin, crooning as they ponder an exciting new future:

I'll sing to him, each spring to him,

And worship the trousers that cling to him

Bewitched, bothered and bewildered ...am I.

It's hard to escape the feeling that all this excitement is going to be repaid in the devalued currency of disappointment. Mr Obama's ego is certainly writing cheques his body can't cash. There's an expectation that a President Obama will change everything in America's relations with the world. But my guess is that, for all his campaign rhetoric and for all his genuine intent, the facts on the ground won't change much.

He will be able to do little or nothing new about Iraq. And in return for all those nice commitments he is going to make about multilateralism, global warming and international law, he will, if anything, step up America's demand for hard European action in the fight against terrorism - especially boots on the ground in Afghanistan - something Europeans are not going to want any part of. If he is half-serious about some of the things he has said on trade, he is going to pit the US against the rest of the world in ways that might make diplomats yearn for the tranquil days of George Bush.

And yet there's no doubt he has a view of the world that is closer to European attitudes than anything we have seen in the past seven years and it is this that keeps Obamania in full swing. The effect is heightened, of course, by the identity of the Republican nominee.

The same morally simple narrative that hails Mr Obama as Luke Skywalker, bursting out of America's Death Star, is beginning to portray John McCain as a kind of Darth Vader. Mr McCain is already, in the media's account, the grumpy old white man who emerged from a field of grumpy old white Republicans.

He was once regarded, even by opponents, as a man of exceptional character, a war hero with a heartbreaking story of courage, who came to Washington to reform government. But that version is steadily being replaced by a new one. This is McCain the Hypocrite. Last week's shockingly uncorroborated and salacious hit job on him by The New York Times was a case in point. Here he was, we were told, the man railing at the special interests in Washington by day and getting into bed with them by night.

The rest of the world can fill in the blanks of the rest of this morality tale - rich, white corporate warmonger versus fresh new, African-American embodiment of hope and change.

If it's a caricature that takes hold, it will be a great shame and a great disservice to American politics. Mr McCain has at least as large a claim to be welcomed by America's critics as does Mr Obama.

He is deemed a foreign policy hawk. It is true that he has insisted that the war in Iraq be fought to a successful conclusion. But it's not even clear he would have taken the US to war in the first place. If he had, you can be sure he would not have done so in such a disgracefully ill-prepared way as Mr Bush did.

For those around the world who worry about these things, Mr McCain is very Euro-friendly on a number of important issues. He is deadly serious about climate change, favouring an aggressive cap and trading system. He is sharply critical of US detainee policies and wants to close Guantanamo Bay. When he opposes torture by the US, he does so from a position of authority, having for five years been on the sharp end of torture techniques in a Vietnamese hellhole. Mr McCain has a long and almost unique track record of taking on powerful corporate interests in Washington.

What marks him out from Mr Obama is not his age or his race or his party, but that he has achieved so much of what Mr Obama merely promises to do - tackle the role of money in politics, work across the political lines and promote an image of the US in the world that is in keeping with the finest traditions of American democracy

The problem is that there's a danger that the presidential contest between Mr Obama and Mr McCain will become not a debate but a silly battle of conflicting icons. You can be sure that, in the eyes of the rest of the world, and much of America, if Mr McCain wins it will be not because of his superior experience or the quality of his ideas, but because America is irredeemably racist.

Instead of being the welcome break with America's recent past that he truly is, he will be painted as a continuation of it. Worse, that that, he will have won by vanquishing Hope and Peace. He will be for ever The Man Who Shot Bambi.

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