Honesty and leadership - Protests will be exercises in delusion

A YEAR ago tonight Chicago’s Grant Park was the place to be. Barack Obama had defied history, racial prejudice, America’s Grand Old Party and, not least of all, the Clintons, to be elected President of America.

His hometown supporters were in a mood to celebrate his great, history-making achievement.

There was an almost irrational air of optimism in Grant Park — and in many places around the world too — which was only surpassed in the days surrounding his January inauguration in Washington. The celebrations assumed the status of some sort of rebirth; they looked forward to a time when America might again be universally admired and respected.