Aha, good morning, Doctor Faust

The American electoral system, simply by existing, corrupts.

By the time a man like Obama has got this far — electable, within reach of the presidency — nobody really knows any longer who he is. He probably doesn’t know himself. By raising $660m dollars in campaign funds — imagine! — he has inevitably run up debts, obligations, favours, whose nature remains obscure. By running as a candidate of change and transformation, he has raised expectations that cannot possibly be met within the constraints of the political system. He has aroused fears that could well spill over into grievous harm (it is not so long ago that other advocates of transformational change, like Luther King and the Kennedys, ended up as corpses; crazed neo-Nazi skinheads from Tennessee are not going to be the only ones wishing Obama harm).

The irresistible pull towards the centre — essential now, it seems, to electability anywhere in the west — means that Obama has had to shelve, or defer, or forget about, the things he really wants to do, the things that would mark him out as a truly reforming president. He has had to learn to spend his days jetting around a continent playing the schoolyard game (yes you did ... no I didn’t: you stand for higher taxes ... no I don’t). He has had to learn to reduce complicated policies and strategies to one-word slogans, flatten out complex nuances of meaning and vision and intent into platitudes about who will make the best commander-in-chief, the best guarantor of security, the best champion of the rich, or the poor, or whatever. He has had to become a Washington-style politician even while railing against Washington.

By the time a candidate gets to that stage, it’s doubtful whether he even remembers who is or what he used to stand for. Every ounce of time and energy is spent on raising money, mud-slinging, dodging and weaving, manufacturing sound-bites, manipulating the media, and generally struggling to survive another day. By this stage, whatever there had been of political passion is being provided by the public relations industry.

To become electable, in other words, is to leave behind all the things you wanted to be elected for. If the money doesn’t compromise you, if the crowds and the rhetoric don’t corrupt you, Machiavellian pragmatism will.