America is still the nation whose eyes say ‘yes’

Douglas Murray tours a country despondent about its presidential race and increasingly uncertain about Barack Obama. Yet the world still needs America’s strengths

In front of me at the University of Chicago, and several times my height, is a stone carving of a half-human deity from the Assyrian empire. All round this exhibition on ancient Iraq are towering artefacts from lost cities and faded empires. The whole is overshadowed by a room featuring the Baghdad looting of 2003. Beside me, a father tries to answer a question from his son: ‘What happened to Babylon?’ The father attempts to explain how empires ebb and flow — how armies rise and fall.

The fall of empires was already on my mind because I had come from Washington where I had been with some of the people now perennially described as the ‘architects’ of the Iraq war. It was not only being with those now out of the Bush administration that created a state of dejection in the air. Talking with Republicans and Democrats, listening to the flagging disciples of Obama and the resigned party-allies of McCain, it seems from the capital that a more than seasonal torpor hangs in the late summer air.

This is in part because of a presidential race that already feels interminable. Then there is the fact that conservatives feel saddled with a presidential candidate about whom few can find it in themselves to be enthusiastic — as McCain’s fund-raising efforts go some way to demonstrating. Add to that the expected if wearying late-administration legal suits and scandals. All combine to create in Republicans a resignation to the fact that the other side probably has to win sometimes and that this might just be their go. Many Republicans are even considering the unthinkable — a Democrat sweep which will see them running the House of Representatives, the Senate and the White House.