Heartfelt thanks for the thousands of messages of good will I have received from all parts of Canada and the U.S. and many other countries, over my present confinement.

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Even those who are habitually dismissive of the U.S. political process seem to be entranced by this fierce struggle between Senators Clinton, McCain, and Obama. No other country has recently fielded such a formidable trio of contenders for its highest office, and they are a good deal more prepossessing than George W. Bush, Albert Gore, and John Kerry have been in the last eight years. Mr. Obama struck a resonant chord when he called for candor about race relations, but he will not squiggle out of 20 years of happily auditing Jeremiah Wright’s racist sermons by likening his pastor’s outrageous comments to the innocuous remarks of the senator’s white grandmother, who largely raised him and is now a poor, 85 year-old Hawaiian condo-dweller.

The man Senator Obama cited as a great formative mentor in his life has repeatedly stated that the U.S. government (under both parties), has deliberately propagated AIDS in Africa to depopulate the black world; that Americans should be petitioning God to damn rather than bless their country; that 9/11 was America’s chickens coming home to rest; and that the worm-eaten canard that Franklin D. Roosevelt orchestrated the attack on Pearl Harbor was true.

Half of Americans practice a religion and most of them would desert a house of worship where they were routinely treated to such reflections. Mr. Obama told the New York Times in April 2007, that he might have to distance himself from Pastor Wright, but he still hasn’t really done so. Many will want to know why. The racially aggrieved or guilt-ridden may be assuaged by Mr. Obama’s platitude about a “national conversation” about race, but most Americans will not.

Nor, if she is the nominee, has Mrs. Clinton likely heard the last of Whitewater and related questions. Turning $1,000 into $100,000 in one day of astute commodity trading with the tutelage of a local billionaire commodity specialist, in her first attempt at it in her life, is something the Republicans are unlikely to allow her to forget.

Mrs. McCain is the only candidate’s spouse who is still reckoned to be an electoral asset. After all the Clinton hype about two for the price of one, and a few of Bill’s clangers about Jesse Jackson and others, the ex-president was banished by his wife down the well-trodden (by him) path to the dog house. As for Michelle Obama, after a flurry of fawning comparisons with Jackie Kennedy, her statement that she first felt pride in America as an adult was when a primary state voted for her husband caused her abrupt muzzling and virtual disappearance.

The Democrats and most of the national press seem not to have noticed that the defeatist truisms about Iraq have passed their sell-by date. The latest intelligence findings in Iraq, detailing Saddam Hussein’s long and extensive promotion of terrorism, leave the Republicans with plenty of room to reargue the casus belli. Iraq’s 75% reduction in violence, 30% increase in oil production, taming of al-Sadr and other factional leaders, and possibly the world’s highest annual economic growth rate since the upward “Surge” in American forces, seem not to have entered into the Democratic electoral strategy. Neighboring Gulf states have expressed their satisfaction at the American presence and progress in Iraq. And Mr. McCain, who approved the invasion, criticized the occupation, and supported the Surge, will sound a good deal more like a plausible commander-in-chief than his Democratic rivals.

Whatever else may be said of George W. Bush, with the Surge he has appeared to be a felicitous combination of Washington and Machiavelli. His father and his father’s friends set up James Baker and Lee Hamilton’s Iraq Study Group to provide a fig-leaf for the president to withdraw from Iraq with whatever dignity he could salvage.

George W. smiled politely, sent two more divisions to Iraq, rather than withdraw, adopted a new strategy, fired the defense secretary, and replaced him with Robert Gates, a prominent member of the Iraq Study Group and his father’s director of central intelligence. It was piquant, and it has worked, and McCain will rub his Democratic opponent’s nose in it.

The Democrats will mend their divisions as they did in 1968, when there was horrible fragmentation between Vice President Humphrey and Senator McCarthy, after the assassination of Robert Kennedy and the violent disorders at the Democratic convention in Chicago.

If the present administration can’t straddle to November with interest rate cuts that steady the stock market and the economy generally, but continue to depress the dollar, the Democrats should win. If the Federal Reserve chairman, Ben Bernanke, and the treasury secretary, Henry Paulson, can keep the ball in the air to Election Day without China breaking its currency’s peg to the US dollar, Mr. McCain should win.

Whatever happens, it will be, as Richard Nixon used to say, “a rocking, socking campaign” (and he conducted many). The American genius for showmanship and propensity to commercialize almost everything, are about to reach their heights (or depths). The result, whoever wins, will be a capable new president.

Lord Black is the author of “Franklin Delano Roosevelt: Champion of Freedom” and “Nixon: A Life in Full.” From the National Post.