Does it really matter?

I had a premonition Obama wouldn’t make it – the sites which I was accessing wanted him to win and, I suspect, put a particular spin on the polls. In 2008 three points of Obama's putative lead in 2008 apparently vanished because people didn't like telling the pollsters they would be voting against him. And he didn’t have such a lead this time.

Of course, it was all down to swing states – in some of which the Republican power system has been disenfranchising voters. 

Obama seems a decent (if ineffective) guy. Romney also comes across in some ways as decent but, basically, he has disowned so many of the policy positions he has taken over the years that I would not know what I was voting for (except for the loony tea-party stuff his VP brings). 

In so many ways the election no longer matters – corporate power rules OK.

But we all want a good guy there – and we haven’t entirely given up hope on the community activist I almost met when I was placed in the Chicago mayor’s Office for a week in 1987 as part of the German Marshall Fellowship.  

Three years ago I had a post about making sense of public sector reform and, last year, I called in the clowns

Finally a great story about a Scottish guy trying to restore a Romanian palace

The painting is a wonderful Stanley Spencer - adoration of elderly men