KEY POINTS:
The 1960s TV series The Defenders, a legal drama about an idealistic father and son team who specialise in hopeless cases, signed off each week by paraphrasing Winston Churchill's dictum that democracy isn't perfect but it's preferable to anything else mankind has come up with.
As an aside, the original teleplay on which the series was based starred William Shatner, who now appears in Boston Legal as the rich, lazy, lecherous Denny Crane, a man so lacking in altruism that he probably thinks a social conscience is something married men acquire shortly after they contract a social disease. Somewhere, no doubt, a cultural studies post-graduate is working Shatner's career arc into a thesis on the death of idealism.
As the civil war between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama grinds towards its last person standing conclusion, it's hard to summon even that level of qualified enthusiasm for democracy. The longer the contest has gone on, the more it's been about race.
Leaving aside the issue of who's to blame - and the Rev Jeremiah Wright's recent intervention did such predictable damage to Obama that it's reasonable to assume that was the whole idea - the truly dispiriting thing is that it's happening within the Democratic Party, the natural political home of the Afro-American community.
The genie is now out of the bottle and seeing the Republicans have nothing to lose by playing the race card because black people don't vote for them anyway, who knows what depths will be plumbed if Obama does stagger across the line to win the nomination.
Almost as dispiriting has been Clinton's transformation from card-carrying liberal to populist redneck, kissing up to the gun nuts and ranting about obliterating Iran, once it became evident that the so-called Reagan Democrats - the white, socially conservative working class - were suspicious of Obama.
Abysmal, too, has been the fixation with gaffes. A gaffe is a statement made during an election campaign that reflects what many people are thinking but which no canny candidate would utter publicly because it contains a truth that's unpalatable to a segment of the electorate. In other words, what defines a gaffe isn't its validity, but that it was said at all.
Thus Obama committed a hideous gaffe when he commented that people in small mid-western towns which have been buffeted by 25 years of economic restructuring and globalisation were not surprisingly bitter, and in their bitterness clung to guns, religion or antipathy to people who weren't like them.
Never mind that he went on to place the alienation of young urban blacks in a similar context, or that this is exactly how most of the rest of the world views Middle America, or that it's essentially true.
People in small towns in the mid-west were offended, and for a candidate to offend anyone constitutes a gaffe. There's a dismal logic to this gaffe-mania.
Gaffes occur when a lapse of discipline causes someone to say what they really think and political professionals, including those in the media, place a high value on discipline and hypocrisy in election campaigns.
Thus the election of Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson, the most gaffe-prone politician in the Western world, to the mayoralty of London went some way towards restoring one's faith in democracy. Most of Johnson's gaffes have been sweeping if not wild generalisations or politically incorrect eruptions that, once processed by the thought police, have caused offence to entire towns, regions, countries and races.
There's another small tick for democracy in the fact that he succeeded despite decades of reverse snobbery that has sought to ridicule and marginalise those who have the misfortune to be born posh. Johnson is often likened to P. G. Wodehouse's immortal character Bertie Wooster, the half-witted, disaster-prone gentleman of leisure who'd struggle to be a functioning member of society if it wasn't for his supremely intelligent and capable manservant, Jeeves.
While Johnson's appearance and manner invite this comparison, his fondness for Latin aphorisms and classical allusions, as opposed to facile sound bites, suggests he might have more in common with Jeeves.
Lastly in this little exercise in looking on the bright side, in contrast to the bile-fest across the Atlantic, the contest between Johnson and left-wing incumbent Ken Livingstone was marked by good humour and mutual respect. When the results were in, Johnson said to his opponent, "When we have that drink together, which we both so richly deserve, I hope we can discover a way in which the mayoralty can continue to benefit from your transparent love of London."
