Some of you know that I am an, er, critic of Israel, but I am a big fan of parts of its English media, especially the newspaper Ha'aretz, and not just on its Mideast coverage. Here's an intriguing column by Bradley Burston on the US election. He's basically written Obama off.

Take a long walk in this land of dreams and all you'll see is Obama. Obama lawn signs, Obama bumper stickers, window placards, lapel buttons, anklets. In souvenir stores, Obama t-shirts compete successfully with longtime best-sellers touting Bourbon Street and carousing alligators.

The signs are everywhere. Taped to vintage windowpanes in antebellum mansions in the tony Garden District, to wrought-iron balconies in the French Quarter, to the ruins of housing projects in the still-Katrina-ravaged 9th Ward. The signs are everywhere, it seems, except in the polls.

One August survey showed likely Louisiana voters favoring John McCain by a margin of 57 percent to 39 percent. The significance of the poll may go well beyond the fate of the Bayou State's nine electoral votes. Simply put, Louisiana has voted for the winning presidential candidate in every election for the past 36 years.

In the end, one suspects, John McCain may take this election in a quiet walk.

And more importantly,

Here is a place which has suffered as no other American city from what may be called the Reagan Effect - the urge to vote for the person who, in the face of crying problems, responds that this is the greatest country in the world, that things are not so bad after all, who counsels staying the course, rebuffing the pesky pinhead pencil-neck critic, letting the disaster-profiteer and the energy profiteer and the war-profiteer go about their business as good Americans.

Let us understand, therefore, that social ills are at root the fault of those who suffer from them, that lowering taxes is all that's really needed. Let us understand, therefore, that if part of the United States of America has become a part of the Third World, we should let it go, move on, get on with our own lives.

Thus far, Americans have shown themselves adept at bailing out financial institutions threatened by the credit crisis that the institutions themselves helped create and propagate.

At some point, this foreign visitor believes, America will also have to deal with its crisis of moral credit. Someone will have to pay for the catastrophes caused by the neo-cons, still curiously self-delighted after all these terrible years. Someone will have to deal with the world, and the New Poverty of America, that the Fox-blissed administration is about to leave behind.

But finally, he ends on a note with which I disagree.

But what the foreign visitor finds the most frightening, the most dangerous, is the voter who, after eight years of abject catastrophe, continues to pray "Please, please, give me a reason to vote for the person who says that things are all right, after all."

Someone like Bush.

It is eminently logical and predictable that someone might want to be told that "things are all right." Under these conditions, of course. Why wouldn't they? There's no point in being told things are awful...unless there's some hope that they would get better. Otherwise, you might as well just pray that things are all right---since nothing better is on its way.

And people need to know and see for themselves why and how things should get better. They need to see t in their wallets.

Otherwise, why vote for the scolding doomsayers?

That is what the Hope and Change meme is trying to overcome, but without offering much. Of course, it's often impossible to tell what you need to do, and impossible to make long-term predictions, but at least a commitment to act is required.