I have just returned from a short visit to some of the (increasingly expensive) countries of the European Union. For much of the time I was in the enjoyable company of couples from the U.S. and had ample opportunity to overhear their conversations.

One such conversation between a wife who was a Democrat and her husband who was a Republican was brief and instantly amusing but as I pondered on it I was reminded that we need to be careful in wishing for what we want: we might get it.

The conversation ran thus:-

Wife. ‘The reason I like Obama is that he believes in what he says.'

Husband. ‘That is just what worries me.'

My first reaction was that the husband was simply reflecting a Republican view that Obama was both dangerous and seriously wrong in believing that the U.S. would be a more successful society if it embraced policies which were redistributive of wealth and ‘socialist'. I put ‘socialist' within quotation marks because, as another of my travelling companions explained to me, it is seen by many in the U.S. as a word connoting a political system based on the taking of money from those who work and giving it, in cash or kind  ( e.g. ‘excessive' access to education or health care), to those who don't  - ‘like in the U.K. and France'.

But on reflection I wondered if the husband also meant that, in an inherently selfish world, the interests of the U.S. would be served better by a leader who was more practised in the arts of deception and less inclined to honesty and openness.