New York Times columnist Gail Collins pens a colourful - albeit whimsical - piece on the history of public interest in politics in the United States. She contrasts the rowdy, crowded and often bloody character of US politics a century ago to its comparatively tranquil and staid modern incarnation. While unconvincingly suggesting that video games and women are responsible for this transformation, she briefly points in a more compelling direction:

People are also less enthusiastic about politics because they no longer think of their political affiliation as being central to their identity. Once reformers arrived with the 20th century, Americans were taught to prove they were good citizens by studying the party platforms, not by getting in a fistfight at a bar. Since nobody actually did study the party platforms, folks simply slunk home and waited for the invention of radio and professional sports teams.

If we accept Collins' description as largely true for the US, how does the American example stack up against the world? Take, for example, the nature of student politics, so often the cauldron in which political identities are forged (or not forged). Twinned with violence, bristling senses of political affiliation remain common around the world. One need only look so far as an Indian college campus, for instance, to feel the uncomfortable heat of party political identity. Elsewhere, fierce party identities may induce less violence but are no less prevalent. In British student unions, aspiring student politicians are affiliated with political parties. In their American equivalents, on the other hand, such naked and presumptuous politicking would be totally out of place. Why does party identity persist in many parts of the world and not in the US?

Collins doesn't ask what it means in a democracy for party identity to be out of vogue. But even without the bluster of party tribalism, American politics cannot substitute "modern" indifference for cool, reasoned engagement.

While Obama claims to seek the "transcending of race" in the United States, his campaign for the White House is having quite opposite effects elsewhere in the world. According to the New York Times, Obama's success is spurring African youth in France - where institutionalised laïcité suppresses the recognition of religious and racial identities - to return to Négritude, the black intellectual movement of the 1920s and 30s that was pioneered by the late Franco-Caribbean writer and politician Aimé Césaire.

The US Constitution has come under the cross-hairs of a group that wants to fundamentally change the way America elects its presidents. The National Popular Vote campaign seeks to do away with the elaborate electoral college system by the 2012 presidential election, replacing the "vote of states" with a species of more direct popular election. Calls for the sweeping change - which would have indelible effects on the way campaigns are strategised and run - have gained momentum since 2000, when Al Gore won the popular vote but lost out in the electoral college. Lawmakers would be forced to amend the Constitution in order to put such a system in effect, a process that requires the consent of three-quarters of states and a two-thirds majority in Congress.

Proponents of the popular vote argue that presidential candidates ignore so-called "safe states" - like California and New York - in favour of the more contested "swing states" - Ohio, Florida, etc. Its critics fear that a turn to the popular vote would push the already isolated rural communities of the country further off the political map. At the base of the debate is an underlying tension between the city and the hinterland, the coast and the heartland. Would a popular vote - democratic election in its simplest, purest form - strand small-town America in the wilderness?

The extraordinary, compelling race in the United States for the Democratic Party's presidential nominee has been settled in favour of Barack Obama. But a moment of triumph can also be one of danger. The candidate must now think seriously and decide what kind of candidate he wants to be. On the answer will depend his chances of success in the election on 4 November 2008.

The issue of sexism and whether it hurt Hillary is an important question. There isn't yet equality for women in the USA, not to speak of elsewhere. There needs to be. But the argument is apparently still raging.

Albert R Hunt of Bloomberg news lays out an elaborate case about why Hillary's sex was not what hurt her.

The case is much simpler and can be definitely demonstrated. Hillary didn't win what was hers for the taking because of a political judgement. Had she voted against the Iraq war she would have been the candidate, long ago. She talked about her "experience", not least in her White House years. But these ensured that she and Bill knew how weak Saddam was militarily and that he didn't have weapons of mass destruction. They fully understood the politics of the decision. She also made her call knowing how unpopular it would be with the younger generation in the Democratic Party.

The point I'm making is this: if she had not backed Bush on Iraq, Obama's early, critical distinction would not have existed. She was in poll position to take the nomination, she lost it because she made a fundamental mistake of judgement. The media will go on about how she ran a flawed campaign, was "out-strategised" and so forth. It's nonsense - the media loves to talk about style, methods, techniques, appearances, perceptions, all of which feeds its narcissism. It was political judgement that lost if for her, just as it would have done had she been a man.

The Hispanic vote in the swing states, on a plate. This, in the kind of clumsily indiscreet code language that serves as competition for Obama’s vice-presidential slate, is what New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson regards as the key to Democrat victory. It is not hard to see that he wants the job: when asked directly, he recited the names of those undecided states, Colorado, Nevada and Florida, as if they were courses of a fine banquet.

This was a Monday morning under the gilded fronds and angelic chorus of the Casa de América, central Madrid. Ambassadors to Spain were there, as were the literati, the politically wired, and the media. Miguel Barroso, director of this excellent cultural centre and one of Prime Minister Zapatero’s closest friends, sat by Richardson’s side.

With the general election before us, the presidential campaign has at last shifted to the contest most of us have been relishing. John McCain vs. Barack Obama seems a battle of stark contrast: age against youth, experience against brash confidence, the "Great American Century" against 21st century global pluralism. Both project vastly different images of leadership and, consequently, seem to offer equally different options for America.

But what makes both candidates so compelling - particularly in comparison to their predecessors - is that neither are really products of their respective party establishments. As Anne Applebaum points out in the Daily Telegraph, Hillary Clinton and Mike Huckabee won the support of the "bases" of the Democrat and Republican parties - "blue-collar" whites in the blue corner and conservatives in the red corner. Applebaum suggests that McCain and Obama appeal principally to "unpredictable centrists" and represent an unprecedented a-partisan shift in American politics.

Yet the candidates didn't simply navigate away from their party's "bases" into fresh, politically uncharted territory. The earth has moved beneath the parties' feet. Obama and McCain were wise to spot this change, but it is a transformation they have noticed, not made.