Anthony Barnett (London, OK): In a brief post in the Times David Lammy MP, the Minister for Skills, who met Obama some years back at Harvard writes about the impact of his election. He says,
In the end politics is not the art of the possible: far from it. It is the art of making things possible.
There is a very important issue here with New Labour. Indeed, Lammy was the first member of the government to engage with the argument about the political class (we reproduced it in OK) and has a broader understanding of this than Hazel Blears. But traditional, Clinton-loving, triangulating New Labour had a very different 'practical' approach. He reports,
I came back from America and told people that I believed the first black president was already waiting to step forward. They thought I was mad.
Who could those 'they' be, I wonder!
