The Republican candidate, Willard Mitt (yes, Mitt; my attempt to have him referred to as WMR, like FDR, JFK and LBJ didn't succeed) Romney, was a consultant, a former private equity executive, wealthy and successful, who had been the governor of Massachusetts and had successfully managed the Salt Lake City Winter Olympic Games, had faced in all four directions on all issues and was a sitting duck. He was well summarised by Bill Clinton as "a nice guy who should not be allowed to speak to large numbers of people" after he called 47 per cent of Americans freeloaders who accepted benefit in one form or another and were lost to the Democrats. (A majority of pensioners generally vote Republican.) The 47-per-cent comment and the headline on an op-ed piece in the New York Times about the General Motors-Chrysler bailout titled (by the Times, not Romney) "Let Detroit Go Bankrupt" sank his candidacy. Each side spent a billion dollars; there were three inane sound-bite debates, and a president who had increased the National Debt from $10 trillion (after 233 years of American independence) to $17 trillion to buy a 1 per cent economic growth rate, passed a catastrophic healthcare bill, and retreated on every front in the world, apart from killing Osama bin Laden, was re-elected by five million votes in an electorate of 129 million. The campaign was a bore, the candidates were bores, and Obama is an unsuccessful president, like Carter, Hoover and Benjamin Harrison, to mention only a few — but they weren't re-elected.

This book does reveal the unsuitability for national office of Chris Christie, the governor of New Jersey, who was being touted by Rupert Murdoch, Nancy Reagan, Ken Langone, Henry Kissinger and others. He didn't pass Romney's scrutiny for vice-president, and after his recent punishment of the community of Fort Lee, New Jersey, for a disagreement its mayor had with the governor, by his staff shutting down access to the George Washington Bridge to Manhattan, he has probably sunk, in national terms. But this book presents this entire sequence of events and panoply of second-rate people without comment, even subtly implied comment. In the terrible year of 1968, with 550,000 draftees in Vietnam, 200 to 400 coming back dead every week, the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy, and race and anti-war riots every week all over the country, Lyndon Johnson, Hubert Humphrey, Robert Kennedy, Nelson Rockefeller, Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan all ran for president and all were qualified to be president. The procession of tyros who were dispatched by Romney when Jeb Bush, Indiana governor Mitch Daniels, and even Senator Marco Rubio were available, raises serious questions of why, in the splendid formulation from the days of the founders, the office is not seeking the man (or woman).

This is not a particularly good book, but it is an interesting document of the very reversible, but unmistakeable, decline of America.