This week I thought we'd talk the upcoming American election although I thought in passing I'd point out how good it is with Corona to see the British 'Dunkirk Spirit' coming out by which of course I mean thousands of trapped Britons trying their damnedest to cross the channel and escape France.

But anyway, the US election is entering the last couple of months of what has been the quietest and most lacklustre presidential election since the era when King George III was in charge and the election consisted of a sketch comedy routine performed by courtiers. The usual feverish wall-to-wall campaigning has been a trudge this year as both candidates stumble forward like drunks at closing time, both assured in their own self-confidence and popularity though one of them will of course have a rude and painful awakening come that morning in November.

Up against Mr Trump is Jo Biden who many have accused of being cognitively impaired following a litany of gaffes, mistakes and an ability to mess up numbers that makes you assume he used to have a private sector job at Enron. There's hours of clips on YouTube if you go browsing, including one where he introduces his sister as his wife, although I don't know the context and perhaps he was trying to play to a crowd in Alabama. The Coronavirus has largely saved his campaign by allowing him to remain silent, out of the public eye and hide behind a facemask when he is on display. Gordon Brown presumably wishes he could have shielded his "smile" behind one back in the day.

In order to combat the stale old white man image in an era of BLM, Biden decided to finally appoint his running mate this week, by which I mean the results of the focus group finally came back and they went with Kamala Harris who ticks a number of boxes including the one where she can talk coherently but more importantly the ethnicity one given that we now live in an era where it's likely a matter of time until someone demands that the piano is redesigned to have an equal number of black keys and white keys. This is a week in fact in which Nasa decided to rename some star systems such as the Eskimo Nebula in case it was offensive to the Inuit, though strangely no mention yet of renaming the planets, the roman god Jupiter has a pretty offensive backstory after all and the whole Roman empire itself was based on slavery. Until the Visigoths held a peaceful protest in the year 410 and accidentally burned it to the ground.

Despite this I find it somewhat bemusing when you look at the facts. Joe Biden carved himself a career in the 80s and 90s by passing legislation now seen as disproportionately harsh on minority groups. But it's ok because Kamala Harris is only half-white although she and grew up in a white neighbourhood and married a white man and was one of the first to be kicked out of the primary race by the public earlier in the year. This is a PR effort somehow worse than the usual election effort, in which a multimillionaire candidate decides to remove their tie and slowly drink half a bottle of Coors Light while chatting to a voter in the Midwest. Sometimes I wonder if US politicians brought in Prohibition simply in order to get out of having to to do that part of the campaign.

Either way, the lack of anything to get excited about in this election is why there's so little action or enthusiasm on the ground, there's no grassroots groundswell and nobody's leafletting or knocking on doors and Covid is nowhere near as responsible for that as the Biden camp would make out. Morale and is always a strange one to tie down though, after all if the people who make motivational posters are so motivated, why are they still working in a poster factory?