By the standards of US presidential elections, a landslide is apparently defined as one candidate getting 55% of the popular vote.  So President-Elect Obama is some way off that, for all the headlines.

Imagine an election in your club or workplace where 11 people support one idea or candidate and 9 don’t.  I doubt you would call that a ‘landslide’ and you might in fact be tempted into thinking that it was time for more negotiations to achieve a result acceptable to a bigger majority.

As it is, more than 9 Americans out of 20 are today feeling like losers.  I don’t know how many Americans fear that their country is now the United Socialist States of Arab Muslim America, but one has to worry at the appalling ignorance that this election has revealed (and not all of it by the failed vice-presidential candidate). 

The woman who was cut short by McCain when she stated that Obama was an Arab reportedly has a bit of a history of mental wandering.  (And when McCain answered that Obama was not an Arab but a ‘good family man’, implying the two were not compatible, I suspect he promptly lost the Arab-American vote.) 

But mental wanderers have the right to vote.

The BBC interviewed a steel-worker in Pennsylvania who claimed that although he was a lifelong Democrat, he wouldn’t vote for Obama because when Obama took an oath, he refused to use the Bible, because he was a Muslim, and turned his back on the flag.  The interviewer didn’t correct him but did, by a voice-over, confirm that Obama is a Christian. 

A few months before the election, when the issue of Obama’s religion had been talked over time and time again, a Newsweek poll showed that a quarter of Americans still believed that Obama was a Muslim or had been raised a Muslim.

I don’t know how many of those who perversely insist on Obama’s Muslim background are also people who would never tolerate a Muslim president, but they all had votes.

And, somewhat different from bemused pensioners and manual workers who may have enjoyed limited educational opportunities, the Guardian stumbled across an ethanol plant manager in Missouri.  Their reporter was looking for a story on Obama’s not-so-green support for agrofuels (as opposed to the McCain-Palin not-green-at-all policy of drill, baby, drill), and first stumbled over the casual comment by manager Roger Hill that he knew that the Muslims had taken over the UK. 

Have you heard about this?  All the top people - the Queen, Prime Minister, Governor of the Bank of England - converting to Islam?  The US may have elected its first black president.  The UK is still some decades off the prospect of a Muslim getting into Number 10.

The interview went downhill from there.

Mr Hill explained his anti-Obama sentiments by reference to Chapter 13 of the New Testament’s Revelation, or rather to the internet hysteria about it.  Revelation 13 talks of a 7-headed, ten-horned beast, bearing the name of blasphemy and with a power for 42 months.  For likes of Mr Hill, this is a clear reference to the Muslim Obama anti-Christ, with a presidential term of 4 years or 48 months. 

Forget that 42 is not 48; forget that Obama is not and never has been a Muslim; and forget that when Revelation was written, the Muslim religion didn’t even exist.  For the intellectual yahoos of the Christian fundamentalist right, voting Republican wasn’t a civic right, but a religious duty.

I assume Mr Hill’s vote was one of those that took Missouri to the knife-edge before it was won by a whisker for Obama.

Now the McCain-Palin campaign, even in its most negative moments, managed to refrain from calling Obama an Arab Muslim anti-Christ.  But they did smear him as a socialist with the aim of redistributing wealth.

It says a lot for the brain-washing of the American public that (a) many think that this is somehow un-American and (b) many don’t realize that it already happens.

Personal taxes in the US are mildly progressive.  This means that those with higher incomes pay more tax than those with lower incomes.  A quick example will demonstrate how this redistributes wealth.

Take 2 families with equal income.  One family has 2 children in school, the other has none.  Because of tax allowances, the childless family is judged to have a higher taxable income.  All else being equal they will therefore pay more tax.  Now assume that the children enjoy public education, paid for from tax revenue.  The childless family of course cannot benefit in this way.  They’ve paid more in tax but received less in public services.  Some of their wealth has been transferred to the other family.  This is socialist.  And it’s American (despite Palin’s outlandish claims that, far from being a patriotic duty, paying taxes is un-American).

Move into the corporate world and the transfers of wealth become astronomical.  Tax-payers, rich and poor alike, will have to stump up the $700 billion that the Bush administration is trying to force-feed into the banks before Obama takes over – banks that insist on paying 6-figures salaries and pay-offs to their executives.  And this is far from new.  The Savings and Loan debacle under Reagan cost taxpayers an estimated $125 billion.

Even a simple mechanism like the payment of interest on a loan is a transfer of wealth.  People who borrow money, by definition, are people who don’t have enough.  People who lend money clearly have more than they need.  Interest is paid by those with too little to those with more than enough.

But when the redistribution of wealth is from poor to rich, as in these last two examples, it’s not socialism. 

But it is perfectly American.