In the years I’ve lived in Ireland I’ve been stuck with a rep, for good or ill, as a right-winger who counterpunched at criticism of the US response to 9/11, who supported the invasion of Iraq and who (however reluctantly) supported George W Bush in 2004. So for anybody who hasn’t had a conversation about politics with me in the last three years, the following may come as a bit of a shock.

After a lifetime supporting Republican candidates (and even working for a few), today I took the DART into Dublin, listening to a podcast of an NPR interview as it happened with Russian defector ‘Comrade J’, aka Sergei Tretyakov. I walked into O’Neills on Suffolk Street, stepped into a snug marked “Democrats Abroad”, and requested political asylum in the Democratic Party.

And then cast my ballot for Barack Obama, for Democratic party nominee for president of the United States.

People who saw Obama’s keynote to the Democratic National Convention, or his Jefferson-Jackson Day speech in Iowa, or the “Yes, we can” speech in New Hampshire - made into this political confection by the Black Eyed Peas - knew that the guy with the funny name with a father from Kenya and a mother from Kansas represented something that had been missing from American politics for 40 years. Hope. Or, as Maureen Dowd put it, the Obama phenomenon was “propelled by a visceral desire among Americans to feel American again“.

I’ve been watching Obama since 2004. I first wrote about him in 2005, when he impressed with a willingness to tell part of his own base to pipe down when it came to the Roberts Supreme Court nomination. I took a lot of flak for getting a bit giddy in 2006 by the prospect of his candidacy, and thought a couple weeks later that maybe I’d be embarassed to have written about Obama in a national newspaper in quite such florid terms:

His 2004 Democratic National Convention keynote address was far superior in its content and delivery to any oration in American politics that year or since. It instantly convinced many who heard it that Obama has the stuff to one day be president. It called Americans to common cause, to heal their wounds, to honestly acknowledge and address the nation’s problems. It fused a belief in justice for the poor with a belief that the rich are not evil. It evoked the rhythms and references of black preachers. It was a voice absent from politics since around 1968 – and by
which absence American politics has been impoverished.
Other than Republican John McCain, Obama is the only person in American politics who generates authentic excitement. Talk centred around a presidential run, someday, maybe in a few years. Obama is just 45. He should wait his turn, went the thinking. Last weekend he made it clear that he might not be content to wait.
The prospect of a 2008 Obama run is making people, including a surprising number on the right, giddy. Obama is the black JFK. His election would transform, and in some sense redeem, the US. In our own hearts and in the eyes of the world. But most of all in the lives of ordinary people.
His desire to change the priorities of US politics to offer hope to the poor is not the cynical demagogy of a Jesse Jackson but the moral pragmatism of Theodore Roosevelt….
As he said in 2004: “I stand here knowing that my story is part of the larger American story, that I owe a debt to all of those who came before me, and that, in no other country on earth, is my story even possible.”
America has a remarkable – let us say exceptional – record in times of trial of producing leaders it does not deserve, who inspire the audacious hope that a better world is possible. Obama may be one of them.

Winning is still a long shot. But however tonight’s voting goes, I will always be proud of what I wrote in 2006. And proud I cast this vote today.