Iain Dale has finally come off the US Election fence

As evidenced here, he's come out reluctantly for Obama.

Damn him, I was going to write a piece entitled "When will Iain Dale come off the fence?". Just goes to show that you should strike when the inspiration iron is hot!

I'm used to his blind partisan (and in election periods, too shrill to read) posts on UK politics but I never quite understood why he was applying his same "style" to the US elections.

Especially his repeated dogged defence of the clearly unsuitable Sarah Palin, picking up and blindly running with every Republican defence line (rabidly posted in the comments of a thousand leftish US blogs).

I never really understood why anyone from a mainstream UK party would ever support the republicans. A far as I can see both (yes only two) US parties are more right-wing than our entire mainstream politics in terms of the extent of the influence of big business on and the bareface lobbying/bribing by big companies of all levels and parties of government (which seems to always work). Maybe that's naive/partisan of me to see that as right-wing...

However on the flip side they are both big government spenders and protectionist.

Socially of course, Republicans are so far off the right of the scale it's untrue and this has been the case for as long as I can remember.

And before people like Iain Dale say it was different when his hero Reagan was there, I suggest he watch Boogieman: The Lee Atwater Story which I'm pretty sure I saw on BBC4 the other night (or at least a version of it). Scary stuff.

Anyway Iain assures us that now nearly half of his powerful new friends wouldn't lynch him given half a chance anymore, so that's okay.

Clearly, the reality-rhetoric gap eventually got too wide even for him.
Fingers crossed for election day...