Obama is a an example of

a media phenomenon known as the 'Diana effect'

It's electric, but short-lived. It's is essentially empty,

amoral, untruthful and manipulative

Eventually voters see through it

and realize they have been played for suckers

Clinton's Manipulation:

"I come tonight with a full heart

Over the last week, I have listened to you,

and in the process I found my own voice.

"Together let's give America the kind of comeback

that New Hampshire has just given me

We're going to take what we learned here

in New Hampshire and make our case

We are in it for the long run!"

Dianafication [Original]

Watching the cresting of the Obama tidal wave, it seems that the US is having its Princess Diana moment. Hillary Clinton, turning on the tears, wails fruitlessly that Obama is all warm fuzzy feeling but no substance.

‘Wait a minute,’ she said, ‘what is the substance here? What, as famously was said years ago, where's the beef? You know, where is the reality?’

Welcome to Planet Diana. It was only with the death of the People’s Princess that the extent of Britain’s transformation from a country of reason, intelligence, stoicism, self-restraint and responsibility into a land of credulousness, emotional incontinence, sentimentality, irresponsibility and self-obsession became shatteringly apparent.

Princess Diana was an icon of the new Britain because she embodied precisely those latter characteristics.

It became clear that politicians could score remarkable short-term success if they too got in touch with their inner trauma and felt everyone else’s pain.

Bill Clinton (hideous irony for Hillary) was the first to realise this and made it his political signature. Tony Blair, whose lip periodically quivered with precision timing, had it in spades. David Cameron has it; so too does Obama.

The effect is electric, but short-lived. That is because Dianafication is essentially empty, amoral, untruthful and manipulative; eventually voters see through it and realise they have been played for suckers. But while it lasts -- and it creates presidents and prime ministers -- reason doesn’t get a look in.

Warm fuzzy feelings win hands down because they anaesthetise reality and blank out altogether those difficult issues which require difficult decisions.

Obama appears to be on the wrong side of just about every important issue going; indeed, were he to be elected president he would be a danger to the free world.

But hey – the guy makes people feel good about themselves; he stands for hope, love, reconciliation, youthfulness and fairies at the bottom of the garden.

In Britain, we understand to our cost why that makes a politician a winner. In America, it’s something quite new because until this moment it wasn’t obvious that the rot that has degraded the British mind had also penetrated the American psyche. Now we know better.

So, What Happened in New Hampshire?

So what happened? The New York Times thinks it knows:

Several New Hampshire women, some of them undecided until Tuesday, said in interviews that a galvanizing moment in the race had been Mrs. Clinton’s unusual display of emotion on Monday.

This was when her eyes filled with tears and her voice cracked as she described the pressures of the race and her goals for the nation.

"As voters began to see the choice they have and heard Hillary speak from her heart, they came back to her," said Mark Penn, Mrs. Clinton’s chief strategist.

Well, if this is really true then the Dianafication of America that I wrote about above really has started to rot the US brain big-time. But maybe other factors were also at work in New Hampshire.

Maybe the post-Iowa feeding frenzy over Obama made the NH voters look much harder at him and realise he was a dubious flake.

Maybe the fact that Iowa voted through a non-secret ballot made a difference. Many theories will now doubtless fill many pages.

Who knows. The only thing we can be sure of is that anyone who predicts the outcome of this presidential race, including the pollsters, can safely be ignored.

But just watch Hillary now do empathy. She is being made over -- and Obama will find himself triangulated.