WHAT I THINK....JONATHAN FREEDLAND

Nineteen sixty-eight was a vintage year, as was 1992. And, I confidently predict, 2008 will be one too. I am not speaking of fine bottles of Chateau Lafite but rather US presidential politics. The campaign that will culminate on November 4 is already shaping up as a classic, replete with the requisite elements of a cracking contest: a gaggle of intriguing candidates with complicated histories, volatility in the electorate, and an unpredictable result. And up for grabs is the leadership of the world's sole superpower. The stakes could not be higher - for Americans and for everyone else.

The battle for 2008 was always going to be open, with no incumbent on either side. But there was a time when the two parties' choices seemed easy to guess: an aura of inevitability wreathed itself around Democrat Hillary Clinton and Republican Rudy Giuliani. That would have been a slugfest to savour, a New York derby pitting two scarred bruisers with a talent for doling out and absorbing punishment. Now both those frontrunners, while still narrowly ahead in polls, are stumbling, watching the momentum flow towards their rivals - especially in make-or-break Iowa and New Hampshire, which vote next month. As Barack Obama surges among Democrats in Iowa, it is becoming possible to imagine 2008 as the first US election since 1976 without either a Clinton or Bush. Suddenly, nothing is predictable.

Already some weirdnesses are clear. The two candidates who polls rate as the most electable for their respective parties are lagging behind. Surveys show John Edwards beating every Republican on offer, yet Democrats rank him behind Clinton and Obama. John McCain is the only Republican who polls ahead of the three leading Democrats in a match-up, yet he is stuck in fourth place.

Stranger still, the main candidates are deeply flawed. Obama is young and inexperienced; Edwards, with his $400 haircuts, has an authenticity problem; Hillary is seen as establishment and robotic. Among the Republicans, McCain, at 70, is old and an advocate of an unpopular war in Iraq. Giuliani's liberal stance on guns, gays and abortion - and a Technicolor personal life that has seen him defending the taxpayer-funded security detail that protected his lover when he was the married mayor of New York - have alienated him from the family-values voters who can decide Republican contests in Iowa and New Hampshire. Mitt Romney has the big hair and dazzling smile of a Hollywood president. Trouble is, he's a Mormon seeking the votes of evangelicals who refuse to recognise him as a Christian. TV actor and former senator Fred Thompson is such a lethargic campaigner, he's in single digits.

Which leaves Mike Huckabee, the new and entirely unexpected star of the 2008 campaign. His warm, folksy, fluency has drawn comparisons with Bill Clinton: like Clinton, he was born in a town called Hope and served as a popular Arkansas governor. Unlike Clinton, he's a Baptist preacher who does not believe in evolution and suggested in 1992 that people living with Aids should be quarantined. He's so clueless on foreign affairs, he hadn't even heard of last week's intelligence report on Iran's non-bomb - 24 hours after it had been on every TV news bulletin and front page. He may well win in Iowa on January 3 and he's currently tied with Giuliani in national polls of Republicans.

Against that Republican crop is a Democratic trio with just a few years in the Senate between them and the not-quite-experience of eight years as first lady. As one Republican commentator puts it: "What happens if both parties nominate a candidate who can't win?"

All this is great fun as spectator sport. But for those watching in Britain, especially in our governing circles, there are some important lessons to learn too. The first, grim for Gordon Brown, is that wit and warmth matter enormously in today's politics. Huckabee's rise can be explained almost entirely by his easy manner. Both he and Obama deploy a weapon that could protect Brown under fire if only he could acquire it: humour.

More importantly, the contest offers heartening evidence that a more progressive mood may be dawning in the US. Start in the most obvious place, among the Democrats.
It's worth spelling out what would once have been unimaginable: the two lead contenders for the Democratic presidential nomination are a black man and a white woman. The notion of either a black or female president was once the stuff of fanciful "what if" movies. Now it is a real possibility (though I can't quite shake off the thought that, when the smoke clears, the resilient Edwards, the white man in the trio, may be the one left standing).

The Obama campaign has been electrified by Oprah Winfrey's appearance at a clutch of rallies last weekend, bringing out (mainly white) Iowans and New Hampshire voters in numbers to rival a Led Zeppelin reunion. The response has confirmed Oprah's unique standing as a moral authority in America, a position secured by her early voicing of outrage in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in 2005. But there is a plainer meaning too. According to one Washington Post columnist yesterday, when white Americans are cheering themselves hoarse for two African-Americans, "something big [is] happening".

It's not only about race. Obama's stance against the Iraq war has forced Hillary to tack left. Edwards dares to talk about poverty and inequality with a directness our prime minister is yet to match. He has also challenged the trade agreements whose chief beneficiaries have been the balance sheets of multinational corporations. All three compete over how many people would be covered by their healthcare reform plans.

Perhaps that's no surprise in a Democratic contest that inevitably panders to the left leanings of primary voters. But just watch what's going on among the Republicans. Admittedly, there is a vicious contest under way to strike the cruellest posture towards illegal immigrants (a development that could alienate Latino voters, hurting Republicans in key western states next November). And it's sad that both Romney and Giuliani, who might have offered themselves as a new breed of enlightened Republican, have instead disavowed their earlier, more liberal records.

Nevertheless, go online and watch last month's CNN/YouTube debate, which featured McCain slamming Romney for refusing to rule out "waterboarding" of terror suspects, and denouncing torture as a violation of the Geneva conventions. The same debate had Congressman Ron Paul - trailing in the polls, yet bagging serious campaign contributions online - railing not only against the Iraq war but the entire drift of US imperialistic foreign policy, planting its bases all over the world: "I don't want to send troops overseas using force to tell [other people] how to live. We would object to it here and they're going to object to us over there." Meanwhile, Huckabee calls climate change a "moral issue" that entails "a biblical duty" to save the planet.

What to make of this noisy, confusing circus? We might not be on the brink of a progressive moment in US politics. But we could be witnessing the end of the Bush era - in which the war on terror overshadowed all else - to be replaced by one that focuses on other questions, which transcend the old partisan dividing lines. How it will play out is anyone's guess. But all those who care about the direction of our world over the next four years had better pay attention.