The more out of touch with mainstream America they sounded, the greater the applause. "Sometimes we talk about why we're importing so many people in our workforce," said Mike Huckabee. "It might be, for the last 35 years, we have aborted more than a million people who would have been in our workforce had we not had the holocaust of liberalised abortion." Huckabee was rewarded with a strong second-place showing in the summit's straw poll.

It wasn't difficult to see what Matthews was driving at. Obama is the product of a mixed race relationship who went to Harvard and taught at a prestigious law school. He is, as Joe Biden would later tell us "clean" and "articulate". In short, he is not Jesse Jackson or, God forbid, Al Sharpton. He doesn't scare white people. Or at least not that much and not that many.

It wasn't difficult to see what Matthews was driving at. Obama is the product of a mixed race relationship who went to Harvard and taught at a prestigious law school. He is, as Joe Biden would later tell us "clean" and "articulate". In short, he is not Jesse Jackson or, God forbid, Al Sharpton. He doesn't scare white people. Or at least not that much and not that many.

If Beale Street could talk, as James Baldwin famously imagined, then somewhere around Memphis’s South Fourth Street it would let out an agonizing cry. Facing east, the garish neon commodification of the blues stands behind you–a trap for tourists and an insult to the legacy of a great musical tradition. Commerce here is thriving from a culture it doesn’t respect. Ahead sprawls the desolation and poverty of the communities that gave blues its meaning and to whom the blues returned some dignity.

Presumably seeking to capture the mood of the nation, Humphrey started his speech thus: "Here we are, the way politics ought to be in America, the politics of happiness, the politics of purpose, the politics of joy; and that's the way it's going to be, all the way, too, from here on out." Within six weeks Bobby Kennedy had been assassinated.

More than 100 miles away in Fort Worth, Lance Corporal Patrick Myers returns home to streets lined with American flags and an escort of "Patriot Guard Riders" on motorcycles. Myers, 23, used to ride a motorcycle himself, but rolls home today in a wheelchair from an army medical centre in San Antonio. Two years ago he was driving his Humvee near the Syrian border in Iraq when it struck a wayside bomb and he lost both his legs.

It's not difficult to see why. New York is an impressive and distinctive global city. It moves like a disco without the music - the aficionados try to stick with the rhythm but so long as you're into it nobody much cares. For a European visitor it has more in common with London, Paris or Rome than it does with Phoenix, San Antonio or San Jose, which are among America's 10 largest cities.