Bush's stupid, brutish ways have made the U.S. more hated than ever... and it's cost McCain the election

Thumbs up: Her supporters love her, and bristle at ideas that Sarah Palin is not ready for the White House

Meet the losers. Take a look at the shrinking band of unhappy, even embittered Americans who plan to vote for John McCain and Sarah Palin next week. There were 5,000 of them gathered outside a local school for a Republican rally in Belton, Missouri, one night last week.

These are simple people, most of them decent people, some also angry people. They believe that their party alone offers the kind of government which America needs. It really hurts them that so many millions of their fellow-countrymen now think differently.

With or without her $150,000 sartorial make-over, they love their vice-presidential candidate maybe even more than McCain.

'She's awesome - somebody I can really associate myself with,' said a young computer store owner. Two electrical contractors from nearby Greenwood bristled defensively when I asked them about Palin.

They had assumed - not wrongly - that I was a smart-assed foreigner who did not think much of Alaska's governor. 'What's wrong with her?' demanded one man defiantly.

'Are you against her because she owns guns? Is it because she's a woman ? Is it because she's a Christian conservative who says what she thinks?'

No, I said, some of us are just scared that she doesn't have the brains or experience to be President. 'She got more of them than Obama,' said one of the Greenwood party's wives. 'I'm scared of Obama. He's a socialist.'

These people passionately opposed the U.S. government bail-out of Wall Street banks. One man said: 'We've got banks down here which have been conservatively managed, and they are just fine and have drawerfuls of money.

'Why should they and their customers pay for the New York ones which have screwed up? This country would do just fine if government stayed out of our business, got off our backs.'

The school field around us was a sea - though only a little sea, compared with the crowds which turn out for Barack Obama - of people and placards: 'A Real Hero' and 'Country First'. 'Drill, Baby, Drill' (referring to McCain's populist pledge to recommence offshore oil drilling),

Obama-mania: The candidate address a sea of fans last Wednesday

These people are deeply sensitive, first, to the reality that if the polls are right, their team is about to be beaten into the ground; and second, to sneers from East Coast city slickers who do not appreciate the values that made America great in the way that McCain and Palin do.

'Is this the time to raise taxes for Americans?' demanded the South Carolina senator who introduced the presidential candidate.

'No!' shouted the obedient crowd. 'Do you want a President you can believe in?'

'Yes!' Then McCain himself appeared, much smaller than I had expected, clasping his hands like a benign, slightly apologetic old clergyman.

'I'm going to realise the American dream - that's my first priority,' he told his eager audience, prompting the first of many easy cheers. 'I'm not going to spend billions of your money to bail out Wall Street bankers. It's another government giveaway, and we don't need any more of those.' There were fresh cheers, then they chanted 'U-S-A, U-S-A'.

There was more applause for the Republicans' campaign icon, Joe the Plumber (the everyman American worker he has been using to hammer home his economic plans).

John McCain speaks to his supporters in Iowa

McCain said: 'An attack on him is an attack on small businesses all over the country. Senator Obama says he plans to spread the wealth around - he is more interested in getting your piece of the pot than growing the pot.'

That drew boos, as did every mention of taxes, taxes, taxes - things rural Republicans hate more even than abortion rights or gun control.

Local voters in Missouri and Virginia have received a McCain flier through their mailboxes, showing a plane about to crash into a building full of people. 'Terrorists don't care who they hurt,' says the caption. Then, over the page, it reads: 'Barack Obama Thinks Terrorists Just Need A Good Talking To.'

That is how nasty this election has got, in these its last days.

But it is most unlikely to be nasty enough to stop Obama getting to the White House. A host of thoughtful Republicans recoils from the crude rhetoric, the bitter taste left by the past eight Bush years, and from what their own party has become.

In Lawrence, a university town 30 miles outside Kansas City, I met Rob Chestnut, an accountant who serves as a city councillor. He is a lifelong Republican, but takes an unusually clear-sighted view of his nation's attitude to the coming recession.

'We want a magic bullet,' he says. 'Nobody wants to hear about what needs to be done. Nobody wants to face the fact that we all have to take a step back, and it's going to hurt.'

With uncommon wisdom, Chestnut says that everybody shares responsibility for the credit crunch: 'We did it. All of us did it. We elected those people who failed to regulate the system. We borrowed all that money.'

Chestnut will vote for Obama on November 4. Though he disagrees with his social policies, he says: 'I think the Republican Party's all out of ideas - I see it becoming very shrill.'

His wife, Micki, a writer, says her parents in St Louis, Missouri, are shocked and angry that she, too, is supporting Obama. They're not racists. They just say: 'Who is this man? Where does he come from? We don't know anything about him. He's a dreamer who is going to fall on his ideas.' She will vote for Obama anyway.

So too, more surprisingly, will retired car dealer Ed Fleetwood, whom I met at the McCain rally in Belton. Another veteran Republican, he voted for Bush twice and thinks Ronald Reagan was America's greatest modern President. He switched to Obama when McCain chose Palin as his running-mate. Fleetwood says: 'That was very, very unwise.'

It's a knock-out: Two weeks to go and only one can win

So badly have the Republicans handled this campaign and, indeed, their recent governance of America that they have herded themselves into a corner. In their intolerance and aggressive religious fervour, they have pushed out of their own ranks most voters with minds, or with a shred of liberal social conscience, or who realise that however little they like government and taxes, they need these things, especially in a global financial crisis.

McCain has still got the support of the God nuts. These include, dismayingly, many senior U.S. Army officers. For years, the U.S. Air Force has been a stronghold of Christian evangelicalism. American soldiers, alas, have caught the same disease.

Many battalion staff meetings now start with prayers. Few ambitious career officers dare refuse to sign up for the Christian agenda. Most of them are solid for John McCain.

Yet there are nowhere near enough soldiers, or evangelicals, or rich oil men to get this increasingly beleaguered old warhorse into the White House. Pollsters point out that the Republicans made a big mistake by plugging Sarah Palin's folksy values. Fewer than 10 per cent of Americans today live in small towns.

To put it bluntly, the Republicans have become the party of America's stupid people. That is not abusive, but a statement of fact. Most of the whites who will vote for McCain next week are demographically among the nation's least-educated: rednecks; drivers of big, tough pick-up trucks with flags on the hoods; Johnny Cash fans; and deer hunters.

Sure, in upmarket city suburbs there are still some McCain/Palin boards up, among people who simply vote with their wallets. In the Bush years, the Republicans have justified their reputation as the party which looks after rich people.

But a shrewd political reporter said to me: 'The real fault line in America is no longer geographical, between north and south, the middle and the coasts; it's educational.'

Lawyers now back the Democrats by 4 to 1; with doctors, it is 2-1; investment bankers, 2-1; executives in hightech businesses, 5-1.

The blunt, happy truth is that today there are not enough dumb people in the United States to elect John McCain and his hockey mom Veep.

A formidable majority of Americans perceive that George W. Bush's pretty brutish presidency has been a disaster. They are painfully conscious that he has made America more widely disliked in the world than at any time since Vietnam.

Laura Bush said smugly, soon after she and George W. arrived in the White House from Texas, that they had not come to Washington to make new friends. They have not done so.

George W. Bush: Max Hastings believes it is his 'toxic legacy' which has done for McCain's presidential campaign

Now, the stupid people and their President have had their turn. Americans are ready for a dramatic change of tone. They perceive that only Barack Obama can give it to them.

In an extraordinary fashion, Obama, dismissed by most pundits only eight months ago as a no-hoper, has emerged as a superstar.

He is a seriously clever man with remarkable experience of the world if not of government, author of the finest and most thoughtful politician's autobiography in decades, Dreams Of My Father. He has scarcely made a mistake in this campaign.

He will inherit the presidency amid one of the gravest crises to strike Western society in modern times. He will face awesome challenges. Yet today, on the threshold of the election, the rest of us seem entitled to a share in the huge excitement with which he has imbued most of the American people.

Obama may become the most powerful man in the world

They see their country about to do something amazing. This black man, who has come from nowhere in less than a decade, who was still a smalltime Chicago politician when Gordon Brown started as Chancellor of the Exchequer, looks like becoming President of the greatest society on earth.

If he wins, it will be a wonderful day for mankind, as well as for the American people; and especially, of course, for their black minority.

On a plane from the mid-west to Washington, I talked to David Hutchinson, a 39-year-old black American businessman for whom Obama's victory will be 'a very big thing for a family like mine'.

Hutchinson's father went from South Side Chicago, where Obama worked for years, into the U.S. Army as an artillery officer. Part of the Hutchinson family folklore, retailed to the children from their infancy, were his tales of segregation in the southern states in the Sixties.

Before the young lieutenant left for service in Vietnam, even when travelling in uniform to parachute jump school, he was told: 'You get to the back of the train, boy.'

Now, according to his son David, his father 'is looking to see something happen that he and my mother dreamed of, but never thought they would see in their lifetimes - an African American in the White House'.

I asked Hutchinson how he himself would feel if Obama lost. 'Pretty bad. I think there would be rioting in some cities.'

The choice before Americans on Tuesday next week is more stark than most of us would have imagined possible a few months ago.

If, by some implausible twist of fate, Americans turn back to McCain, they would vote for more of the same - bungled economics, breaks for the rich, blundering foreign policy, perverted religion and foolish folksy values, a moral arrogance which has led America in to military quagmires abroad.

If instead - and thankfully most likely - they choose Obama, they will take a soaring leap into the unknown. Electing him will be the bravest thing the American people have done for many a long day.

The world is holding its breath, full of fervent hopes that they will not lose their nerve.