In a strange role-reversal, the Democrats are now the America-loving, grown-up optimists

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Are you already starting to miss Barack Obama?

If you are, then his speech to the Democratic Convention will only have made withdrawal symptoms worse. And even if you disagree with his policies, there’s no denying the care that went into the formulation of them, the fact that he knows his stuff – that, whatever else, he’s made of proper presidential timber. How different from you-know-who.

Obama’s soaring valedictory merely underlined all these points. But Wednesday evening in Philadelphia also underscored something else that’s happened during his tenure: the extraordinary role reversal between America’s two big parties.

Once upon a time, Republicans were the orderly party, the optimistic party, the party you instinctively trusted with national security, the party that talked about God. Democrats were scrappy and faction-prone. They were the champions of the working class. They could be a bit gloomy too, as they spoke of the miseries Republicans were inflicting on ordinary Americans.

No more. This week, Obama was the optimist, flashing that infectious grin all too little in evidence lately, amid the grim procession of terrorist incidents, mass shootings and police killings. He was the one talking about love of country and American exceptionalism. He talked about faith. He even referred approvingly to the other party’s greatest modern hero, that patron saint of optimism Ronald Reagan.

Flash back to the Republicans in Cleveland. Donald Trump was doom, gloom and non-stop snarling. Everything – the economy, the military, the violence on the streets, the global standing of the US – was a disaster. He was the champion of ordinary workers, the “forgotten” ones. He was, he proclaimed, the sole candidate capable of bringing back lost jobs and lost opportunities, and restore a vanished golden age when no-one messed with America.

Not long ago, America’s natural ruling establishment was Republican. Now Trump is the anti-establishment, the insurgent who would overthrow a self perpetuating but failed political class. Wednesday simply underlined the contrast, nowhere starker in that one-time Republican preserve of national security.

I remember a piece just after 9/11 in The New York Times, anything but Republican in its sympathies. Despite the controversy over George W Bush’s election (Florida, hanging chads, butterfly ballots and all that), it argued, perhaps it was as well that Republicans, the national security grown-ups, were in charge at that fraught moment in American history.

No longer. Trump of course is one big reason why, with the ignorance he wears like a badge of honour, his boasting that on foreign policy he listens first and foremost to himself. Not a single high-profile foreign policy expert featured in Cleveland. The Republican national security establishment, such as it is, stayed away, fearful of contamination by mere proximity to their 2016 nominee.

The brand of course has been discredited by Iraq. But back in September 2001, the reputations of Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and Colin Powell were virtually untarnished. Add to this list the likes of Jim Baker, Brent Scowcroft and Robert Gates, all close associates of America’s deftest foreign policy president of modern times, George H W Bush.

Today the grown-ups are Democrats.

Consider Wednesday night’s line-up in Cleveland. There was Obama. There was his vice president Joe Biden, there was Leon Panetta, who so ably ran the CIA and then the Pentagon for Obama. The night before it was Bill Clinton. Tonight it’s Hillary Clinton:

“There’s never been a man or woman more qualified for the Presidency,” Obama said of her, “Not me, not Bill, not anyone.”

As far as Republican national security gravitas goes, practically the last man standing is Henry Kissinger.

Of course none of this guarantees success – it was “the best and the brightest,” most of them Democrats, who oiled the slippery slope to the catastrophe of Vietnam. And, it cannot be repeated enough, this is the weirdest election.

A charlatan is holding his own or better in the polls, precisely because he embodies the anti-establishment. The sense that a Clinton win would be a “third” Obama term, an eternalisation of Democratic control of the White House, could boomerang against her, for all her evident competence. That however is a separate issue. For now wonder at the astounding role reversal that has overtaken American politics.