Had Mr McCain won, America would have continued the long drift to the left that set in with Franklin Roosevelt.

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Would he drift to the left, where he has tended to find succour and supporters in his feuds with his neighbour?

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In the 1960s and 1970s, babies tended to be put in their cots and left to drift off.

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Pretending to doze off, I let the car drift gently to the left.

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You see the plane you have just left, drift into the clouds (if there are any), and the land is far away but approaching rapidly.

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Yet as recently as May 1, this drift was evinced on the left, on this subject, on the Rachel Maddow Show, as Maddow reported on the charges brought that day against three friends of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev.

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But, from my dealings with black conservatives, I can tell you that -- for many of them -- their rightward drift began as a reaction to the condescension on the left.

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