I HAVE huge respect for American political institutions and over the years I have had the privilege of working with legends from the field of political communication, policy and organisation.
People such as Jim King, widely known as an advance man for most of the Democratic party presidential candidates from Kennedy through to Clinton.
Also political strategists like Jill Buckley, Les Francis and strategist turned commentator Peter Fenn.
What appealed to me most about the United States is that despite its quirks and overly complicated political structures somehow it seems to work.
It has a series of checks that balance out any fallout between liberal presidents and conservative supreme courts or the anomalies thrown up between Democratic executives and republican Congresses or vice versa.
There is also a very healthy equilibrium between the reaches of federal and state jurisdictions.
Once as a young intern I spent some time in the office of Andrew Young, then mayor of Atlanta.
Anyone familiar with the movie Selma will recognise his name as one of the confidants of Martin Luther King.
Young ruefully remarked it was wonderful to be mayor of a city where one of his predecessors had him thrown in jail.
One day on the way to work in the sweltering Georgia heat I had to pass by a far right demonstration by white supremacists.
It was a first for me. Their chants and slogans were unbelievably racist. Police stood by at a respectful distance.
Having recently graduated I was still full of that student fire and indignation.
On reaching the office I remarked to a colleague that I couldn't believe the police wouldn't intervene.
The veteran civil rights leader and former US ambassador to the United Nations overheard my remarks and said, "Tom, this is the US - freedom of speech is a cornerstone of our democracy."
In one sentence I started a quarter of a century love in with the USA - that is until now.
Recently the former mayor said that "white supremacy is a sickness and you don't get mad with sick people. You work to heal the system."
He also said that "if you get angry, it's contagious, and you end up acting as bad as the perpetrators."
It is clear that the current system of American politics is now failing the country. And in doing so its giving way to the politics of anger. The rise of both Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders is all about anger.
Trump is perhaps one of the most openly disingenuous political candidates in the history of world politics.
If political flip flopping was an Olympic sport he would be a gold medal winner - with Boris Johnson in the running for silver.
Sanders too is the grumpy outsider peddling a petulant radicalism that could very well ( though ultimately unlikely) propel Trump into the White House.
Sanders has lost any sense of responsibility to the consequence of his madcap campaign and will recklessly continue on to the Democratic convention.
The US primary systems for both parties has miserably failed.
Hillary Clinton, though eminently more qualified to be president than either Sanders or Trump, is the worst possible candidate for the Democrats to have at this moment.
It's as if she is fighting Gordon Gekko and Don Quixote at the same time. One can only hope that most Americans will set aside their distaste for dynastic politics one more time and opt for Hillary in November.
What is clear is that 'the system' so eloquently spoken about by Andrew Young is clearly broken and in need of healing.
Working class white Americans are feeling disenfranchised but as to why they are flocking to an egocentric billionaire is still unclear but it is an illness not confined to our American cousins.
The rise of the right in Britain and in continental Europe is mainly because unrealised and in some cases imaginary fears about immigration are being ruthlessly exploited.
The ever threatening tsumami of migration that so obsesses the Tory party right is exactly the same type of xenophobic nonsense that was spouted by arch bigot Enoch Powell some fifty years ago against Indian, Pakistani and African Caribbean communities. It didn't happen then and won't now.
But what also did not happen in the past fifty years was a proper programme of social integration either.
With over 50 per cent of immigration from outside of the EU, Britain still needs to face up to its integration problem, not its migration one.
Referenda and US elections aside, without integration hurt not healing will drive politics.
