Six days before a presidential election that promises to be America’s redemption in more ways than one, it is difficult to imagine that Abraham Lincoln — whose presidency 147 years ago is symbolically imprinted on Barack Obama’s destiny — was a Republican and, indeed, the first Republican president of the United States of America.

It is equally difficult, as Obama enters his final lap for the White House, to comprehend the eerie similarities in the lives of Lincoln and the man who may, realistically, become the US’s first black president on January 20 next year.

Like Obama, Lincoln was a lawyer in Illinois. Both men were elected to the state legislature in Illinois. At the national level, Lincoln served only one term in the US House of Representatives before becoming president. If he wins the presidency next week, Obama would have served only one term — that too unfinished — in the US Senate.

Like Obama now, Lincoln was then accused of lacking enough experience to seek the presidency. To put down the black Democrat, Obama’s opponents have cited the 25 years of work of his Republican rival, John McCain, on Capitol Hill, his military service and his time spent in a Hanoi jail for prisoners of war.

As in the case of Obama’s rival, both the opponents that Lincoln faced in the 1860 presidential election had been US senators and members of the US House of Representatives and both men had served as secretaries of war. In addition, John Cabell Breckinridge, Lincoln’s opponent from the Southern Democratic Party, was vice-president for a four-year term before he sought the presidency. Lincoln’s other opponent, John Bell of the Constitutional Union Party, had the experience of being the 16th speaker of the US House of Representatives.

But as the longest, and possibly the most gruelling, presidential campaign in America now draws to a close, one of the sad realities of US political life is how much Lincoln’s party, which freed the slaves, has changed and is totally beyond recognition today.

Last week, I was in the Village of Midlothian in Virginia with a population of 35,427, for a rally organized by small businessmen in support of McCain. The rally was at the warehousing premises of an insulation business, owned by the small entrepreneur, Roddy Davoud. What struck me about the rally was that in the crowd of 200 or so men and women who had turned up to hear Republican big guns, such as the former New York mayor, Rudy Giuliani, and the billionaire publisher and former presidential candidate, Steve Forbes, every single person was white. A lone black woman strolled into the warehouse, but left after a few minutes. In all probability, she was discomfited by the ethnic and racial composition of the crowd and the mood of anger that was palpable. A Southeast Asian-looking man with a brown complexion came in with Giuliani when the rally was half-way through and he stood out in the all-white crowd. It was difficult to accept that the Republican Party, which emancipated America’s slaves, had so completely become a white man’s outfit in a southern state, in a village that was only a few miles away from what was the capital of the confederacy that was defeated in the civil war.

I did not initially go to the area where 12 of my journalist colleagues from Germany, Spain, Russia and some other countries had a vantage position next to the podium where Giuliani, Virginia’s lieutenant governor, Bill Bolling, and other speakers had lined up because I was talking to members of the audience. But when I eventually moved in that direction, the sight of a brown man with a beard wandering towards the podium so unsettled a white male in charge of security, presumably part of the lieutenant governor’s staff, that he nearly incinerated me with his steady glare, his hands ready to go for the holster that appeared to hold a pistol under his jacket if I made any wrong move, such as reaching for my overcoat or trouser pockets.

It was so unnerving that I felt I had to do something. Luckily for me, I knew Randy Marcus, the lieutenant governor’s live wire chief of staff, who was close to where I was standing. So I walked up to Marcus, who shook my hand and we chatted for a few minutes. It became obvious to the potentially trigger-happy security man that Marcus knew me. That brought instant and palpable relief to his face and I was left alone after that to do pretty much what I wanted to do at the rally.

Of the three consecutive presidential elections that I have reported on for The Telegraph from the US, this has been the most difficult for the media. It is bad enough to be a reporter covering the Republican electioneering effort, but if you are a coloured reporter covering the party’s campaign, it is not just difficult, it is traumatic.

Three weeks ago, in Clearwater, Florida, reporters who were at a rally addressed by McCain’s vice-presidential running mate, Sarah Palin, were taunted and threatened by a crowd of about 3,000 Republicans. A sound technician from the visual media at the rally happened to be black and he really got it. Racial slurs were lobbed at him and he was told in language reminiscent of the period of slavery at one point: “Sit down, boy,” according to accounts of the incident in the US national media.

In this election, the Republicans are blaming the messenger — that is, the media — for the message from voters that is being transmitted: that Americans are fed up with the policies of President George W. Bush in the last eight years, that the economic meltdown has scared them stiff and that they are yearning for a new direction for their country, for which Obama, to an increasing number of Americans, appears to offer hope.

The problem actually begins at the very top of the Republican campaign. McCain, much like V.P. Singh in India some 20 years ago, is a creation of the media. While most other senators dealt with the media institutionally, through their press relations people, McCain went out of his way to befriend journalists. He wined and dined them to the point where he felt justified in calling them “my base”.

What he expected from his journalist friends, though, was a lifetime of loyalty and adulation. The American media, already critically wounded by their unquestioning support for the Iraq war and for willingly carrying stories planted by the Pentagon in the first Bush term, had to be objective about McCain lest they lost their credibility beyond any hope of recovery. Besides, Obama offered a breath of fresh air in national politics that the US media, despite their questionable ways and their pretended objectivity, could not ignore. Yet, until the tsunami of a financial crisis hit Wall Street, the captains of American journalism tried to help McCain as subtly as they could. But the banking crisis forced them to change. It is often said in media circles that top television anchors and editors — whose salaries run into millions — were angry and felt let down or cheated when they saw their huge investments being wiped off as a result of policies they had enthusiastically supported in the last several years.

In a matter of days last month, the US media became objective in their election coverage. As a result, McCain felt betrayed by his “base” and he was furious. The McCain campaign blacklisted individual reporters and refused seats on his campaign plane to reporters whose coverage was deemed to be unfavourable. They employed tactics that were familiar to reporters who were posted in Moscow or East Berlin in the 1980s.

At the small business rally that I attended in Virginia, speakers urged voters not to watch CNN or MSNBC TV channels. How is it any different from the ways of Mulayam Singh Yadav, whose supporters burnt copies of newspapers in Uttar Pradesh that criticized him when he was a first-time chief minister?