NEW YORK: He has been hailed as the King Of New York. With his charming manners and ability to make or break celebrities, Graydon Carter is to the magazine world what Jay Leno is to the American talk show — powerbroker to the formerly, currently and would-be famous.

Carter, the editor of Vanity Fair, was portrayed by some as a lightweight when he took over from Tina Brown almost a decade ago following a career that began as a telegraph worker in Saskatchewan and went on to see him become a celebrity in his own right.

Now, however, he is no longer content with damning the reputation of Hollywood’s finest: Carter has emerged as the cheerleader of a movement to change the face of America by having George Bush thrown out as president.

Better known for expensive lunching around New York’s swanky restaurants than tub-thumping, Carter has picked up the challenge of leading America’s intellectual liberal luminaries in a battle against Bush when the race for next November’s election gets seriously under way with the primaries after Christmas.

An influential institution at the grand Conde Nast monthly that, from its huge building on a corner of New York’s Times Square, rules on what is hot in A-list celebrity culture and style, Carter has turned his normally innocuous monthly Editor’s Letter into a campaign for “regime change”.

His January 2004 Editor’s Letter will blast Bush’s “wrongheaded” state visit to Britain, ridicule Tony Blair as having a schoolboy’s crush on the President and slam “deceptions” in the run-up to a war in Iraq that is “out of control”.

In previous columns he has accused Bush of lying over Weapons of Mass Destruction in Iraq and shaming the country by allowing members of the Saudi royal family to fly out of the US without questioning two days after the September 11 terrorist attacks. He has slammed healthcare gaps, security, the burgeoning deficit, tax cuts for the rich, the US reputation abroad and corruption.

But despite his unpopularity with the Clintons while they were in office, Carter is now turning to Hillary as America’s saviour. He believes she is the only Democrat with the ‘X’ factor — charisma, toughness and a certain je ne sais quoi that makes her a natural leader.

This weekend it emerged that he is also writing an anti-Bush book and, he told The Observer, he has been campaigning behind the scenes to get Hillary Clinton to run for president “right now”.

“I feel like a lone voice in the wilderness. But there is a large, seething majority out there against what Bush is doing to this country. This administration is as fundamentalist as some other groups in the world,” Carter said on Saturday.

His book is to be titled What We Have Lost, he revealed, and will examine the failings of Bush in office, to be published late summer by Farrar, Straus & Giroux as the election campaign approaches its climax.

“It is about the fragile state of US democracy, looking at what this administration has done to the environment, the judiciary and civil liberties. This is a very dangerous time in America,” he said.

He promised it will not be “hysterical” or a rant, but fact- based — researched by him and a small team and written himself.

“It is different from the other books out there. I am not a liberal ideologue; I am very much a libertarian. I never got invited to the Clinton White House,” he said.—Dawn/The Guardian News Service.