DATELINE: Tallahassee, Florida

In our unstinting quest to unearth at least one Republican during this trip, we made south from beautiful, ghostly Savannah, Georgia, hoping to see John McCain speak on Monday afternoon in Jacksonville, Florida (Florida’s hugely important primary is on 29 January). The dour, flyover-scarred city is the largest in the United States, and indeed it provided us with a record-breaking 841 square miles of disappointment. Monday happened to be Martin Luther King Jr. Day in the US, which did not, alas, lead to massive debates, parties, speeches and community activities filling the streets of Jacksonville. To compound our boredom, it emerged that Senator McCain wanted $1,000 a head for his dinner event, which at the current exchange rate would have been about £30 each – and thus just slightly out of our price range. Sorry John.

Instead, we tripped further down the Florida coast to St Augustine, the oldest continuous European settlement in the USA; since it was settled by the Spanish in 1565, in fact. The town is heavily tilted towards tourists these days, giving the narrow Mediterranean-style streets and sixteenth century monuments a slightly tacky feel in places. It also felt like the kind of town where politics is heavily buried under a blanket of commerce. It’s like Disneyworld with Spanish history as the main attraction, rather than giant oversized rodents; so it’s like my Disneyworld, in fact. And man oh man was it gorgeous.

When those intrepid Spaniards settled the swampy riverside near the east coast of what is now Florida, they established the Mission of Nombre De Dios, and a 208ft stainless steel cross now stands in the place where their first mass in the new world was held. Today, swathed in sea breezes, surrounded by palms and picture-postcard little streets, the mission can’t help but evoke quiet contemplation, for atheists and theists alike; the settlers left something pretty special behind. Those early American Christians have bequeathed a diffuse, diverse series of messages since establishing the Mission in 1565; messages which continue to influence and underscore politics and elections in a manner absent from Britain since at least the nineteenth century.

One such permutation was a DJ on a local Jacksonville station who was spending MLK Day not celebrating the great man’s contribution to such Christian notions as harmony or unity, but interviewing a former abortion doctor. This doctor recounted the “cold-blooded, matter-of-fact” manner in which he had, in the 60s, 70s and 80s carried out abortion after abortion, before his secular Jewish upbringing (relevant how, I wondered?) gave way to an all-consuming awakening to the Catholic faith, and his current crusade to denounce his former profession. The DJ did not censure the sins of one so penitent, but ummed and ahhed at the description of the “matter-of-fact” approach of “the abortion movement”, and of abortion doctors like himself:

“Well that’s right, it was the same with the Nazis of course: they just got desensitized to all the killing they were part of.”

The former doctor and converted Jew did not demur, and, as any good Christian should, took this equivalency with a concentration camp guard like a man.

Meanwhile, across the dial, a DJ reflecting on Dr King’s legacy was preaching in full-flow:

“We’re saying, something must be wrong with capitalism. We’re saying, the profit motive must be taken out of the slums. We’re saying, what we need… is democratic socialism. Get some.”

She hit the last two words hard, before, unflinching at the inevitable bathos that was to come, she cut to the commercials.

In that night’s Democratic debate on CNN, beyond all the headline-grabbing bickering and tangled webs of ‘he said/she said’, there was a more revelatory segment, right at the end. The three candidates were asked for a 30 second explanation of why Dr King would have endorsed their candidacies, had he been alive today. You’ll have to trust my paraphrasing here, but I think each summarised answer encapsulates the candidate’s pitch:

John Edwards: “because Dr King’s passions were twofold: ending poverty, and fighting for equality – and I can deliver on those issues” (I’m a man of, and for, the people)

Barack Obama: “because change does not happen from the top down, it happens from the bottom up” (I’m building a movement here, take a chance on me)

Hillary Clinton: “because we are strongest when we lead by our values” (I’m a bureaucrat, I talk like a bureaucrat, and deep down you know you need a bureaucrat)