DATELINE: Fort Stockton, Texas

The latest election news is that John McCain has just beaten Mitt Romney in Florida’s Republican primary, which is the last election until next week’s Elephantine Tuesday, when 22 states vote at once – the biggest day in the history of American primaries. Here’s what McCain’s Floridian coalition of the willing looked like when we met some of it last week. Meanwhile Rudy Giuliani’s wacky Florida-or-bust strategy backfired completely, when the state’s voters opted for the latter, deciding they liked Rudy better when he was making cameos in Adam Sandler movies. He finished far back in third place, and is about to drop out to endorse McCain, meaning the Republican race is looking like a contest between Big Mac and the conservatives: the latter divided between Mitt Romney and Mike Huckabee.

Meanwhile Hillary Clinton won Florida’s Democratic primary, a contest which is electorally meaningless: the candidates signed a pledge not to compete there, and no delegates will be put forward to the party convention in August. Florida’s Democrats are being punished by the national Democratic party for moving their primary too far forward in the calendar, which is of course completely unfair on the state’s voters. The same thing happened in Michigan on 15 January. On both occasions, having agreed not to compete, Hillary claimed victory, bizarrely. It’s not really cricket to agree that you’re not in a contest, then claim victory – and thus all the positive news coverage – afterwards. Here’s what she said on CNN: “It’s a really big deal. I’m thrilled. Obviously the people of Florida felt so strongly about this election [that] several million of them turned out to vote in the Democratic primary.”

Note the phrase ‘several million’ there – the figure was approximately 1.3million. Big up yourself, as we say in London.

Another very weird Democratic election was the Nevada Caucus, on 19 January. On that occasion Hillary got 51% of the vote, Obama 45%. But thanks to local variations in support, Obama actually won more delegates than Hillary; so despite the media uniformly reporting a Hillary win, Obama actually ‘won’ the caucus, because he got more Nevada delegates (the same way Bush won the 2000 election, despite Gore getting a larger share of the popular vote). At least, I think Obama won; trying to explain this to you has given me a pounding headache, and the realisation that I still don’t really understand. Allow someone else to explain:

On Jan. 19, party caucuses meet in each precinct to choose delegates to county conventions. The delegates selected are not bound to any candidate. At the county conventions on Feb. 23, delegates to the state convention are chosen. They are not bound to any candidate. The state convention is April 18-20, during which delegates choose 25 of the 33 delegates to the national convention. Sixteen of the 25 delegates are allocated proportionally to presidential candidates based on the support for the candidates in each of the state’s three Congressional districts. Nine delegates are allocated to candidates based on the support among all of the delegates attending the convention. The remaining eight unpledged delegates are chosen from party leaders.

There you are then. Simple.

DATELINE: Austin, Texas

So tonight is George W. Bush’s final State of the Union speech then, which the former Democratic candidate Dennis Kucinich decided to mark by trying to impeach the President. The wag. Sadly he has just announced he is postponing this bit of political fun for a little while longer.

Either way, Kucinich is not like other candidates. He was the only Democratic candidate who denounced the immorality of the Iraq war from the outset, who tried to shout down the Patriot Act and Guantanamo, called for a genuinely not-for-profit healthcare system, and supported the right to gay marriage. He infamously claims to have once seen a UFO, and on the day of the New Hampshire primary he told our friends at Harvard H-Bomb that young people ought to “love themselves”. Aww.

Hanging out at Kucinich’s non-victory party in Jillian’s Sports Bar in Manchester, New Hampshire a couple of weeks ago, there was little doubt that this bold, passionate man was only really in the race to help shape the debate. “When I am President”, he kept saying, but his supporters all knew the reality. Kate, a Manchester local and Kucinich fan, had walked into the voting booth that morning planning to vote for John Edwards, who eventually finished third.

“I was all ready to tick the Edwards box. But then I thought ‘well, if I’m going to vote for someone who’s not going to win, I may as well vote for the one guy who actually represents my views.’”

A lot of Americans see Kucinich as being slightly to the left of Leon Trotsky, but he’s really quite the liberal, in the English sense of the word. Indeed he was once lauded in The Guardian newspaper as the kind of politician who’d be better off abandoning the staunchly centrist Democratic party, relocating to Islington, and signing up as an archetypal north London Labour MP. And given that his wife Elizabeth is English, why not do just that?

The Kucinich New Hampshire party could easily have been a good old-fashioned London Labour Party bunk-up, looking around the room. There were earnest young men in suits that didn’t fit them properly, a few corduroy-clad grad students, a smattering of pierced eco-vegans, and, the predominant demographic, friendly middle aged faces sticking out of horrifying multi-coloured woolly jumpers.

So what about it? Time to get Dennis and Elizabeth to cross the Atlantic to save Labour from itself, surely? His staunch defence of civil liberties, and ideological (not opportunist) opposition to unilateral invasions of middle eastern countries could give Brown’s government the moral compass it needs to return the Labour vessel to calmer waters.

Once Kucinich’s speech was over, he descended the small stage in the back-room at Jillian’s to thank his rag-tag army of New Hampshire activists. The throng around Elizabeth was smaller, however, so I respectfully shuffled into a position alongside a guy who wanted her autograph, despite being nearly 70 in age (“she’s just so glamorous,” he said, like a school-boy standing on the red carpet). When he had had his turn I walked up and explained myself, mentioning London, and our blog, and the insanity of the campaign trail.

“So have you ever thought about taking Dennis back home to England, getting him involved in the Labour Party over there? Helping Gordon out a little?”

She smiles slightly sheepishly at my question.

“Actually,” she says, leaning in as if to impart a secret, “I’m a Conservative back home”.

“Really?!” I say, forgetting my polite awe, unable to contain my consternation. Dennis Kucinich is seen as redder than red out here, and now his wife is telling me she’s a Tory.

“Yeah, well you know how it is.” I look at her blankly. I’m not sure that I do. “Well, you know: right-wing in Britain is like left-wing over here. It’s so different.”

“So will you really vote for David Cameron in 2010?” I ask, slightly tetchily.

“Oh, I don’t know, I guess so. Maybe Liberal Democrat actually.”

I thanked Elizabeth, still slightly confused, and wandered back to our blogger enclave next to the free chips and dips. English politeness had come to my rescue at the last minute; after all, it wouldn’t have been very good form to have started lambasting Kucinich the Cameroonian at her husband’s New Hampshire party. Goddamn it I was tempted though.

DATELINE: Houston, Texas

Obama cleaned up in South Carolina last night. Most of the mainstream media’s talking heads will spend the next week prattling on about the significance of the black turn-out, and whether Obama’s success will be replicated in states with smaller African American communities. Please ignore this prattling.

“It’s not about colour, it’s generational” said one of the more sensible pundits on CNN last night, citing the statistics that young voters of all races were once again voting overwhelmingly for the Senator for Illinois. This is what we have been saying since we saw the caucus at the Iowa City Senior Citizens Center overrun by literally hundreds of bright-eyed first-time voters.

The Democratic contest is all about age and guile versus youth, innocence and a bad haircut.

Sandis Sullivan, the 60-something Georgian who was running the poll in Springfield Baptist Church in Greenville, South Carolina, knew it was about age, not race:

“These young people are so much better informed than my generation.” he said happily, gesturing to his Blackberry. “I don’t really know how to use this thing, but the younger generation, they’re always multi-tasking. I see them out in cafes and in the street, and they’re checking the news and e-mailing their friends and socialising all at once. It’s great to see.”

“This election is about the past versus the future” Obama said in his powerful South Carolina victory sermon last night. And do you know what, it is. It’s about the recent past and the near future.

So many of the young people we’ve met, 18-30 year olds everywhere from snowy towns in New Hampshire to the grand cities of the south, display a scepticism of their politicians you’d expect in Communist Russia. Intelligent, worldly people like Patch and Leah in Baltimore are disenfranchised, dispirited, and unenthusiastic about this election. They think every one of the candidates is hiding something, most of them not very far below the surface, and in any case the whole process is bent anyway. They really wish it could be otherwise, and talking about the great Presidents of the past, they seem to feel they ought to tuck in their cynicism and just believe. But they’ve been burned before – worse than that, they’ve been burned ever since the birth of their political consciousness.

There is a whole generation of young people who have reached voting age since the year 2000, and that generation’s formative political experience, their pubescent awakening to the world outside the school playground, the first time they asked their parents what was going on on the news – was a total subversion of logic, justice, and democracy: the stolen election of 2000. George W. Bush and those that legitimised his presidency have aborted the hope of a whole generation of Americans.

Rob, a 26-year old born in Jamaica and raised in NYC, moved to Orlando, Florida when he was 18, with his wife and newborn daughter, arriving in the midst of the scandal. I didn’t envy him starting a family, bringing new life into the world, with the acrid stench of corruption hanging so thickly in the air. In that context, it takes a lot of gumption, it takes almost a blind act of faith to believe in a political system in which the default option seems to be unabashed deception. But Rob’s doing it; he wants Obama as President, and he’s organising for the Obama Florida campaign.

“We are ready to believe again” Obama said in his victory speech, to passionate cheers from all sides. But it’s not about believing again. It’s about whether you can believe for the first time, despite all the evidence to the contrary. So many teenagers and twenty-somethings we’ve met have jumped on the Obama bandwagon and said “take me where you’re going. I don’t care where it is and I don’t care how we get there. Just take me.”

But so many more aren’t just going to offer their hope, no questions asked. People we’ve met like Patch, Leah, Uni, and Meredith reckon they will vote for Obama, if they vote at all, but they aren’t about to offer their heart and soul to his campaign – because they don’t want to give that love just to be betrayed, chastened, and burned like they suspect they will be. Were Obama to win, there is still a multitude of ways they could have their belief sold down the river: by the Democratic party, by the voters, or, most fearsomely of all, by Obama himself. For so many young people, this election relies on whether they feel psychologically ready to take a massive political leap of faith. And if they’re betrayed this time, recovering that faith will be virtually impossible.

DATELINE: New Orleans, Louisiana

A week before we hit New Orleans (correct pronunciation: ‘N’orlins’), I got an email from a concerned British friend saying the following:

“I cannot emphasise how careful you should be – stay in the French Quarter, do not leave it on any account! And even then be really careful. It’s not just ‘haha America scary, people have guns’, it’s actually really bad… in four days there [in August 2006] we met two people who had been mugged at gunpoint and one whose friend had been shot dead.”

That concerned us a little. As did the fact that my guidebook described the French Quarter, for decades the legendary, beautiful home to musicians, artists, and indeed tourists, as “comparatively safe” (what a comforting modifier there). Even in New Orleans itself a cafe owner bid us goodbye not with a traditional ’see ya’, ‘goodbye’, or ‘have a good one’, but ‘be careful’. ‘Be careful’? What kind of thing is that to say to your clientele?

Well, we were careful – but not paranoid; not to the point that it stopped us having a wonderful time in New Orleans. It’s two and a half years since the devastation of Hurricane Katrina – and the greater devastation of federal incompetence – reduced a great city to its knees, and the Big Easy is still moving slowly, creakingly, back to something approaching normality. Recovery is manifested in the ubiquitous gold, green and purple that visually tags and unites the whole city – and in the music, dancing, and irrepressibly welcoming party spirit of Mardi Gras, which we accidentally stumbled upon the start of.

But beyond the French Quarter, some areas remain entirely un-populated for whole blocks, family houses are still left as crumbling wreckage, with flotsam-ridden yards, almost every street is scarred with pot-holes that could swallow your whole wheel, and crime is still a major problem. Last month three guys with AK-47s held up an armoured bank truck outside a middle school playground around the corner from where we were staying – in the middle of recess. Their getaway was aided by the fact that the NOPD literally could not carry out a proper Police chase: the roads are just too messed up for that, thanks to a combination of neglect, Katrina, and the army humvees that pounded the streets in the aftermath of the hurricane.

There aren’t many political lawn signs about – and those that are there are for local Mayoral and State races. Which hardly surprises me: would you have much faith in the federal government right now? Like the sardonic t-shirts in the tourist shops say: ‘FEMA Disaster Advice: ‘Run bitch, run!’. No-one really wants to talk about politics – but the very presence in the city of all the young people we meet, none of whom are New Orleans locals, is one of the most profound political statements you could ask for. They struggle to make rent in an ailing economy, put up with the painful slowness of the city’s recovery, tolerate the ignorant attitudes of outsiders and live with the real fears of insiders, and all because there is nowhere else in this vast, diverse land of opportunity that they would rather spend their youth.

Erik, our gracious host, is a supremely talented young pastry chef, originally from New York – though he has lived all over the USA (”I think there might possibly be one state I haven’t been to”). He survived Katrina, which is another story for another time. For now I’m wondering if local anger at the federal government is motivating a groundswell of interest in the election. Erik thinks not.

“You’re not going to get much out of people during Mardi Gras man. This is our time to enjoy ourselves. Because Katrina…” he tails off, trying to find the words, “…it’s fucking depressing man. I don’t want to think about that shit. I don’t like to talk about it much either. Normally if people ask about Katrina I just lie and say ‘nah dude, I wasn’t here for that’. It’s just too bad, it’s too depressing.”

The room falls silent, and we stare sadly at the floor, still trying to comprehend the horror of it all. But Erik grins broadly, affectionately, correctively.

“But I came back man. I fucking love this city. I had to come back.”

DATELINE: New Orleans, Louisiana

It’s one of those probably phoney bits of received wisdom that American Idol gets more votes than the Presidential election – insert your own cynical sneer about celebrity culture here if you so wish. But it is true that the American election process is fiendishly complicated – we’ve got so many hits off people typing ‘how does the American election work?’ into Google it’s not even funny. So on a long drive somewhere between Florida and Louisiana the other day, we figured out a reality TV alternative to the chaotic ’system’ of primaries, caucuses, delegates and electoral colleges: ‘Presidential Big Brother’.

This spin-off of George Orwell’s favourite elimination-based Channel 4 game show is filmed in two wings of the same house: one for the Republicans, one for the Democrats. The winner of the daily task gets to occupy a miniature, mocked-up version of the Oval Office for the evening and play at being President, bossing the others around.

Day 23: Democratic Wing
The candidates are being set their daily task by Big Brother: to prepare a basic stump speech on the hoof, but with a difference: each candidate has their own specific handicap. Barack Obama is not allowed to use the words ‘hope’, ‘change’, or ‘believe’ – which sadly leaves his speech (working title: ‘Change – the hope we can believe in’) one long deep-throated stutter. Hillary Clinton’s handicap prevents her from using the platitudes she is so fond of (”I’m against illegal guns”, she controversially pledged in one of the South Carolina debates), while John Edwards is told to his dismay that he must pronounce words like ‘opportunity’ with the number of syllables prescribed by the OED and no more. Dennis Kucinich, meanwhile, is disqualified from the contest in the first five minutes for trying to impeach Big Brother.

Day 37: Republican Wing
In the Republican part of the Big Brother house, the candidates have been set the apparently straight-forward task of changing a light-bulb. Mitt Romney tries to pay someone else to do it, Mike Huckabee organises a prayer meeting for it to change, John McCain shakes his head sadly, saying that he didn’t need light-bulbs in the Hanoi Hilton, and Ron Paul tries to dismantle the wiring on the grounds that the light-bulb wasn’t mandated in the constitution. Meanwhile Rudy Giuliani is nowhere to be seen – he is apparently changing a lightbulb on his own somewhere in Florida.

24 hour coverage continues on C-SPAN and BBC Parliament. At the end of six months of this torture two candidates will emerge – one Democrat, one Republican – to be put to a national phone vote. The results will be tabulated, checked, and re-checked to ensure that the winner has been fairly and verifiably chosen. The Supreme Court will then announce that George W. Bush has been elected President anyway.

*****

Ahem. Like I say, it was a long car journey. But before we knew it Alabama was turning into swampy Mississipi, which gradually gave way to Louisiana, and eventually the dark glow of rain-soaked, disaster-cracked New Orleans asphalt, the streets gleaming the perennial reflected promise of night-time debauchery.