Kirsty Scott: The US that couldn't care less about the rest of us

Published on Sunday 7 September 2008 22:20

John McCain's choice of a running-mate reminds us of an aspect of America it is easy to forget

HOW sobering was it to watch the crowd at the Republican National Convention last week and then to study the polls afterwards? After the euphoria at Denver's Mile High Stadium and the growing belief that, with 38 million TV viewers tuning in for Barack Obama's speech, maybe the US was ready for a leader who wanted to restore the country's international standing, here was another America – swathed in Old Glory, hoisting hand-painted signs that read "Mavrick" (sic), cheering every Sarah Palin soundbite, utterly disengaged from the rest of the world.

"Don't tell me that Sarah Palin doesn't have international experience," bellowed one Grand Old Party (GOP) delegate to the cameras. "She has Canada on one side and Russia on the other."

This is familiar territory for any European who has lived or studied in America for any length of time. I lost count of the number of times I was asked breathtakingly ill-informed questions about Scotland during three years in the south-west, including one posed by a middle-aged man in Yuma, Arizona, who wondered how we got about once we were out of the cities

His wife had already told me she could never travel to Europe because she had heard that in France they spit on Americans. I considered, for a moment, using a cocktail napkin to draw her a map and point out that in the unlikely event of her indeed being spat upon in France, there were plenty of other places she could go.

Neither of them had passports, nor any desire to possess one. They were nice people, he was a realtor and she, a homemaker. They were warm-hearted and genuine and clueless about the world beyond their own borders.

It makes for a good holiday yarn or dinner-party chat, that kind of experience. But it is also deeply unsettling. These are not backwoods survivalists, paranoid about a new world order. These are ordinary Americans; "folks" as George W Bush would call them. These are the people who will decide who the next president will be.

In hindsight, it was easy to be fooled by John McCain. At the height of the Bush years, he was the moderate face of Republicanism, principled and considered and willing to stand against his own party.

This was, after all, a man who, for all his support of the Iraq war, vehemently opposed extraordinary rendition and tore a strip off Donald Rumsfeld when no-one else was willing to, a man who challenged Bush on tax cuts and climate change and who co-sponsored a bipartisan immigration bill just last year that would have offered amnesty to illegal immigrants, something that is anathema to most Republicans.

The fact that many within the GOP were leery of him was all to the good. One could even be lulled into thinking that should the Democrats lose, it might not actually be the end of the world.

But then we watched McCain pick Sarah Palin and, in St Paul, Minnesota, reach out to a demographic that we had perhaps forgotten – the Americans who live in communities where jobs are getting hard to come by but preachers have always been plentiful, where houses ought to have flags and libraries choose carefully what they put on their shelves.

It was a neat trick for McCain to align himself with this America. He is the son and grandson of two four-star US Navy admirals, supremely well-educated, married to a brewery heiress, and now so wealthy he cannot remember how many homes he owns.

It was also clever of him to paint himself and Palin as contemptuous of Washington ways, two simple folk immune to the power-plays and machinations of big government.

In doing all this, he managed to portray Barack Obama, a man who overcame race and poverty to run for the greatest office in the land, as an intellectual and dreamer, a liberal elitist with little empathy for "real" Americans.

It did not help Obama that he had made, some months back, that unguarded comment about small-town voters clinging to guns or religion in times of crisis, explaining their frustrations about their lot through anti-immigrant or anti-trade sentiments. It did not help, either, that he was talking in San Francisco but speaking about Pennsylvania.

He apologised afterwards for the manner in which he spoke but not for the belief, because he understood something that McCain refuses to acknowledge and Palin probably does not understand – that the country they all profess to love is terrifyingly inward-looking for a global superpower, too quick to circle the wagons in times of crisis whether economic, social or international, too quick to confuse patriotism and paranoia.

Even during the Olympics, US broadcasters could not resist re-casting the medals table for American consumption. Equal points were given to every medal, a formula that flew in the face of the preferred IOC method, but which meant the US bested both China and Russia.

To those of us looking in from the outside, it seemed inconceivable that the Republican convention could match what the Democrats had offered America in Colorado, which was nothing less than a way back into the world. But now, Barack Obama holds only a slender 1 per cent lead over McCain.

It is a reminder that beyond the euphoria of Denver and our own febrile hopes, there is another America – one with a tendency to put its own interests above all others, a nation with an inherent distrust of all things foreign.

It ought to count for something that a country's leader is held in high regard across the globe. What is concerning about the America we glimpsed last week is that the opposite may well be true. That America could not care less who we are and what we think.