Ben Ward's Scattered Mind

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However well-intentioned it was, the catastrophic and unpopular intervention in Iraq has served in some parts of the world to discredit the very idea of western democracy. The recent collapse of the banking system, and the humiliating resort to semi-socialist solutions, has done a great deal to discredit - in some people’s eyes - the idea of free-market capitalism.

Democracy and capitalism are the two great pillars of the American idea.

To have rocked one of those pillars may be regarded as a misfortune.

To have damaged the reputation of both, at home and abroad, is a pretty stunning achievement for an American president.

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I cannot vote in this election. I’m a British man, I’ve lived in San Francisco for only a few months, but I’ll be living in this country for years, I hope.

I’ve arrived just in time to to witness the spectacle of a US election.

Not being permitted to vote, I’m just an observer here. But yet the result of this election affects me as much as any American.

I moved here from the UK, a country which has developed a complex tolerance and integration between multiple cultures, races and religions. Sometimes it falters and struggles, other times it forms a glorious melting pot of culture.

We — countries of the western hemisphere — defined the modern world and our reward is to have countries of diversity. Countries that attracted people of all races together and whose coming together makes for a better society, an outright better humanity.

Without a vote, I haven’t chosen a party. Whilst I know the history and the global influence of presidents from both parties, there’s no value in choosing sides.

As such, I can just observe and judge these politicians as people.

It’s with utter disgust, then, that I should see a man and a woman running for the highest office in the land, two of the most influential and powerful political positions on earth, and embrace hate as their aid in seeking election.

How can you knowingly embrace the politics of fear? How can you sit easily with yourself whilst carelessly throwing out the much-abused word ‘terrorist’ to provoke completely unrelated emotional reactions? Driving people to your cause through fear? That is terrorism.

This country is divided. And to see you allow a minority faction of the less progressive sections of this broad and vibrant society flare up in violent rhetoric, racism and untethered abuse is abhorrent.

If elected by my peers, you will be a president and vice president of people of every nation, race and colour. Not just the peace loving people all around the world, but right here within these boarders. In provoking hate toward large sections of that society, I do not understand why you would run for an office which represents them.

You have an opportunity to set an example of tolerance and maturity for the world to see, at a time when society is exaggerated as going wild. Instead you appear as manipulative and savage as some of your enemies.

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My idea of a proper role of a journalist is not to be part of the contest.

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‘It’s an odd thing being in two different parts of Middle America for a fortnight. Most of those who choose to come to America come to the wonder of New York, of Boston, San Fransico or LA, or to the Grand Canyon, the Cape, Florida or California. To be in Denver and, more particularly, St Paul and Minneapolis, is a salutary experience.

You feel it hard. America is living in the past, a past of consumption, fatty foods, garish television, weight reduction ads, depression relief pills, gas guzzling freeways and a dependence on splurging out 25 per cent of the entire world carbon emission totals.

Travelling bumper to bumper, rat race to the workplace for 50 minutes each way, six lanes of traffic clogging the freeway, with many more trails of such traffic glimpsed from the side windows.

Parking in vast multi-storey carparks that dominate the city centres, a short walk through massive yet inefficient security into great icy barns in which these conventions take place and are reported.

This sort of living, which huge numbers of Americans experience every day of their lives, is NOT the future. There is no soul, no touch with nature, no brush with fresh food or fresh air.

The sheer cost of maintaining a building at 15 degrees C when it’s 23 outside must be monumentally wasteful, and everyone of the skyscrapers, office blocks, malls and convention centres you see are up to the same stuff, freezing inside against a perfectly manageable temperature outside. There’s not a single opening window in Minneapolis.

Yet for the first time I have heard politicians on both sides at last calling for an end to America’s dependence on foreign oil. But there is still no clarion call for a Manhattan-style project to find alternative energy sources.

So yes, being here at this crunch moment in the life of America is, er, a kind of a treat. But you know something, you feel neither of these competing teams is offering a big enough vision for what’s needed to change America.’