6th November 2012

In 1985 I spent a semester in Cambridge Massachusetts. 

It was my year of Undoing Theology in Red Sneakers.

The project was a major undertaking, relocating six people from the NE of England to the NE of the United States, finding schools for the children, settling into a new apartment and choosing which courses to pursue.

We arrived in January when it was, quite literally, breathtakingly cold and lived the dream through to the summer when it was beginning to feel extremely warm, then we returned home to Newcastle to pick up our old life where we had left.

Whilst we were in the States one of our children changed her name, to Chelsea Wilde but within hours of our return she had defaulted back to her given name.

I spent the next two years trying to find a job in order to make our stay permanent but gave up after coming second one too many times.

On reflection, with four children to guide through University and the indoor critic's increasing disability it seems that we made the right decision.

Education, Health Care and now in Retirement pensions, all point to the benefits of publicly provided support in the form of a welfare state understood in its broadest terms.

The current election taking place in the US appears to reflect this choice.

The Romney ticket appears to wish to undo much of what Obama has achieved and to return to the policies of the Bush era, which as Laurel and Hardy might observe, got the USA into this mess in the first place.

Tax cuts for the rich, no trickle down benefits for the poorest and expensive and unbudgeted wars.

The suprising thing about Mitt Romney is that whilst Governor of Massachusetts he appeared to be something of a Liberal, but the Republican Party has shifted pretty firmly to the Right following the success of the Tea Party Movement.

To gain the nomination and secure the Republican vote Romney had to adopt a much more right wing, even reactionary stance than he presented whilst in office.

Obama on the other hand, inherited a huge mess.

The economy was in free fall, housing, healthcare, pensions and the defence budget meant that his room for manoeuvre was extremely limited and opposition in the Senate from the Republicans meant that every inch of progress was only achieved at a high cost.

But there has been real achievement in Health Care, in Foreign Policy and in public investment which has secured economic growth, wages and jobs.

The emotional investment in an Obama victory in the UK is extremely high.

The special relationship, reinforced by pictures of Cameron flipping burgers on the White House lawn and Romney's cavalier comments about the Olympics mean that even the Conservatives appear to be hoping for Obama to win.

Even William Hague, whilst obviously not as appealing to Hilary Clinton as David Milliband, has managed to appear statesmanlike.

Of course we have no say in the matter.

We have no vote.

But on the BBC News, Hugh Edwards went in search of his Welsh relatives, all of whom appeared to be voting for Romney, to give us a first hand experience of what being caught  up in a presidential election debate might feel like.

I imagine that I will sleep well enough whilst the votes are being counted, I hope that their will be no repeat of the hanging chads debacle which cost the Democrats dearly three terms ago, but when I wake up to the news I have a sense that the world may be the same or that it might just have become a slightly more dangerous place.