I know that all politicos have a major boner for American politics and that this year is just one non-stop wet dream. But do our lot have to make their affection quite so blatant?

As Alex Massie noted a last week, at the Labour Party conference, Gordon Brown was setting himself up as the experienced man who can lead the country through these choppy waters. As he said, “This is no time for a novice. Zing!”

He is betting that, come the election, voters will choose “experience” over “change”. Does that sound familiar?

Today, David Cameron appeared to deliberately counter Gordon Brown’s line. He is “a man with a plan (on a canal in Panama)”. (Sorry to James Graham for stealing his joke.)

He continued by saying, “it’s not experience we need; it’s character and judgement.” He then did his best Bowie impression and used the word ‘change’ 20 times during his speech.

Do these guys really need to copy everything that happens in America? I mean, Gordon Brown’s wife was brought out in front of the Labour Conference as though she is a First Lady. David Cameron spent a minute or two talking about his wife (with a bit of cringe worthy Carry On-lite humour packaged with it), as though I give a monkey’s who his wife is.

Now correct me if I’m wrong, but I always had the impression that the job of a First Lady is to provide a kind of ceremonial role, waving at the crowds and the like, because the USA (and France, and wherever) doesn’t have a royal family to do all that sort of stuff. Well the UK does have a royal family to do all that sort of stuff! Besides, Carla Bruni they are not (despite what The Daily Mail tries to tell you.)

Meanwhile, David Cameron was doing that awful thing where he looked as though he was facing the wrong direction. At least this time the people over his shoulder were recognisable faces rather than unknown greasy pole climbers-in-waiting. Unfortunately, George Osborne looked like he was constantly giving David Cameron an evil laser death stare. Watch him in the videos and you’ll see what I mean.

Another amusing aside to the conferences is the BBC’s word clouds. I couldn’t help but notice that Gordon Brown — leader of the Labour Party which distrusts people so much that it wants to issue you with a biometric ID card if you want to so much as scratch your arse — mentioned the word “people” more than any other word.

David Cameron — leader of the Conservative Party that is supposed to hate big government — used the word, er, “government” more than any other word.

Meanwhile, Nick Clegg, leader of the Lib Dems — the party that is said to sit on the fence on every matter — used both words an equally high number of times. At least one of the parties is true to form.

It’s loathsome and it comes around once every four years. No, I’m not talking about the Olympics. I’m on about American politics.

A lot of people get themselves really jazzed with American politics. I mean, I get it — the President of the USA is an important person, so it’s good to keep up with events. But some people actually seem to enjoy it. Are they sadists?

For the past two weeks my favourite radio programme Up All Night has been hijacked by these American politicos talking enormous amounts of horsey-poo. Dr Karl’s excellent science podcast was this week unbearably difficult to listen to because presenter Rhod Sharp was sitting there in Denver surrounded by lots of people cheering. (To add insult to injury, the podcast was less than half the length it normally is.)

The thing about these party conventions in America is that they always seem so detached from reality. I know this is not an original comparison, but it really is like pantomime. A politician can say the most banal, boring thing with a clumsy delivery, but the crowd will still cheer and applaud like crazy. Bring up the enemy and they boo and hiss. And at the end of the day you will still be no clearer about what anyone will actually do if they are elected.

And speaking of the applause, and the cheering and the whooping. What is with it? I wandered into a room that had the Democratic Convention on the television last week. All that was happening was some kind of upbeat music was playing, and the people were cheering and whooping and dancing. I must have been in the room for three or four minutes. I left before anyone actually uttered a single word. I mean, what is this? The world’s biggest laughter therapy class?

When I see stuff like that, it just makes me think everyone that is sitting in that room is delusional. John McCain is never just John McCain. He is always, always, “The Next President Of The United States Of America, John McCain”. What makes them so sure? That is just cocky. I would kind of get it if it was obvious he was going to win, but even then it is like tempting fate. When Neil Kinnock tried it here in 1992 he got hammered. So why does this stuff sit well in the USA? Perhaps it is one of those things where they think, “If I say it often enough it will become true.”

Maybe I’m old-fashioned, but I think politics should be about the issues. At least in Britain the parties pretend to talk about policies during their conferences. In America, party conventions just put too much emphasis on the razzmatazz. It’s all about the glitz and the glamour. Then there is the emotive nature of it all. Most of it seems to be about tugging on the heart-strings, and they’re not very subtle about it. It’s just too saccharine for me.

I am certainly glad I don’t live in America so that I have to actually face to prospect of having to pay attention to all of this nonsense. If you ask me, it is no surprise that turnout in the USA is so low. I would hardly be overjoyed by the prospect of choosing between the White Elephants Party and the Ridiculous Asses Party.

It is true that politicians can be quite off-putting here in Britain as well. But at least they put me off because of what they say. American politicians put me off because of what they do and how they present themselves.

What gets me is the fact that they think I would be impressed with any of the sort of silly things they do at conventions. It’s like when they get a group of people to stand behind the speaker. I think it’s meant to look like he’s so popular that he’s always got scores of people standing around him. In actual fact it looks like the speaker is facing the wrong way without realising it.

When Michelle Obama started speaking at the Democratic Convention, all of these placards suddenly appeared from within the audience. It looked like there were hundreds of them. “MICHELLE”, they said. Why was that? Were they worried she was going to forget her name? Why don’t they make her check the inside of her underpants like the rest of us have to?

I only include the video to prove the point about the placards. Don’t watch the whole video — it only encourages them. Incidentally, the first word is not even uttered until 1:19.

It was my turn to write this week’s Scottish Roundup (nominations always welcome of course, even if it’s nothing to do with politics). I keep an eye on the Scottish blogs throughout the week in preparation, and towards the end of the week it became pretty clear that one particular wee stooshie had to be covered.

Labour blogger Kezia Dugdale has been involved in a campaign called Scotland for Obama. SNP blogger Calum Cashley was none too impressed. Then a number of other bloggers — SNP supporters among them — decided to take Calum Cashley to task.

I have to confess that I’m not a great fan of Calum Cashley’s blog. To me, it seems unnecessarily confrontational, negative, sarcastic and maybe even a bit boorish. It’s certainly not the sort of thing that would persuade me to vote for him come election time. But despite the response to his most recent post, in this instance I’m probably more inclined to agree with Cashley.

Maybe it’s just a reflection of my increasingly anti-political or apolitical (certainly in terms of party politics) viewpoint (I will consider the roots of this in a future post if I can get round to it). But there is something about the amount of attention that the US Presidential election receives that rubs me up the wrong way a bit. It’s not that I don’t recognise that the position of US President isn’t an incredibly powerful one. But political campaigns in general are starting to really get my goat.

Mostly, it is the implication that a campaign like Scotland for Obama will make a difference. It just comes across as a bit attention seeking. “Look at me and look at how much I care!”

I am pretty sceptical of most political campaigning. Of course, I have my views. But I have never joined a club, I’ve never gone on a demonstration and I’ve never worn any political t-shirts. This is because I know it will make next to no difference.

Come election time, of course, I love it. I stay up all night to watch the results. It’s great fun to cheer on the good guys and boo the baddies. As Jeff says in the tagline to his blog, “Elections - Probably the Best Spectator Sport in the World”. But beyond that, what does political campaigning mean?

Do I need to go on a rally to prove how much I care? Not really. Will the Scotland for Obama campaign make a jot of difference to the outcome of the election? I hardly think so. In fact, as Calum Cashley rightly points out, if enough Americans find out that those pinko Europeans are campaigning in Obama’s favour, if anything it will probably have a negative effect.

I am not sure it’s my position to tell Americans how to vote anyway. I know it has been pointed out in the posts I have linked to above that Scotland for Obama is not intended to tell Americans how to vote. But the point still stands.

Imagine if the boot was on another foot. What if somewhere in America a group of people gathered to express their support for, say, David Cameron. What would you think of it? I would think they were the most enormous fools. I would roll my eyes. I might ignore them. But it would more likely make me even less inclined to vote for Cameron.

The thing is that our viewpoint is unquestionably altered by the fact that we don’t live in America. The issues, the agenda and the political climate are completely different over there.

I know that whenever I have heard visiting foreign students express an opinion about Scottish politics (there is no shortage of this in the Edinburgh Uni politics department) it has often been the most ill-informed bum drizzle. You can’t blame them for that. They cannot possibly have as good a feel for the issues as someone like me who has barely set foot out of Scotland. They are projecting their views on American (or whatever) politics onto a map of Scotland. But it’s a square peg in a round hole.

I recognise that the same phenomenon would occur in reverse. In deference to this, I mostly keep my viewpoints on other countries’ politics to myself. I have my own opinions, of course. I do care what goes on in other countries. But you wouldn’t find me going around the place wearing an Obama badge or anything like that.

I have done a few of those online quizzes that tell you which candidate you should vote for. The results are here and here. When I did those quizzes though, there were a number of questions that I didn’t have the first clue about. In some cases I had not even heard of the issues and I couldn’t possibly have an opinion on them.

The same even applies when you’re in the same country. When I tried out Vote Match London about a quarter of the questions were about issues that I had never heard of, and half of the questions I had no opinion on whatsoever. For what it’s worth, it told me that I should vote for Boris Johnson. Would I vote for Boris Johnson if I was an actual Londoner? I simply don’t know because I’m not a Londoner.

And here is the thing. I am sure that London does not need my help to elect their Mayor. Equally, the USA does not need to hear my views on the Presidential campaign. An argument against this has been put forward by Political Dissuasion:

Would you criticise me for organising a rally against Robert Mugabe’s treatment of the people of Zimbabwe, where people are dying, starving and being jailed for actions and rights that you and I take take for granted?

There is quite a noticeable difference between the USA and Zimbabwe. One of them is democratic and the other is not. For all of its faults, at least in the USA there is a reasonable expectation of free speech, a reasonably free press, reasonably free markets and so on. None of this exists in Zimbabwe. So the people of Zimbabwe need international support so much more. Even then, I would limit myself to saying that I think Zimbabwe should be freer. Once they have the “rights that you and I take for granted”, I am sure they will be able to conduct their own affairs without the help of the likes of me.

The USA needs no help in this regard. They have their freedoms that they take for granted. If I were to stick my nose in, I would most likely be batted away. And if an American sticks his nose into my country’s politics, I would bat him away as well.

There is the other argument that US politics affects us all, which I suppose is true to an extent. But does it really affect us? I have my doubts. The likely winners of the election are much of a muchness. People like to pluck out the Iraq War as an example of how much American politics affects us, but these people forget that most Democrats were all for invading Iraq at the time as well!

Incidentally, I do have an opinion on the US Presidential candidates. As it happens, I favour Barack Obama. But I don’t pretend that this is based on any nuanced policy view. It is based on the fact that John McCain is a baad, baad Republican and that Hilary Clinton is a screeching maniac. Honestly, Clinton drives me nuts. She is like that teacher you could hear giving someone a row from the opposite end of the corridor.

There are other reasons, which I covered here. I really dislike the tone of Clinton’s campaign. You can just tell that she came into the campaign thinking she had a divine right to be President. The message of experience is total bunk. Her sumtotal of experience is limited to being married to a former President. Big wow.

At least Obama’s message is more positive. But here is another area where I agree with Calum Cashley. If the American public buys into all of the hope rhetoric, it is lining itself up for disappointment. We have seen this in Britain in the 1990s. Labour pulled off the exact same trick. “I’m here to save you from those awful conservatives!” Well we all know how that turned out.

The truth is harsher. No matter who you vote for, the government gets in. I’d love to see Barack Obama usher in a new era of hope for America. But if he actually does it I’ll eat my hat.

All of that said, I don’t criticise Kezia Dugdale or anyone else for getting involved in Scotland for Obama. It is a harmless campaign and if the people involved get a buzz out of participating then that is all good. We are all adults living in a democracy. By the same token, Calum Cashley is perfectly entitled to chip in, and I don’t think the points he made were as awful as some people are making out.

There is a row in the USA at the moment between the Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama camps. Sadly, someone somewhere along the line has played the race card. Hillary Clinton’s comments about the Civil Rights Act have been called into question.

I doubt Hillary Clinton intended to belittle Martin Luther King’s role. But Hillary Clinton’s comments nevertheless piss me off.

Cassilis says Clinton was making a fair point. But to say “it took a President” to pass the Civil Rights Act is banal. It isn’t exactly headline news that you need a President to pass legislation in the USA. I hardly believe Barack Obama — or any of the other Democratic candidates — dispute it. So what was the point of her saying it?

Well, I am assuming this is yet another angle in her crusade to persuade everyone how experienced she is. She keeps on banging on and on about her experience as if she is in the running to become leader of the Chinese Communist Party rather than President of the United States.

But what experience does she have? Well, she has been a Senator since 2001 — for years longer than Obama. But Obama has also been a member of the Illinois State Senate for seven years prior to that. So it looks to me as though Barack Obama has roughly equal (if we decide to give a higher weight to the US Senate) or slightly more experience at actually being a politician, as opposed to just being married to one.

But I presume it is her famous husband whom Hillary Clinton is evoking whenever she refers to “her” “experience”. This is what really annoys me about Clinton. She comes across as though she thinks she has a right to be President because of her surname. But is it really wise to elect someone on the basis of whom they are married to?

If voters buy into the Clinton mantra of experience, it may mean that really people want Bill Clinton to become President through the back door. In this case it makes a mockery of the constitution, and the maximum of two terms that Presidents can have. No doubt Putin will be trying this trick soon.

Let us assume that Hillary Clinton goes all the way, becomes President and serves two terms. By the end of that, it will have been almost three entire decades since the US had known a President who wasn’t either a Bush or a Clinton.

It does amuse me. Some Americans like to go on about how they are proud that they don’t have a Royal Family because they believe that power should not run through the family. But then they go ahead and elect people from the same families anyway. The difference is that Britain’s Royal family doesn’t actually have any real power.

And I have got through this entire post without even mentioning the Kennedy family yet.

For this reason, I find Barack Obama’s main message of ‘change’ much more appealing than Clinton’s message of ‘experience’. On the basis of the slogans and the simplified, dumbed-down political debates, Barack Obama ought to win this campaign hands down.

A few months back I wrote about a quiz that tells you which US Presidential candidate to vote for. Obviously I don’t have a vote, but it is still fun to try it out and see what comes up.

The election has been in the news this week, so it’s worth taking a look at another of these quizzes, from GoToQuiz (via Amused Cynicism).

67% Chris Dodd
67% Mike Gravel
65% Dennis Kucinich
63% Bill Richardson
62% Barack Obama
62% Rudy Giuliani
61% Hillary Clinton
58% John Edwards
56% Joe Biden
53% Ron Paul
51% John McCain
44% Mitt Romney
43% Mike Huckabee
34% Tom Tancredo
34% Fred Thompson

2008 Presidential Candidate Matching Quiz

Fairly similar results to the other one. Once again, it’s the Democrats you’ve never heard of who have come out top. This time around, a Republican — Rudy Giuliani — appears above some Democrats.