Eight hours in a truck. A snap shot of America.


The drive from Chicago to Pennsylvania was never going to be an enjoyable trip. The 750km journey across the American Corn Belt was always going to be an arduous task. Eight hours in the Truck of Justice was a test of how best to pass the time away. Thankfully for some, a three hour cd documentary on the American civil war was one way to pass the time away. Before the guts of the journey began, a brief stop off in South Bend, Indiana to visit the Democrat campaign office, home of the Joe Donnelly for Congress campaign and the University of Notre Dame (home of the Fighting Irish and the US’s most prestigious Catholic University) was enough to satisfy the demands of The Don. He revelled at the opportunity to meet with his people, especially after he quietly endured the drive through the Pentecostal Bible Belt days earlier.

The rest of the journey through the miles and miles of corn fields across Indiana, Ohio and Pennsylvania was fairly uneventful. We did manage to drive though the entire state of Ohio without touching the soil, even though several occupants’ back teeth were floating.

The hours did provide the pentagon of Road Trippers the opportunity to pontificate about the American political industry, current polling, food and the ubiquitous napkins under every bottle of beer.

Our conclusions were thus: Americans are really into cheese, processed meat and salt. Upon our return we will all get new livers and liposuction. One day we shall return to the states and introduce fruit and veg to our ally’s diets. Ok let’s not get too carried away and bite off more than we can chew, let’s just start with fibre.

Moving from fibre to moral fibre, American radio is shit. When it is not out of range, it is always a mad radical preacher telling his sheep that the bible tells us not to vote for Obama, shock jocks like Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity spend most of their time living in denial as their religious right fantasyland is falling around them as poll after poll shows that enough electoral votes will fall in the Obama camp. According to the political half wits on the radio, Obama’s plan to redistribute the wealth from 5 per cent of the highest income earners to middle America is socialism, and that the world is about to end if the America doesn’t wake up on election day and vote for John McCain - a candidate that most of the republican base have little affinity for him or his maverick politics.

What is clear to us though is that across television (apart from Fox News) radio and print, the Obama campaign is consistently on message, a message that all boils down to CHANGE WE NEED. Whereas McCain/Palin are all over the shop just like the Coalition was in the dying days of the Howard Government. If McCain spent less time attacking his opponent and defending his running mate’s wardrobe expenses and more on talking about anything other than the economy, they may hold on to most of the states in the south. This is something some betting agencies have recognised and started paying out, like Irish bookie Paddy Power did last week. Meanwhile we have Palin, now distancing herself from the McCain camp and preparing for the 2012 campaign. People, the wheels are falling off the conservative bandwagon.

A striking contrast to Australian party politics is the ability to energise their base in a manner in which Australian political parties can only dream about. Trying to get an ALP branch member to put up a garden sign, let alone pay for one as they do here, is a very, very tall order. Non-compulsory voting has meant that political activists in their millions are registering as Democrats, calling voters and getting out the vote. Blogs, buttons, bumper stickers is the by-product of a political industry that is geared towards getting the message out to voters that the Democrat/Republican brand is king.

Across our eight-hour journey, and indeed since we left Dallas, we have seen two Americas. Urban America is voting Obama, maybe less for whites in the south, but in rural America, they are resiliently going to vote for McCain/Palin.

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