No one gets my vote in this showbiz US election

Since there can be no taxation without representation, and I'm a taxpayer in both countries, I feel fully entitled to help choose the next president. But what kind of say is this?

From this side of the pond US democracy often seems more vibrant and believable than our own — at least at a local level. The old adage may be that British politics is show-business for ugly people, but when it comes to the national stage, American politics is show-business, pure and simple.

My hunch is that John McCain has made a serious error in picking Alaska governor Sarah Palin as his running mate. Even at the ideological smorgasbord of US electioneering, her mixture of feminist identity politics and gun-toting Christian fundamentalism is indigestible. Never mind that this born-again moralist now has a teenage pregnancy on her hands in the shape of her unmarried 17-year-old daughter; Palin, like the state she hails from, is a woman in profound denial: an oil-barrel-thumping frontierswoman living on the edge of the meltdown caused by global warming.

But while the Republicans have their convictions in a twist, with liberal, conservative and libertarian wings of the party in hopeless conflict, McCain has to do very little in order to retain command of the agenda. His kudos as a war hero — no matter how hollow it truly is — and his valetudinarian status, mean his challenger must make his own political weather.

Unfortunately, for all that Barack Obama speaks of "hope", he has only two substantive policies where he differs from McCain: Iraq and inheritance tax, and on the first there are many in the GOP who, like Obama, opposed the invasion.

Obama's hawkish preening has included threatening his own invasion — of Iran — and going belly-up to everything that the American-Israel Public Affairs Committee could conceivably want of him, including a refusal ever to negotiate on the jurisdiction of the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. Domestically, he has no evolved plan for how to introduce universal healthcare — surely the bedrock of any limitations on the tyranny of the free market.

Americans' perception of their nation — perhaps because of the nature and recency of its formation — has a mystic tinge that is incomprehensible to more realist Europeans. Given this, US democracy continues to be more akin to a holy ritual than expression of reasoned choice. There are still months to go until election day; but you can be sure of more rhetoric, more smoke, more mirrors and less sense.

Does it bother me? Do I feel cynical? Not really: after all, I only have an overseas ballot. Those aren't even counted at all, unless the result turns out to be a close-run thing; as close, for example, as it was in 2000.