KEY POINTS:
In any of the generously equipped playgrounds spread up and down Manhattan you'll see a line up of shiny New Zealand technology, much preferred to what the Americans make themselves.
The child-free may not recognise names such as Mountain Buggy or Phil & Teds; they're prams - or as Americans call them, strollers - that are cleverly designed for two kids. They sail, Humvee like, over New York's cratered , crumbly footpaths. Even Madonna has one.
So popular are these robust New Zealand exports that there is a thriving market for stolen models. Our first was pinched off our Sydney veranda. Its replacement was filched from a restaurant within 48 hours of our arrival to live in New York.
The loss led to my pram-spotting obsession - and a little game played when I spied a Kiwi marque: where, I would ask New Yorkers, did your stroller come from?
Invariably, the answer was Australia or even Canada. One couple told me theirs was from England.
Over-sensitivity, perhaps - but it was mildly annoying that the owners had no idea and cared not that their expensive stroller came from the land of my birth.
On a wider front, the stroller question prompted me to wonder more about New Zealand's presence in the American psyche. And much about America's in my own. Did my odd niggling over Americans' stroller ignorance merely reveal my own insecurities as a New Zealander landed in a cacophonous and supremely bumptious city?
Probably, yes.
But there was something more - and its origins lay in events in a large, opulent Wellington home nearly 25 years ago. Its occupant was a crusty American former high school history teacher, H. Monroe Browne, the United States Ambassador to Wellington.
He was blindsided when the Labour Prime Minister, David Lange, banned US nuclear warships.
Monroe Browne was infuriated with Lange, believing the New Zealand Prime Minister had duped him into reporting to Washington that New Zealand would never actually enforce its anti-nuclear policy.
On his worst nights, the ambassador would, at abrupt notice, summon a handful of Press Gallery journalists out to his Lower Hutt residence for dinner.
He seemed lonely and as the night wore on and the port flowed - more than a little of it over the ambassador's cream carpet - Monroe Brown would become increasingly agitated, quaking with rage over New Zealand's arrogance.
And most of what he promised came to pass: US military intelligence was cut off, military exercises curtailed and trading preferences diluted. That high-handed American response to Lange has long stayed with those of us who saw it close up. It was an ugly exercise of American self-interest.
Its offence lingers with a generation, I suspect.
Diplomatic etiquette these days urges us to put aside that period and instead politely talk of the rewarming of the New Zealand-US relationship that has come to pass under President George W. Bush and Condoleezza Rice. What would amount to a free-trade pact with the United States is said to be in the offing, the generals are talking again.
New Zealand treads carefully with the Americans, quietly hopeful for the presidential waiver that may some day lift the US-imposed, Lange-provoked suspension of defence exercises.
Much of the above of this would be lost on today's middle America and, one suspects, on much of the US Congress in their desperate efforts to bail out the nation's investment houses and banks - or face the unthinkable: a collapse of its economic system.
Understandably, the American media - also fixated with their own presidential election - have all but ignored New Zealand's election. I have seen but one piece of any length - a grumpy lament for the abortion issue to enter the New Zealand campaign. That is unsurprising in this strangely insular nation and understandable at a time when most Americans are chilled by the sudden collapse of their leading financial institutions and fearful for the effects on their jobs and the value of their homes.
Amid such uncertain times, one thing seems clear. No matter who wins the United States election, New Zealand's new Government will be dealing with a very different America - one that is likely to be even more insular and focused on its own economic preservation.
The faith of the American people in the market economy has been shaken. So, too, their commitment to globalisation.
It's never been difficult to envisage that Barack Obama as a Democratic President would narrow the shutters and show his protectionist bent to countries like New Zealand which rely massively on access to the American market.
John McCain always seemed a better bet for Wellington. Until now.
The protectionists are on the loose. Self-interest is avowedly back.
Meantime I shall keep pram spotting in New York - and hope the numbers somehow keep going New Zealand's way.
* Bernard Lagan is a former New Zealand political journalist. He lives in New York.
