KEY POINTS:
Has anyone ever considered that if you mushed together the red and blue states of America, you'd get purple? Purple like a bruise, if I believe this election's army of spinsters. Or like "purple mountain's majesty" sung in America The Beautiful, if I'd rather see my birth country
from the lofty ether of Lake Woebegon's airwaves, our purer fictional alter-ego.
America's better self, the one that still stops to listen to the patter of petition-peddlers in a strip mall, or drives somebody to a polling booth, knows what that colour will look like on the next President. It looks like hope.
Not spin, not stagecraft, not the endless algorithm assessing Hillary's tears or Obama's shade of blackness or Romney's pinstripe Mormonism or McCain's age.
It is the thing you can't read between the lines in the news as an American living abroad, and it's the same thing that people in New Zealand or Denmark or Ireland don't really believe any more - that hat America has the ability to get it right.
For a fistful of years, whenever the conversation staggers into American politics, friends abroad turn on what I've affectionately dubbed 'the constipation face'. We're not a whole lot higher on the political food chain than if you'd tried wearing an 'Apartheid Can Be Fun' badge to deflect the blows.
And who can blame them? What we read about America from abroad is about as enticing as socialite Nicole Richie trying to solve a national Sudoku.
Is it best to have the Woman versus the Mormon, or the Black versus the Veteran, with two Southerners thrown in to make it all add up?
It's all peachy fine analysis, but the endless spin is always dressed in air quotes. Any semblance of political passion gets sucked out of the equation, like serving up already chewed dessert.
The day after Iowans scraped the ice off their eyebrows to get to their nearest hermetically sealed town hall as the first to tell us who they wanted as president, I waited to pay for my newspaper on the flipside of the planet, in a tiny beachside shop in the Coromandel, slathered in summer sunscreen and expectation.
Finally, an answer to the first Midwestern political pregnancy test, after far too many months of bad foreplay. The headline read like a surprise good report card, "Obama win breaks US race barrier". Corn-fed, white Iowa farmers wanted a black man, by a wide margin.
"See that headline?" I turned to the unsuspecting Kiwi in the line behind me, "That is one of the best headlines I've seen in a long time."
If nothing else, out of three strong Democratic candidates, I needed a marker of clarity to point the way out of Bush-ageddon. It was a definitive start.
Hearing my accent, he smiled. "But won't they shoot him before he ever makes it to the presidency?"
Like a balloon collapsing air, I said only, "No, no, no - ", and paid for my news, in more ways than one.
There it was, in all its nakedness, America's real battlefield - a disease much harder to kick than even the race, gender, or religion issues this election keeps stuttering over. It is the deflation of hope; that you-should-know-better reality check when political potential falls back into soundbites instead of sound ideas.
Cynicism is easy; allowing yourself to believe in your country again is slightly embarrassing seven years on, after water boarding and body bags and prisoners stacked naked like a pile of chairs.
It is the price the United States will have to pay for getting it so wrong in the world's eyes for so many years. Does America really see just how high a cost it will have to pay now that its renowned checks and balances never really balanced?
There is a split within America that is far more dangerous than any red or blue banners. It is the difference between these two questions, "Who do you think will win the presidency?" versus the answer that should sit at the tip of every voter's pen, "Who do you wish would win?"
How many Americans have turned their politics into some 'winnable' equation instead of voting for who they want to be right?
That is where fictional Lake Woebegon crashes into America's very real future-strangely, at a tiny little beach shop in a corner of New Zealand.
More than anything, I want the man standing in line behind me to be wrong. And I want the world standing behind him to see it. I want to believe again that America can get it right. I want to believe the candidate who I wish would win, will.
And I want to believe that America sees it that way too, just as clearly as its purple mountain's majesty.
* www.traceybarnett.co.nz
