We sneer at America at our peril

America may be a laughing stock at the moment but, says MICHAEL ELLIOTT, we should remember that it is the most successful and powerful democracy in history - and that much of the world depends on it staying so

AS the extraordinary events since the Presidential election last week have unfolded, my mind has kept skipping back to the distinguished Washington correspondent of a British newspaper who, 15 years ago or so, lost his Maryland driver's licence. After a day in the hell of the Gaithersburg drivers' and vehicle-licence centre, our hero (or so he told us later) advanced menacingly on one of the oafish clerks and hissed: "If what has happened to me today had happened in the Soviet Union, Ronald Reagan would have given a f****** speech about it."

In short, this train wreck has been a long time coming.

For many of us who live in the United States, the only surprise about the farce in Florida is that it hasn't happened before. Contrary to popular myth (inside and outside the country), the US is not a smoothly oiled machine. In fact, many of its public services are tangled in the sort of bureaucratic red tape that would make a Frenchman turn white. To some extent (and this is particularly true of the Presidential election process) the culprit is federalism, a system of government with much to recommend it for a nation that spans a continent, but which inevitably spawns overlapping jurisdictions and inconsistent laws, all of which attract money- grubbing lawyers like bees to a honeypot. The miserable consequences are now on full display.

Putting the laughably awful bureaucracy aside, the larger question about the election is this: does it matter? It seems somewhat indecent to suggest that the identity of the next President is a second-order matter, and, obviously, for some groups of Americans (like gun-owners, or partisans of the abortion debate) whether George W Bush or Al Gore is inaugurated in January is something of the first importance. But in the grand sweep of things, the Presidency is not what it was.

THE modern presidency was the creation of 60 years of overlapping crises that commenced with the stockmarket crash of 1929 and ended with the fall of the Berlin Wall. That period saw an economic catastrophe, wars both hot and cold; and an elemental struggle to grant African-Americans the basic democratic rights to which they were entitled. Each of those crises demanded a strong president able to stand for "national" values, either against the states or against an external enemy.

But that world died in 1989; America today is a prosperous country at peace with itself and others. The "political" issues that truly engage Americans - like education - are matters for state and local government.

America today is much as it was in the decades after the Civil War, when the driving force of the nation was not Washington (how many presidents can you name between Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt?) but the private sector of the economy.

You don't have to love everything about American capitalism to admit that the energy and exuberance of that private sector today is astonishing. This column is being written in San Francisco, a city whose flagship high-technology industry has supposedly taken a beating from the market "corrections" in April and October.

Yeah, right. Sure, offices in the streets south of Market, where some of the dottier dotcoms once hung their shingle, have more vacancies than they did a year ago.

But at any party in town you can still find 10 fresh ideas on how the internet is going to change the world, still find people for whom failure in one business is nothing more than a spur to get on and start the next one.

I spent part of this afternoon in the offices of a classic startup, one year old, a mess of cubicles, computers and coffee cups and, of course, with less money to play with than its young workers thought they would have six months ago. The mood? Success will take a little longer and more hard work than once imagined, but it will come. Of course, Washington has a role in the success of the high- technology sector, whatever some of the libertarians in Silicon Valley like to say. It is Washington that sets the vital rules and standards on privacy, e-commerce and intellectual property. But those are all matters of good administration; they have nothing to do with the elemental struggles of politics that once defined the presidency.

ALL that said, there is one sense, and an important one, in which the aftermath of the election really does matter.

The Florida election is one of those moments - rather like the Challenger disaster of 1986 - when Uncle Sam seems to have rather a lot in common with the Wizard of Oz, quaking behind the curtain. We are all susceptible to a touch of Schadenfreude, and the scale and reach - and, at times, arrogance - of American power since 1989 has been such that we may forgive some of those who now choose to gloat.

But only for a while. It's an ugly phrase, but in a still dangerous world, the United States really is the indispensable nation, with resources of all kinds - military, economic and political - on which millions depend for a degree of security. Yes, Washington was late to understand what was happening in the Balkans throughout the 1990s, but without eventual American intervention the wars there would have been longer and bloodier. It was the strength of the American economy that put Mexico back on its feet in 1995 and which ensured that the Asian financial crisis was far less damaging to the lives of millions than once seemed likely. An America that disengaged from challenges such as those would, in time, be an America with whose nature we were far from comfortable. Something rather like that happened after the Challenger tragedy, when for a few years the United States was introspective, lacked confidence and flirted with economic protectionism.

The lesson? You may think (as I do) that what's happening in Florida is richly comic. But a world that laughs at the United States is, in tiny increments, a world that each day becomes a more dangerous place.

I just wish we had a hassle-free way of getting a new driver's licence.

P Michael Elliott is a former European editor of Newsweek and now editor-in-chief of eCountries.com

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