America on the road to perdition

James Doran drives from Wall Street to Detroit to discover how the American Dream turned into a nightmare

Angie Suarez, manager of the nearby Hunter’s Lodge Motel, paints an equally bleak picture. ‘Things are much slower this year than last,’ she says. ‘We don’t normally have vacancies in hunting season.’

All of these businesses around Buttzville fit the archetype of small-town American commerce. The hotdog shack, the country store and the roadhouse are essential parts of the American way of life. But it is doubtful many of them will survive the current downturn.

Driving up into the Pocono Mountains in Pennsylvania, the signs on the lawns turn from Obama to McCain and the car radio offers little but country music and old men reading from the bible. We pass Scranton, the birthplace of Democratic vice-presidential candidate Joe Biden, and drive on towards Allentown and the Lehigh Valley, once the crucible of America’s industrial revolution. The air here was once thick with the smoke of steel mills that employed thousands of men. They forged the girders to make the Empire State Building and the Golden Gate Bridge and the railroad tracks that opened up the West.

Today there are few industrial jobs in The Valley. The famous Bethlehem Steel plant is being turned into a giant museum. Prospects for an economic revival were bleak even before the downturn. As we speed westward, we learn from the radio news that Pennsylvania is so important to the outcome of the general election that Barack Obama, Joe Biden, John McCain and Sarah Palin will all be visiting various towns in the state in the coming days. Millions of disaffected, mainly white, mainly blue-collar voters are the richest prize of this election.