A reluctance to report on American politics may leave us surprised at the result of 2012's election, argues Joe Pilkington.

A year from now, the chaos will be over. Short of a judicial nightmare akin to post-election 2000, there will be a new President-elect of the United States. The smart money remains on that person being the sitting President, but Barack Obama cannot escape the dire economic numbers which are not in his favour at present.

What is so curious about this election cycle is that we are only weeks away from the Iowa Caucuses, yet very little of the Republican primary contest has filtered through to news media outside the United States. This is perhaps refreshing given the wall-to-wall coverage we experienced in the 22 months following Barack Obama’s announcement of his candidacy in Springfield, Illinois in 2007. What are the reasons for this absence of updates on the perennial political merry-go-round from across the Atlantic?

Perhaps we have enough news of our own to contend with. This is not necessarily surprising; the American media has led the way in this regard, tending to report only on stories on home ground. Visit the pages of any of the major American publications and the weighting of Herman Cain’s latest blunder in favour of Italy’s teetering on the precipice of economic disaster is a little eye-watering. One could argue that our attention is best directed to European and British economic growth being feeble or non-existent. The American media’s heavy focus on domestic stories to the exclusion of international affairs is perhaps also mirrored rather embarrassingly by the British thirst for tabloid-esque stories. The News International scandal continues to dominate the papers, and given the British people’s thirst for gossip, Jeremy Clarkson’s super-injunction soap opera will currently relegate Rick Perry’s gaffes to the middle pages of the broadsheets.

Perhaps the British press see very little chance of a Republican nominee winning a general election. If the GOP is doomed anyway ("surely the Americans won’t be voting for a Santorum/Cain/Gingrich/Bachmann...", we hear them say) then why spend time watching and covering the crap-shoot popularity contest of a floundering party? This is a naivety the press this side of the Atlantic should not entertain.

By the example of Congressional leaders and the many of the presidential nominees, the Republican Party in the United States does indeed appear to be in the grip of an evangelical social conservatism that has many Europeans fearing the onset of a theocracy awaiting the Second Coming. Their successes in the recent past, however, cannot be overlooked. The GOP remains a legitimate competitor (just look at many predictions for the Congressional elections next year) and its ability to get out the vote among its base is not so offset by Democrat-leaning independents as one might imagine.

Editors of British newspapers know all of this. This does not adequately explain the absence of coverage of a contest that usually entertains a British populace used to unpredictable elections and short, occasionally ineffective and frequently dull campaigns.

Perhaps, then, we should be worried. Perhaps Europeans invested too many hopes in the Obama campaign machine and are not yet ready to accept the all-too-possible chance that double-digit unemployment will mark the end of a presidency that many saw as a return by America to a political, almost ‘Clintonian’ sanity that we had become accustomed to in the 1990s. Maybe there is a chance that someone as socially dangerous as Michele Bachmann or as painfully hypocritical as Mitt Romney may be able to harvest 270 electoral votes from a weary, unemployed population.

For many Europeans, America remains a popular nation. The Bush years are now regarded as an unfortunate anomaly; the ‘noughties’ were a decade where it became uncouth to admire or support America in Europe. For many, Barack Obama marked a return to normalcy in transatlantic attitudes.

Perhaps 2012, and the current crop of GOP nominees, indicate that our hopes of a resumption of normality were themselves anomalous.