In Louisiana, an agricultural state in the south of the United States, far from the educated, affluent Northeast, people talk about politics with gritty scepticism. A world away from the rallies, the conferences, the fine-pointed discussions in New York, they tell you to cut the crap and get a look around.

“They’re all crooks,” said a Louisiana-born chef, leaning outside his New Orleans restaurant on a cigarette break. I had tried to draw him into a conversation on which local politicians he favoured. “Who’s really there to support?” he shrugged, rattling off six names of Louisiana politicians and city officials who had been charged with corruption in the past few weeks.

That day the local paper, The Times-Picayune, had an expose on the mayor of Mandeville awarding public contracts to his relatives. Over the years, local mayors, Congressmen, Senators, Republican and Democrat both, have been convicted on various charges of bribery, racketeering, and extortion. Even after Hurricane Katrina struck, what insufficient funds New Orleans managed to get for reconstruction were often misused.

In Louisiana, politics can be dynastic with sons, daughters, and brothers succeeding and exchanging positions with one another. And most Democrats here are moderates — pro-gun, anti corporate-tax raises, pro-Iraq spending, and pro national security extensions — often clashing with other Democrats at the centre. Louisiana is the kind of place where Barrack Obama’s soaring calls for ‘Hope,’ and ‘Change,’ and introspection ring flat.

At a local “meet-the-neighbours” gathering in a neighbourhood bar my first evening in New Orleans, I met a boisterous middle-aged woman who said she couldn’t vote for Obama because he was too inexperienced. “He’s never had a real job!” she screamed. McCain, on the other hand, was tough and capable. “When McCain was captured in Vietnam and put in a cage by the Viet-Cong,” she growled, punching the air, “he didn’t give up, he said “screw you” to them, and fought his way out.” Someone else at the bar murmured that McCain had, at least, taken a stand against Saddam Hussein. Other people voiced vague fears of “China and other countries” and said McCain would be most likely to know what to do.

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