DATELINE: Houston, Texas

Obama cleaned up in South Carolina last night. Most of the mainstream media’s talking heads will spend the next week prattling on about the significance of the black turn-out, and whether Obama’s success will be replicated in states with smaller African American communities. Please ignore this prattling.

“It’s not about colour, it’s generational” said one of the more sensible pundits on CNN last night, citing the statistics that young voters of all races were once again voting overwhelmingly for the Senator for Illinois. This is what we have been saying since we saw the caucus at the Iowa City Senior Citizens Center overrun by literally hundreds of bright-eyed first-time voters.

The Democratic contest is all about age and guile versus youth, innocence and a bad haircut.

Sandis Sullivan, the 60-something Georgian who was running the poll in Springfield Baptist Church in Greenville, South Carolina, knew it was about age, not race:

“These young people are so much better informed than my generation.” he said happily, gesturing to his Blackberry. “I don’t really know how to use this thing, but the younger generation, they’re always multi-tasking. I see them out in cafes and in the street, and they’re checking the news and e-mailing their friends and socialising all at once. It’s great to see.”

“This election is about the past versus the future” Obama said in his powerful South Carolina victory sermon last night. And do you know what, it is. It’s about the recent past and the near future.

So many of the young people we’ve met, 18-30 year olds everywhere from snowy towns in New Hampshire to the grand cities of the south, display a scepticism of their politicians you’d expect in Communist Russia. Intelligent, worldly people like Patch and Leah in Baltimore are disenfranchised, dispirited, and unenthusiastic about this election. They think every one of the candidates is hiding something, most of them not very far below the surface, and in any case the whole process is bent anyway. They really wish it could be otherwise, and talking about the great Presidents of the past, they seem to feel they ought to tuck in their cynicism and just believe. But they’ve been burned before – worse than that, they’ve been burned ever since the birth of their political consciousness.

There is a whole generation of young people who have reached voting age since the year 2000, and that generation’s formative political experience, their pubescent awakening to the world outside the school playground, the first time they asked their parents what was going on on the news – was a total subversion of logic, justice, and democracy: the stolen election of 2000. George W. Bush and those that legitimised his presidency have aborted the hope of a whole generation of Americans.

Rob, a 26-year old born in Jamaica and raised in NYC, moved to Orlando, Florida when he was 18, with his wife and newborn daughter, arriving in the midst of the scandal. I didn’t envy him starting a family, bringing new life into the world, with the acrid stench of corruption hanging so thickly in the air. In that context, it takes a lot of gumption, it takes almost a blind act of faith to believe in a political system in which the default option seems to be unabashed deception. But Rob’s doing it; he wants Obama as President, and he’s organising for the Obama Florida campaign.

“We are ready to believe again” Obama said in his victory speech, to passionate cheers from all sides. But it’s not about believing again. It’s about whether you can believe for the first time, despite all the evidence to the contrary. So many teenagers and twenty-somethings we’ve met have jumped on the Obama bandwagon and said “take me where you’re going. I don’t care where it is and I don’t care how we get there. Just take me.”

But so many more aren’t just going to offer their hope, no questions asked. People we’ve met like Patch, Leah, Uni, and Meredith reckon they will vote for Obama, if they vote at all, but they aren’t about to offer their heart and soul to his campaign – because they don’t want to give that love just to be betrayed, chastened, and burned like they suspect they will be. Were Obama to win, there is still a multitude of ways they could have their belief sold down the river: by the Democratic party, by the voters, or, most fearsomely of all, by Obama himself. For so many young people, this election relies on whether they feel psychologically ready to take a massive political leap of faith. And if they’re betrayed this time, recovering that faith will be virtually impossible.