“The car of a double-murderer in North Charleston was found in Rivers Avenue…” said the news, amidst the campaign pieces and the chronic constipation ads (“do not use if pregnant, as Amitiza may harm the foetus”) and ran on for a while before I realised that the damn thing had happened four blocks from the damn motel.

Having established the Crikey American affairs desk on what turns out to be Charleston’s murder stretch – the nearby Exxon servo was in lockdown when I wandered out for a root beer and Reese’s Pieces, with two vans saying “forensic” on the side, for an entirely separate incident – your correspondent has been cowering, erm, monitoring the Republican-only Michigan primary courtesy of cable, ahead of the split South Carolina showdown this week and next.

You would be hard-pressed to find two more representative southern and northern states than SC and Michigan – the former the great plantation state that basically declined from 1865 onwards, the latter a one-time industrial powerhouse that saw not only some of the most ferocious US labour battles of the 20th century, but also, at the town on Port Huron, the kickstart of the US New Left. Now it’s a state with rust on its rustbelt – officially a 7.5% unemployment rate, more likely around 12-14%, and soon to get worse as the 2006 Ford layoffs (50% of their workforce) register for unemployment – and thus a surging, angry working class, right?

Wrong, as you may have guessed. In fact the Republicans have a depressing deal of support there, out of the usual appeal to bootstraps and self-determination, in rhetoric that does not even to pretend to make sense. Michigan boy, Mitt Romney, fighting for his life in the state, began a speech by saying that he had seen a “lot of people driving American cars here, which is how it should be” (hooting and applause).

The man of course has backed every free trade agreement the Republicans have put on the table, and the sum total of his arguments for reviving the US auto industry is that “government had held it back”. In the week that India announced a $A2000 car, the argument doesn’t begin to make sense – but there is nothing else for a “conservative” to say.

More and more it becomes difficult to see what the point of Mitt Romney is. He is a desperately uninspiring speaker, he has no distinctive set of beliefs or policies, and he gives every appearance of simply sleepwalking through the campaign. Compared to McCain’s extreme bio, Romney’s public admin career marks him off as a colourless apparatchik. If he loses Michigan, he may stay in but he’ll be a walking corpse. And the Republican leadership will be hoping that he goes down, leaving McCain’s the mainstream candidate against the crazies.

South Carolina, meanwhile, seems to be carrying on in evangelical mode. Michelle Obama was on a whirlwind tour through here today, appearing mainly in churches, and the language was mostly about Barack’s girlfriend – Hope.

Yet most of the people here would benefit less from grand strategies of change than from things being slightly less worse, in terms of healthcare, public services, etc. Will things get more concrete as the primary moves closer? I promise to soon venture outside to find out.