Anthony J. Badger
Special to CNN

Students here in Cambridge watched in horror in September 2005 as they saw lines of desperate people snaked round the convention center and the Superdome in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina.

In the past couple of months, they watched with admiration the lines outside polling stations both on Election Day and in the early voting states. They found it difficult to imagine that voters in Britain would be prepared to queue for hours to vote.

No American election in recent history has aroused such interest in Britain among old and young alike. Partly, this is the result of the compelling drama of the long drawn-out primary battles, partly the result of the feeling that, whichever candidate was elected, there would be an end to the "arrogant unilateralism" (Robert McNamara's phrase in Cambridge in 2002) of U.S. foreign policy.

Partly, of course, it was the powerful narrative of an African-American running for the White House. Each August I teach 35 American high school teachers about the civil rights movement for the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History in the far-removed historic buildings of Clare College. This year they reported their students were unprecedentedly enthusiastic about both Barack Obama and the political process.

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