What is actually happening in America?
The problem is really quite simple. Kerry has, by any measurement save that of the unreasoning haters of The American Spectator and such-like, clearly won the three debates. Edwards has, by all accounts, crushed Cheney in their confrontation. True, they have hit below the belt by involving Mary Cheney and refusing to apologize, which seems to have caused a certain amount of disgust among the public; but on the other hand, what about the debacle of the all too visible wire under Mr.Bush's jacket? (If he loses this election, he can blame his excellent taste in tailors; a less well cut jacket might not have shown the intrusive item so clearly.) The country is in an undeniable slump, and job losses have actually been increasing as the election approached; and every morning newspaper brings Americans more evidence of their government's unpopularity among those who should be its allies, and of the dragging, gruesome low-level war that gripped American armed forces like a nightmare. In short, it is not easy to imagine why the challenger is not at least ten percentage points ahead of the incumbent. He ought to have it as easy as Roosevelt against Hoover, or Carter against Ford, or Reagan against Carter.
What seems clear to me is that the four debates have not materially affected the position of the candidates. To be precise: after each debate, most polls seemed to show a certain sway, rather than swing, to Kerry - which, however, quickly vanished after a couple of days, leaving, each time, the candidates neck and neck. And what this says to me is that the electors are not making up their minds, this time, primarily on what they see of the candidates' individuality and character. It may be that decades of ever-sharpening spin techniques have been seen through by the electorate; that debates are seen as artificial, manipulated events, and immediately discarded. But I doubt it. Even such lack of interest in the performance would not explain the fact that the abject revelation of Bush's wire seems to have made no difference to his prospective voters: this is the kind of ridiculous, yet significant discovery that can lose a candidate and a party their election.
In other words, the electors are making up their minds for reasons other than the personality of their candidates. And, in particular, those who vote Bush are unperturbed by the idea that their candidate might turn out to be a wire-suggested glove puppet. I find this extraordinarily significant. The instinct of the American public has always been for character over ideology and even over intellect. They voted the intellectually modest, but trustworthy and reliable, Dwight Eisenhower, over the brilliant Adlai Stevenson. They want to be sure that the man in the White House is a leader, capable of holding on in a crisis, his own man, trustworthy, and not a liar. They know that their president has huge powers and responsibilities, and the first thing they want to know is that he can be trusted with them. The suggestion-wire affair ought to have destroyed Bush. It didn't. What is going on in America?
The only possible answer is that the electorate, and especially the Bush voters, are thinking of the vote as being about something else than about the candidate's own character. We must take this seriously as an election about ideology and political position. This, too, explains why there has been, from the beginning, very little shift in the overall position: the electorate had already made up its mind independently of whether they thought much of Bush or Kerry, Cheney or Edwards. This is an election about issues - the kind of thing politicans always profess to desire (ho ho).
This being the case, there are a couple of factors that tell for Bush, and which most commentators don't seem to have noticed. To begin with, if I were Kerry, or Kerry's campaign manager, I would slip quietly across the border, go see the Canadian Prime Minister, and beg him, go down on my knees and beg him, to stop all the activity to do with "gay marriage" and other similarly controversial subjects until one day after the election. Surely Canada's government and judges are among Bush's biggest electors. At a time when "activist judges" are the bugbear of the average US conservative, Canandian left-wingers have been using the judiciary, rather than the ordinary process of lawmaking, to legalize "gay marriage". With every sentence and every news on this process, the fears of American conservatives must have been sharpening: "If Kerry wins, that will be us".
Second, there is the position of the most neglected and ignored minority in America: Vietnam veterans. These are men who have borne a grudge for thirty years, and who feel that mainstream America ignores or even despises their sacrifices. You meet them in chatrooms on the Internet, still angry at what they had to suffer and at how they were treated. To these men, the selection of John Kerry of all people as a candidate must have unimaginably insensitive; as well select Jane Fonda. I am not making this up. We know about the anti-Kerry campaign of many of his fellow Swift boat veterans; the media have mostly been trying to find out to what extent these men have been paid by Republican money, but surely what is significant is that dozens of Kerry's former comrades have made up their mind to do what they could to destroy him as a candidate. Many of the Swift veterans, if you watch their ad (as I did, on their website) complain not about his personal behaviour in battle (though some do), but about his testimony to the Senate. Thirty years ago, the young Kerry testified under oath to a Senate commission that American forces in Vietnam were routinely guilty of unspecified atrocities. That was how the young officer first rose to national notoriety, the springboard for his political career. His former comrades feel certain that he lied to promote himself. To this day, it seems, they feel bitter about him. And let us not forget that they are a handful out of hundreds of thousands. The Vietnam war was the last American war fought by a conscript army.
One final remark is worth making. Both sides are making unprecedented efforts to register electors. Probably hundreds of thousands, possibly millions, of new electors are joining the registers. And this means that all the polls so far, carried out on the base of the previous situation, risk being completely off-the-wall. With this variant in the electoral body, it becomes almost impossible to tell what the electorate really thinks and what it will do.
What seems clear to me is that the four debates have not materially affected the position of the candidates. To be precise: after each debate, most polls seemed to show a certain sway, rather than swing, to Kerry - which, however, quickly vanished after a couple of days, leaving, each time, the candidates neck and neck. And what this says to me is that the electors are not making up their minds, this time, primarily on what they see of the candidates' individuality and character. It may be that decades of ever-sharpening spin techniques have been seen through by the electorate; that debates are seen as artificial, manipulated events, and immediately discarded. But I doubt it. Even such lack of interest in the performance would not explain the fact that the abject revelation of Bush's wire seems to have made no difference to his prospective voters: this is the kind of ridiculous, yet significant discovery that can lose a candidate and a party their election.
In other words, the electors are making up their minds for reasons other than the personality of their candidates. And, in particular, those who vote Bush are unperturbed by the idea that their candidate might turn out to be a wire-suggested glove puppet. I find this extraordinarily significant. The instinct of the American public has always been for character over ideology and even over intellect. They voted the intellectually modest, but trustworthy and reliable, Dwight Eisenhower, over the brilliant Adlai Stevenson. They want to be sure that the man in the White House is a leader, capable of holding on in a crisis, his own man, trustworthy, and not a liar. They know that their president has huge powers and responsibilities, and the first thing they want to know is that he can be trusted with them. The suggestion-wire affair ought to have destroyed Bush. It didn't. What is going on in America?
The only possible answer is that the electorate, and especially the Bush voters, are thinking of the vote as being about something else than about the candidate's own character. We must take this seriously as an election about ideology and political position. This, too, explains why there has been, from the beginning, very little shift in the overall position: the electorate had already made up its mind independently of whether they thought much of Bush or Kerry, Cheney or Edwards. This is an election about issues - the kind of thing politicans always profess to desire (ho ho).
This being the case, there are a couple of factors that tell for Bush, and which most commentators don't seem to have noticed. To begin with, if I were Kerry, or Kerry's campaign manager, I would slip quietly across the border, go see the Canadian Prime Minister, and beg him, go down on my knees and beg him, to stop all the activity to do with "gay marriage" and other similarly controversial subjects until one day after the election. Surely Canada's government and judges are among Bush's biggest electors. At a time when "activist judges" are the bugbear of the average US conservative, Canandian left-wingers have been using the judiciary, rather than the ordinary process of lawmaking, to legalize "gay marriage". With every sentence and every news on this process, the fears of American conservatives must have been sharpening: "If Kerry wins, that will be us".
Second, there is the position of the most neglected and ignored minority in America: Vietnam veterans. These are men who have borne a grudge for thirty years, and who feel that mainstream America ignores or even despises their sacrifices. You meet them in chatrooms on the Internet, still angry at what they had to suffer and at how they were treated. To these men, the selection of John Kerry of all people as a candidate must have unimaginably insensitive; as well select Jane Fonda. I am not making this up. We know about the anti-Kerry campaign of many of his fellow Swift boat veterans; the media have mostly been trying to find out to what extent these men have been paid by Republican money, but surely what is significant is that dozens of Kerry's former comrades have made up their mind to do what they could to destroy him as a candidate. Many of the Swift veterans, if you watch their ad (as I did, on their website) complain not about his personal behaviour in battle (though some do), but about his testimony to the Senate. Thirty years ago, the young Kerry testified under oath to a Senate commission that American forces in Vietnam were routinely guilty of unspecified atrocities. That was how the young officer first rose to national notoriety, the springboard for his political career. His former comrades feel certain that he lied to promote himself. To this day, it seems, they feel bitter about him. And let us not forget that they are a handful out of hundreds of thousands. The Vietnam war was the last American war fought by a conscript army.
One final remark is worth making. Both sides are making unprecedented efforts to register electors. Probably hundreds of thousands, possibly millions, of new electors are joining the registers. And this means that all the polls so far, carried out on the base of the previous situation, risk being completely off-the-wall. With this variant in the electoral body, it becomes almost impossible to tell what the electorate really thinks and what it will do.