The two presidential candidates are locked in a death grip.
The Zogby Poll (my favourite) interviews a thousand people a day the month before the election. It combines the last three days, continually dropping the third day as time progresses. For the last ten days the candidates are in a statistical dead-heat. Whoever wins two of the three states Ohio, Pennsylvania, Florida will almost certainly be the next president. The big three remain too close to call (though Kerry is almost beyond the margin of error in Pennsylvania). For goodness sake, such Democratic strongholds as New Jersey and Michigan and the Republican stronghold of Nevada are still up for grabs!
While Kerry doubtless made up ground by finally linking the debacle in Iraq to wider concerns about the war against terror, his late surge has left him running neckandneck with the president. In the run-up to the vote on Tuesday 2 November, if anyone on your television says either candidate is ahead, know they are lying.
The final day strategies of the two campaigns could not have been more different. In 2000, partly due to information being brought forward about George W Bushs youthful DUI (Driving Under the Influence) conviction, conservative evangelicals did not vote in droves. But over the past four years these social conservatives have become far more comfortable with the president (a real Texan) than they were with his father (a fake Texan from New England). That is why Karl Rove, the political svengali running the Bush campaign, has broken with precedent and moved right in the campaigns final days, and not back to the centre, as conventional American wisdom dictates.
The president has talked about a constitutional ban on gay marriage (not an issue that plays one way or another in my foreign-policy circles). He constantly mentions the naming of justices to the Supreme Court (currently eight of the nine are over 65; whoever is elected will have a real chance to influence American society through the court for years to come). And he plays his polldriven ace the fact that Republicans remain more generally trusted on security issues than Democrats. In other words, he is playing to the base, calculating that there are more potential new votes on the right than in the centre.
Senator Kerry has followed the traditional Democratic position of moving left during the primaries, and right to win the election, trying to win over moderates and undecided voters. The historical pattern is for twothirds of undecided voters to break for the challenger when confronted with the voting booth. Also, there are a greater number than usual of just registered voters these will almost certainly swing toward Kerry.
So Kerry is on message but in a moderate way he is not debating theology about Americas role in the world (that is left to the likes of me), nor is he unduly playing the protectionist card, which would make for good politics and bad policy in this era of globalisation. Rather, he is being reassuring, criticising the president for how Iraq was implemented, not opening up wounds in his party as to whether it should have been invaded in the first place. He is talking about, however fancifully, balancing the budget, so as not to scare moderates, afraid he might be the tax and spend liberal buddy of Ted Kennedy. In the end, the result will hinge as to whether there are more votes in the centre for Senator Kerry, or more votes on the right for the president.
And then comes the real event. As a realist, the outlines of the coming civil war within the Republican party are plain. A Bush victory will leave realists like myself trying to make the case the president won despite, not because of, Iraq. We will urge President Bush to adjust his foreign-policy course, much as President Reagan did so brilliantly in his second remarkable term, which paved the way for the peaceful end to the cold war. Neocons, sensibly enough, will say they kept their nerve and the President should stay the course.
Any post-mortem involving a Bush defeat will again be over Iraq, but will proceed over slightly different ideological terrain. Realists will argue that Iraq, clearly, was the major reason for defeat. The time will have come to return to the roots of the Republican party, suspicious of the utopian, big government centralisation championed by the neocons. The neocons will be left blaming the messenger, saying their idea remains unscathed by Iraq it was the implementation that went awry (the usual sad little argument former communists make to me in Europe about the failure of Marx).
I have little patience with the standard European gripe that American elections lead to results that matter only at the margins. When was the last seminal European vote? Through this election, we Americans are debating things that really matter, both within and between our parties. Our role in the world, our relationship with the rest of the world, what we want to stand for the questions could not be more important.
For despite my abhorrence of neo-conservative philosophy, I remain, after all, very much an American. As Abraham Lincoln, our greatest president, put it, we are the last, best hope of mankind. My generation is defining what this phrase actually means in the post-9/11 era. Let the battle be joined.
