Two men. One difficult choice

November 2, 2004
US President George W. Bush (R) and Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry during their final televised debate

Photo: Robyn Beck

George Bush versus John Kerry. Just how will the American people decide who will lead them, and the free world? Bill Bryson makes his prediction.

I've been thinking a lot lately about that mysterious bulge in George Bush's jacket. Not because I find it upsetting - personally, I am pleased to see him getting all the help with his thinking he can - but because it was the only occurrence in the campaign that was actually kind of diverting.

The problem is that American elections go on for far too long, of course. The parts of the process that at one point provided a certain moderate level of entertainment - the President's unequal war with the English language, the zany and half-baked excesses of the Department of Homeland Security, the inexhaustible bitterness of right-wing commentators - have by this time become mostly just irritating, except when they are actively disturbing.

So the idea that President Bush might have been wired for assistance has a kind of endearing charm. With the best will in the world - and, of course, I am not offering anything as generous as that here - you have to concede that a radio transmitter would explain a great deal, not least Mr Bush's interesting tendency to order himself to pipe down at odd moments in the debates. Days before any thought of wireless nefariousness entered my head, I remember being struck that Mr Bush referred to the Italian Prime Minister as "Sylvia Burrus", and then a minute or two later, when the name was no longer conspicuously germane, blurted out "Silvio Berlusconi!" as if it had just miraculously come to him. Which, as we now know, it may well have.

What is interesting in this is not how swiftly the story faded from the nation's attention - news is really just a series of nano-events these days - but how little effect it had in its brief spell of lively consideration. Mr Bush, I'm told, could have walked up to the lectern with television rabbit ears strapped to his head and it would have made little difference to how most Americans perceive him. Those who dislike and distrust him do so maximally already, while those who adore him are equally unwavering in their devotions.

Roughly half the electorate this week - and very possibly more than half - will be voting against Bush.

For those of us who are not on the adoring end of the equation, the question that naturally springs to mind is: what would it take to get people not to want to vote for him? One quality that doesn't seem to factor in as it once did - and I am sorry to bring it up because it is an awfully touchy subject - is the matter of presidential intelligence.

Consider an interesting historical parallel. In 1976, while wooing Mexican-American voters, President Gerald Ford was presented with a large, freshly made tamale to pose with. The tamale was wrapped, in the traditional manner, in a corn husk to keep it warm. Unfortunately for his reputation, Mr Ford proceeded to try to eat the whole thing, fibrous husk and all. This was roughly equivalent to sitting down to lunch in a diner and trying to eat the placemat. He looked so foolish that millions of people decided not to vote for him, and instead we got four years of Jimmy Carter and his very odd family, which was a national sacrifice, to be sure.

Now cast your mind forward 28 years to August 2004. While campaigning in Iowa, and sensing a photo opportunity, Mr Bush stopped his motorcade and bounded over to a vegetable stand, bought an ear of corn and, as cameras excitedly clicked, proceeded to try to eat it raw, discovering in the process what all other grown people know already - that eating raw corn is like eating raw wheat or raw rice, which is to say not remotely satisfactory.

In the same week, while fishing, President Bush tossed his dog a live fish to torment to death on the lawn. I hesitate to show disrespect for the President because, as the radio talk show people constantly remind us, criticising the President (or any of his actions or the actions of anyone who has a gun or wears an American flag on his lapel, or such a person's mother) gives comfort to the enemy, so I'll just say very quietly that both of these incidents made him look just a little bit not-too-smart. Yet neither action, as far as can be told, affected Mr Bush's standing with the electorate even a trifle.

Just as Mr Bush seems constitutionally unable to dismay his supporters, so Senator Kerry has seemed throughout the campaign constitutionally unable to galvanise his. The only thing rarer than someone who feelingly supports John Kerry is, it has to be said, someone who understands what his policies are. It is hardly a novel observation to note that roughly half the electorate this week - and very possibly more than half - will be voting not for Kerry but against Bush.

On the face of it, the President would seem to have the lead in accumulated negatives. The economy is not terribly rosy. The budget surplus of $200 billion that he inherited four years ago has become a projected deficit this year of $US422 billion ($A564 billion) and is heading for aggregated arrears of $2.3 trillion by decade's end. More than a million jobs have been lost in the same period. The rebuilding of Iraq is such a mess that even many conservative commentators - George Will and Tucker Carlson notably - have become outspoken in their criticism of the Administration's foreign policy. America has achieved, under Bush's command, the extraordinary distinction of not only failing to find the weapons it sought, but then losing 340,000 kilograms of those it did find.

The President's approval rating is stuck below 50 per cent, which is hardly a ringing endorsement. He can't even be said to be a hard worker. Extraordinarily, considering all that was going on, Mr Bush spent 98 days at his ranch last year. This compares with the 19 days of annual vacation that President Clinton averaged in his two terms (though comparisons are perhaps unfair as we now know that Clinton took much of his relaxation in the Oval Office) or the 41 days per year that President Reagan averaged - which, it should be noted, includes recovery time he had to take after being shot. Mr Bush, in short, would seem to have an abundance of vulnerabilities.

Yet it is John Kerry who has spent most of the campaign on the defensive. The consensus view seems to be that he has excellent hair and a good presidential manner - and these things count for more than we might comfortably suppose - but that these are offset by the more mixed signals that emanate from his patrician bearing and slight air of unconquerable aloofness. Specifically, Senator Kerry is smart but not endearingly self-deprecating. He doesn't seem wholly at ease with strangers. He is proficient in French - a language spoken, notoriously, by men who sometimes kiss each other on the cheeks and make faithless allies. He's married to a woman of independent wealth and mind who looks as if she would have to ask a servant where the brooms in her house are kept. When he puts on a hunting jacket or fishing gear, it always looks as if it has come straight out of the packaging. You kind of suspect he doesn't own a single old hat.

George Bush is unquestionably the winner in the regular guy department. Like all successful presidents, he is effortlessly comfortable with ordinary people and wholly unashamed to be folksy, and there is no question that he inspires trust among millions. His wife is adored universally. It's really only his daughters (who look, as one observer acutely observed, like the sort of young women you would expect to see jumping out of a cake at a bachelor party) that seem a little sketchy, as I believe the younger people say, but they have been kept mostly in the background throughout the campaign.

On the basis of trust factor alone, I think Bush has probably got the edge.

Still, this being America, anything is possible. This is a country, never forget, where 11 per cent of young adults can't locate the Pacific Ocean on a map, where nearly half of all adults and a quarter of university graduates believe that the Earth was created in seven days, by God, some time in the past 10,000 years, and where 20 per cent of adults evidently believe that Saddam Hussein not only had weapons of mass destruction but used them on us. It is often remarked how worrying it is that half the people in America don't bother to vote. I think I should find it rather more worrying if they did.

In any case, however accurately pollsters track voter preferences, the critical factors are how many people actually turn out on election day and where the turning out is done. The US presidential election is not really a popularity contest at all, of course. It's about winning the right states and collecting the requisite number of electoral votes. Al Gore, as I am sure you will have been reminded many times already, received more votes in 2000 than any other candidate in history except Ronald Reagan, and still didn't become president.

Almost certainly the most unnerving fact of all is that some 5 per cent of voters make their minds up on election day itself. They just see how they feel when they get out of bed in the morning. It is these decisive souls who will determine who leads the free world for the next four years.

The other thing to bear in mind is that the presidential election is only a small part of a much larger total. Thousands of offices of all types - governors, sheriffs, county road supervisors, municipal judges, dog catchers and much else besides - will be decided in state, county and local races all over the country.

The one that I will be watching out for most keenly is the race for property-value assessor, reported in the Atlantic Monthly, in an unnamed county in Kentucky, in which one candidate has been running ads claiming that her opponent has been arrested nearly five dozen times on charges of assault, including once for biting a man's ear off. The accused has responded by charging that the incumbent once appeared in a pornographic video.

Understandably, that one's too close to call.