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COMMENTARY
September 29, 2004
The debates
Anything can happen in election debates and I can understand how frontrunners would rather sit on a lead than risk the bad hair day that changes history. The pressure on the challenger is more constructive: he will do or he will die. From his view risk looks good and should the final nail be hammered in his coffin it was nevertheless a coffin that was closed. We have three debates coming up in the States between President George W. Bush and Senator John F. Kerry the first tomorrow. From the fact Bush aced Gore in their exchanges four years ago and Mr. Kerry is no match for the debater Mr. Gore was before he lost his marbles (his recent public statements have been incoherent rants) it does not follow that Mr. Bush will land knockout blows this time around. Mr. Kerry has the strength corresponding to his weakness: like our own former prime minister Jean Chretien he is impossible to pin down. But it's deeper than that. Not since Carter v. Reagan has a U.S. presidential election offered so stark a choice if then. The two sides have shifted farther apart and the views of Jimmy Carter himself illustrate the progressive evacuation of common ground. Mr. Bush enters in the stronger incumbent position and is by far the stronger presence; Mr. Kerry has made a mess of his campaign. But "Anti-Bush" is as powerful a candidate as Bush himself and creates a base below which it seems Mr. Kerry cannot slip in the polls no matter how he flounders. My sense continues to be that the candidates are competing for a small swing vote which is already mostly in Mr. Bush's column and so his to lose. It has been said the U.S. electorate is polarized because it is. It appeared the two candidates were stuck in a statistical tie that could not be broken; but in August Mr. Bush opened a lead of 5 to 10 points that also does not budge. I think this is because that swing vote swung around the time of the Republican convention; but swung about as far as it could swing. In the slightly retouched words of my chief Texas correspondent who was not being entirely facetious There are too many Democrats on the left who would rather have their heads sawed off by a Jihadi than admit they've been wrong about everything. And my own sense is that more than a third of the U.S. electorate would vote Kerry against Bush even if during the debates Mr. Kerry's eyes light up green and his head starts rotating. This alas has become the "Democrat base". A very telling glimpse of that base is provided by internal blogs and intra-party polls. From these latter we learn that just over half of Democrats blame the U.S. itself -- not the terrorist perpetrators -- for the events of Sept. 11th 2001; and the frankly paranoid ideas encapsulated in the slogans "Bush knew!" and "Bush lied!" have become common currency. The party of F.D. Roosevelt is degenerating into the party of Michael Moore. The Republican base is likewise credal. It shows in polls (such as George Barna's) that look at the religious affiliations of prospective voters. Among evangelicals and "born-agains" Mr. Bush enjoys as much as 90 per cent support lower but still overwhelming among the less evangelical. But regular church-goers of all denominations support Bush by wide margins; Kerry begins to prevail only among "notional" Christians -- i.e. those who don't attend church or don't relate to Christ personally. Among those who count themselves "atheists" and "agnostics" Mr. Kerry has overwhelming support. The swing vote here is Catholic almost one-quarter of the U.S. population and traditionally strongly Democrat. In the last several months polls have shown the Catholic vote swinging dramatically from Kerry to Bush who now leads it in the proportion 3:2. Most sudden changes are tenuous: the Democrats might still prevail by winning that back. But don't ask me how. Surprisingly the much smaller traditionally Democrat Jewish vote has not yet fled from Kerry to Bush though the Muslim vote is shifting modestly from Bush to Kerry. But no anomalies here: regular synagogue or mosque attendance is in both cases an indicator for Bush; secularity an indicator for Kerry. The reader would be right to read into this grand seismic events. The U.S. public is splitting along religious lines not between one confession and another but more vastly between the religious faithful and the rest. Messrs. Bush and Kerry have largely without intending become surrogates in a battle between alternative Americas and for each side in the coming election almost everything is at stake. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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