A big blood-red moon manifested itself above the United States last week — the result of a total lunar eclipse. For 82 minutes the entire country from the Grand Coulee Dam to the Capitol was cloaked in a red glow.
I watched this rogue communist moon rise above the East Bay hills in San Francisco and hang over the Transamerica Pyramid — a strange, baleful thing, like one of those expensive grapefruits you can buy in Waitrose.
Meanwhile, on the East Coast, the Boston Red Sox baseball team were defying 86 years of history by winning the World Series. The term “World” in this context — as is so often the case when employed by Americans — is a somewhat limited concept, consisting of the United States, Costa Rica and about 20 people in Japan. Plus, the sport we are talking about is known in Britain as “rounders” and is played exclusively by girls. But still the Americans take it pretty seriously. It was front-page news everywhere.
In any normal country, where the political colours are correctly aligned with a due sense of history, such spooky harbingers on the eve of an election would suggest a victory for the left. But in the United States the left plays in blue, so if it’s a good omen for anyone it’s a good omen for President George W Bush and the Republicans. The red moon, the Red Sox and the latest opinion polls all suggest four more years.
Nobody seems to like John Kerry very much and the almost atavistic dislike of the man seems to have grown, rather than diminished, as polling day draws closer. Even in this most left- leaning of American cities his name is uttered with grave caveats rather than enthusiasm.
In the Bay Area, from the hippie enclave of Haight-Ashbury (95% Democrat) to the dinky bourgeois seaside villages of Sausalito and Tiburon (85% Democrat), I counted a total of two posters in support of Kerry. There are loads of anti-Bush posters and stickers and buttons, employing either clod-hopping irony — Let’s Beat Bush Again — or side-splitting puns — It’s Time To Shave Bush. But almost nothing actually for Kerry.
Similarly, the editorials in The New York Times, The Nation and The New Yorker, all of which have come out in support of the Democrat candidate, scarcely mention his abilities at all. The New York Times wrote succinctly: “There is no denying that this race is mainly about Mr Bush’s disastrous tenure.”
Neither Kerry nor his party have endeared themselves to the electorate. If Bush is mistrusted and scorned, Kerry is roundly despised for his opportunistic and disingenuous policy on Iraq, which he seems to have purloined straight from the policy coffers at Conservative Central Office.
Then there is the Michael Moore factor, which seems to be delivering sackloads of votes to the Republicans. Moore and high-profile lefties like him have spent the campaign bashing the president and, by extension, America. Bush is a moron, Americans are morons for supporting him and the country has become an international laughing stock, led by an idiot.
This arrogance does not play well in middle America, as the briefest exposure to any radio chat show will quickly confirm. One previously Democrat-inclined voter quoted in the San Francisco Chronicle announced that he would be voting for Bush instead and added further that he would vote for an orang-utan if it wiped the smirk from Moore’s fat bearded face.
There is a third candidate, of course: Ralph Nader. Displaying that staunch commitment to the democratic process for which the left is becoming increasingly famous, the Democratic party lawyers have struck Nader from the voting list in 16 states, citing voter registration violations. Nader would certainly have got my vote — and if I were unfortunate enough to live in a state where he was forced off the ticket I would have switched to the Republicans out of anger. There is evidence that a good few Americans will behave similarly.
Sure, Nader may split the left vote, much as he did in 2000.
But the response of the Democratic party should be to inform the electorate of this possibility and let people make up their minds — not prevent them exercising choice.
Incidentally, while Nader is running at between 1% and 2% in the polls, his standing among Arab-Americans is, in some states, as high as 20%.
Yet still the rest of the world yearns for a Kerry presidency. I am not sure why. In so far as it makes any difference at all, a Kerry presidency would be marginally worse for us cowering Europeans than the stuff we have to put up with under Bush.
Recently some British commentators have thrown their weight behind the president. Matthew Parris argued that Bush had embarked on a programme of annihilating various Arab states and should be allowed to complete his project. This is a misrepresentation of Parris’s case, but not much of one. Meanwhile, Simon Jenkins argued that we are safer with Bush because Kerry’s aim is to “internationalise” the war against Iraq.
As far as one can understand Kerry’s perpetually shifting policy, this seems to me an entirely accurate assessment. Most of us who opposed this disastrous war want the troops out sharpish and if we cannot get the American military out, at least we might bring our own troops home. This would be rather more difficult to achieve under a Kerry presidency. Most Europeans do not want the war internationalised: they want it stopped.
Right now Kerry is haranguing Bush over piddling details about the liberation and occupation of Iraq, but failing to contest the government’s Middle Eastern policy in general and the direction of the war on terror.
I accept that my heavily qualified preference for Bush ignores the utter havoc that the man will wreak on the American environment if he is re-elected. But, selfishly, that’s their lookout.
Maybe I’m wrong about the way this election is going. San Francisco is certainly not typical of the United States. Maybe in the blue-collar swing states of Ohio and Michigan and Wisconsin there is a groundswell of support for Kerry and his ghastly billionaire wife. Perhaps his ineffable charisma and chutzpah are really winning the day in Peoria and Dayton and Cleveland. But I wouldn’t bet on it.
This election reminds me a little of the 1987 general election in Britain where an unpopular leader was challenged by a candidate whom nobody could actually visualise winning. But at least Neil Kinnock was likeable.
Over here some pundits have suggested that another victory for Bush would mean the end of the Democratic party as we know and love it. Really? I doubt that. But if that is truly the case, given the way in which it has behaved during this presidential election campaign, the appropriate response from all of us has an agreeably American tang to it: uh, like, whatever.
