THE EARLY results from the US election are in and, I can report, it appears to be a landslide for John Kerry. Around the world, from New York eastwards, the Massachusetts senator is racking up massive majorities against the incumbent George W. Bush. A poll this month by the University of Maryland and GlobeScan gave Mr Kerry a 59-point lead over Mr Bush in Germany. In France just 5 per cent of respondents supported the incumbent President. In Britain, Mr Bush did little better — getting only 16 per cent.

The only winning territories for the Republican seem to be the Philippines, Poland and Nigeria, although even there it is close. He still has an outside chance in India, apparently, and is a little way behind in China. But, even if we put those two demographic behemoths in the swing-state camp, it would seem Mr Bush has already lost the election for leader of the world.

Sadly for them, the French, the Germans and the rest, they don’t pick America’s president. If they did, I suppose, we would never have had Ronald Reagan; instead we would have had sixteen years of Jimmy Carter and Walter Mondale rather than the four happy ones we were so blessed with.

But the world’s incomprehension is now palpable. Not only is Mr Kerry not beating Mr Bush by a margin as wide as the Atlantic and Pacific, he appears to be steadily losing.

An average of six national opinion polls taken since September 10 gives the incumbent a five-point advantage over his challenger, the most durable lead outside the margin of error any candidate has had since the beginning of the year.

All the more bewildering for the rest of the world, and for Europeans in particular, is that Mr Bush’s gains seem to be solidifying even as the war in Iraq turns uglier. Car bombings, kidnappings, beheadings — and all the time Mr Bush’s appeal to Americans edges up. How can this be?

There are a couple of comforting explanations the world likes to reach for in these circumstances. The first is that Americans are, of course, stupid. A people who famously cannot find China on a map of the world just is not clever enough to see that the intellectually challenged Mr Bush has failed and that his policies are leading them to ruin.

There is not much one can say to this old prejudice except that, for a remarkably stupid people, the Americans have done some remarkably clever things over the years. Little ones such as devising the separation of powers and defeating communism and Nazism. Big ones such as becoming the most successful economy in the history of the planet.

A second, only slightly less implausible, explanation, is that it is all the fault of complaisant, patriotic American media too intimidated or too fawning to challenge the hated Mr Bush. If only the Americans had the benefits of the clear-eyed perspicacity and guts of, say, the famously independent-minded French, German or Russian press, they would not be bamboozled into supporting the President.

This argument from false consciousness takes only a moment to measure against the objective facts of history: whatever else Dan Rather and CBS were doing this month when they used forged documents to accuse Mr Bush of lying about his days in the National Guard, it was not offering him fealty.

I think I can provide help for the nonplussed. There are at least two good reasons why President Bush currently enjoys a small but potentially decisive advantage over his opponent.

First, Americans are not eager to vote for a candidate of the studied fickleness of Mr Kerry. Trying to figure out where he stands — not just on any issue, but the biggest issue of all, the Iraq war — is like trying to mould water.

He voted for the war but against the money to prosecute it. He said that the US was safer without Saddam Hussein in power, but said America was less safe as a result of the war. He said even if he had known in 2002 that there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, he would still have voted to use force, and this week he said that no one could possibly think, given what we now know, that it was right to have gone to war in Iraq.

No wonder the rest of the world wants this man as President. There would be a vacancy for global leadership if he were to win.

A Kerry victory would not change that much in terms of US policy anyway. I have no doubt that the Democrat is at heart a peacenik in the European mould, but his campaign, mindful of the views of most Americans, has done its best to hide that — hence the circumlocutions.

But more important, far from being dumb or credulous, Americans see all too clearly what is at stake in Iraq. They understand that the war there is a necessary evil to remove a greater one. They remember what Saddam Hussein’s regime was really like; not the slightly distasteful but really rather stable and reliable one of popular European myth, but the aggrandising, terrorism-supporting, lawless thuggery whose ambitions were to be written in the blood of Americans, British, Israelis and anyone who co-operated with them.

And they see, even more clearly than before, the kind of people we are now fighting in Iraq. When police recruits are blown up and helpless hostages beheaded, Americans understand that the right response is not to blame their President but to take the war to the evil cowards who did it.

They understand too the cruel but unavoidable calculus that a thousand or more US deaths a year wiping out the Saddamites and al-Qaeda groupies in the Middle East is a tragic price worth paying to deny the killers the joy of dismembering American children in their own schools and homes.

Many US voters are certainly angry at the conduct of the war, and dismayed at the errors of the Bush Administration. But above all, Americans understand, because they have been here before in the face of global derision and hatred, that their cause is a just one, and that, in the end, an uncomprehending and ungrateful world will be a better place for their sacrifice.

gerard.baker@thetimes.co.uk

Join the Debate at comment@thetimes.co.uk

Anatole Kaletsky’s column returns tomorrow

Times Recommends

• In the real world, the public sector must pay
• Playing politics in a land of double Dutch
• Be like the plinth people: not set in stone