IN EVERY election cycle there is a dispute among pundits and between candidates as to precisely what the election is “about”. The results can then be analysed according to how they provide a verdict on this topic, or topics.

There is usually more than one “about” about, and sometimes the “abouts” are related. In the past US presidential contest there was general agreement that the dispute between the candidates was “about” Iraq, but also “about” the relative military qualifications, in the late 1960s, of the two contenders. For a while, though this requires an effort of memory, it was also “about” the right of homosexual couples to marry.

The present US midterm election campaign, however, is principally “about” the fact that federal law mandates a vote in November, and thus that there have to be candidates, issues, spending contests and all the rest of it. A mere month or so ago, a shrewd guess might have been that the main quarrel would have been “about” Iraq. Now, the war is only a minor quibble among a slew of issues that this campaign is “about”.

A common American expression for a general agreement on a common topic is to say that we are “all on the same page”. Today this homely usage from the schoolroom would reek of a faint indecency. From nowhere, the hidden issue of 2006 turns out to be possible impropriety between a hitherto obscure right-wing congressman and a group of young congressional attendants named for the days when Europe had courts and courtiers.

I write that last sentence and then I wonder what I am going to tell the interviewer from the BBC World Service when he calls me later for our chat about the fate of the world’s most powerful democracy.

How am I to explain, to listeners in New Zealand and Argentina, that a Congress that makes big decisions for the entire world is being selected in this way? This audience is educated enough to have heard a great deal about President Bush, whose policies might be assumed to be an important element in the discussion, but recently the chief executive announced that he did not consider himself to be an issue in the election at all. (This may be an historic first: I shall have to check the political almanacs.) More astonishingly still, candidates from his own party and from the Democratic side appear to concur. They would all much rather talk about something else.

I live in the nation’s capital, which isn’t allowed representatives in Congress, so the nearest race that concerns me is in neighbouring Virginia.Here, a rich menu of issues confronts the electorate. The incumbent senator, George Allen, a Republican, was considered until recently to be a safe bet for re-election and a possible standard bearer for his party in two years’ time. Now he is in the deepest of trouble because — let me see if I have this right — he isn't “really” from the South, wears cowboy boots though there are no cowboys in Virginia, made a cryptic remark to a questioner from the Indian sub-continent and reacted oddly to the news of his mother’s hidden Jewish parentage.

These are the issues that the pundits are squabbling over, yet this race is taking place in a state where the military adds $34 billion to the economy annually and employs more than 208,000 Virginians, according to the state commission. Ninety-three residents have been killed while serving in Iraq and Afghanistan. Not to mention that Democratic challenger James Webb, a Vietnam vet and former Secretary of the Navy, contends that US troops should pull out of Iraq and fight the war from neighbouring countries.

Most reasonable people would predict that US foreign policy would be an important issue in this race. They’d be wrong. Yes, I assure the polite BBC man. If you give me some extra airtime I can indeed explain all this. I can also elucidate the significance of the combat boots worn by Webb: boots apparently worn in solidarity with his son, who’s serving in Iraq. They appear to have turned the tide against non-existent cowboys.

Let us be generous and concede that some pressing Washington questions do also figure in Virginia’s calculations. Allen, for example, is the son of a former coach of the Washington football team, which is named the “Redskins”. (Actually, everybody calls the players “the Skins”.) This fall, the burning question is whether or not the team should change its name to avoid offending the susceptibilities of Native Americans. The only political posters in my neighbourhood have been concerned exclusively with this matter, on which, of course, Allen, until recently a possible future president, is also expected to take a view. The BBC man says he’ll have a word with his editor and call me back.

It has been a quarter of a century since I moved to the United States but now it comes back to me how I used to resent the way in which Americans made up their minds. In the first election I was able to follow — the Nixon-Kennedy race in 1960 — there were American nuclear bases in Britain, and great American decisions to be taken about free trade and other matters that affected us all directly. Yet from the American press I learnt that the whole thing hinged on Nixon’s unshaven jowls as exposed in the first televised debate.

These days I spend a good deal of my time defending my adopted country from what I have to call anti-American attitudes, many of them based on what seem to me a mixture of envy and ignorance. But, yes, I tell the BBC man when he finally calls back, there is quite a lot of argument this fall about whether or not American schoolchildren should be exposed to the ideas first promulgated by Charles Darwin in the mid-Victorian epoch. Indeed, the subject has begun to open a split in the Republican Party, as well as between it and its critics. There is a brief silence on the line.

Christopher Hitchens is a columnist for Vanity Fair and Slate

© Christopher Hitchens

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