GEORGE W. BUSH’S political ally may be Tony Blair, but his linguistic soulmate is surely John Prescott. Like the Deputy Prime Minister, the President has a relationship with the English language that might be kindly described as experimental. It is akin to that which a tribesman from the depths of the Amazonian rainforest might have with a mobile telephone. Buttons will be pressed, but what emerges is basically a mystery. Mr Bush is thus perhaps the first President of the United States to require an interpreter when addressing an audience that consists entirely of his fellow citizens.

One of his most intriguing rhetorical innovations was offered in the town of Bentonville, Arkansas, on the day before the 2000 presidential election. Reflecting on himself and his campaign, Mr Bush informed a possibly bemused crowd that he had been constantly “misunderestimated” by his opponents. This slip of the tongue features prominently in the multitude of books of Bush gaffes published since he entered the Oval Office. This is harsh and unimaginative. Misunderestimated is a brilliant synthesis of “underestimated” and “misunderstood”. It has proved a prophetic concept. For Mr Bush has indeed been an underestimated and misunderstood President. The contest of 2004 is also an underestimated and misunderstood election.

That Mr Bush is an underestimated man should by now be obvious. His ability to beat the established norms and rules of American politics is extraordinary. He made it to the White House despite having the least experience of public office (a mere six years in total) of any President, except Dwight Eisenhower, in eight decades. Despite this, he has adapted to the peculiarities of Washington life far better than expected. He has defied the widespread assumption that no one elected on a minority of the popular vote, let alone a disputed electoral college as well, could manage to govern effectively. He led his party to seize additional congressional seats in the midterm elections of 2002, a feat unseen since Franklin Roosevelt.

He is, though, as misunderstood as he is underestimated. He is habitually portrayed as a dogmatic conservative at home, obsessed with tax cuts. Yet he has been responsible for expanding the role of the federal government in US schools, has enacted the biggest expansion of public healthcare provision since the 1960s, and has subsidised agriculture and the steel industry liberally.

He is regularly presented as a religious zealot, despite the fact that under him the Republican Party has come to recognise, reluctantly, that it will never secure a constitutional amendment outlawing abortion. He is invariably perceived as a warmonger, ignoring the reality that his interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq would never have been plausible had not al-Qaeda attacked America first.

The contest for the presidency this year is as underestimated as the incumbent. It remains fashionable to dismiss an election in which national security has a standing unknown for ages. In truth, the result will be taken as an endorsement or repudiation of a seismic shift in American foreign policy. It will determine whether voters deem the Iraq episode to be a legitimate if difficult aspect of the War on Terror, or a disastrous distraction from it. America’s view of its place and part in the world will be the question stamped in invisible ink on ballot papers in November. All recent elections seem frivolous by comparison.

And the outcome will be as misunderstood (again) as it has been underestimated. A Bush victory will doubtless be received with dire predictions and premonitions, especially in Europe. To cast off the political bonds placed on a second-term President would, however, require escapology on a scale worthy of Houdini. The curse of the presidency, ever since the option of a third term was formally closed by the 22nd Amendment in 1951, is that power ebbs away from the very moment of re-election.

All that Mr Bush can hope to deliver is less of the same. He will have to compromise drasticaly on his latest tax cut plan even if, as is probable, his party strengthens its control of Congress. The size of the US budget deficit, along with the President’s enforced lame-duck status, will render a choice between guns and butter unavoidable. If there is to be a battle over cultural policy at all before 2008, it will be about the advancement of gay rights, not limitations on abortion.

The notion that a Bush triumph would be the green light to invade Iran, North Korea or Syria is similarly ludicrous. The influence of neoconservatism has been vastly exaggerated during Mr Bush’s first term. The War on Terror will be prosecuted with due vigour, but it will evolve into one rooted more in policing than pre-emption. The Bible intones that “blessed are the peacemakers”; Presidents in their final years have little option but to be one.

It is not Mr Bush who will change if re-elected, rather his presidency will inevitably change as the clock runs down on it. The ultimate paradox of this thoroughly misunderestimated election is that the single event that might, and only might, allow him to avoid a fate that has befallen every second-term President since George Washington is the one that he is desperate to prevent occurring: another al-Qaeda outrage on American soil.

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