wing religious vote. There's the America-as-Iran factor.
The actual result reflects the reality - the mainly white religious conservative vote has made the Republicans the governing party in the United States.
It's important neither to disrespect the folks who vote this way on "moral values," nor to pander to them. The Democratic Party does both, while the Republicans mobilise them, and in essence there goes the election.
The bulk of this religious conservative vote is made up of white people, either working class or middle class of very modest incomes.
For a complex set of reasons, they are voting for the party that is most aggressively dedicated to screwing them.
Their jobs are disappearing into the global marketplace, their social security (the US term for old age pensions) are at risk of being privatised, their health is increasingly uninsured, their kids are one war away from getting the draft notices.
And in the new capitalist order their lives are dominated by permanent indebtedness and insecurity.
Without even knowing it, these folks are among the first ence only goes one way, and takes the form of the British government gamely trotting along behind the US on foreign policy.
When it comes to issues where Blair publicly claims to endorse a more progressive policy - for example on the Kyoto agreement and policies to combat climate change (a problem which Bush's advisors flatly deny even exists) - Bush shows not the lightest sign of movement.
And even where Blair has tried to argue he has had some influence - such as on the soIt's important neither
to disrespect the
folks who vote on
"moral values," nor
to pander to them.
The Democratic
Party does both. victims of the ultra-reactionary US political order their votes have put in place.
The right wing knows how to expertly manipulate their fears and their moral concerns, while the Democratic leadership - no matter how far right they move - haven't a clue how to talk to them.
Kerry runs on, for example, about "colossal errors in judgement over Iraq" without obedient years called "peace process" in the Middle East - it is clear that Bush's political links with Sharon as a fellow warmonger and gun-toting killer of "terrorists" are far stronger than any pressure Blair can bring to bear.
Blair will therefore go into the next General Election still branded as Bush's poodle: but the electoral damage this might cause is far from clear.
Those who most strongly oppose Bush will also oppose the war, the occupation of Iraq, and the British role within it.
Those who recoil in horror even mentioning the morality of Abu Ghraib.
Ralph Nader was entirely COLICEL ON night when he stated that ordinary people in America will not permanently put up with what the two corporate parties offer.
The big unanswered question today, however, is how long that will take, and the stakes riding on that conundrum are incredibly high.
The Republicans, it seems, are in a position to dominate all levels of US politics until they seriously screw up.
In the violently unstable world that US imperialism has created, and the prospects for a financial meltdown from the astonishing deficits that military spending and tax give-aways to the rich, the debacle may come sooner than later.
The question then will be whether there's a democratic, populist or socialist left with anything meaningful to say.
The first step is to unchain the anti-war movement from a decaying Democratic Party and begin to mobilise again. • David Finkel is an editor of Against the Current, published by the U.S. socialist organisation Solidarity. (www.solidarity-us.org). from Bush's social policies will also be concerned to fight on social issues in this country, where Blair has embarked upon a further crusade of privatisation and attacks on public services.
With the Tory opposition in total disarray, and standing further back in the polls under Michael Howard than even the disastrous lain Duncan Smith, the challenge is to turn these political liabilities for Blair into electoral assets for a genuine left alternative: that's the challenge that faces Respect in the months to come. Don't be fooled by the ritual talk about healing wounds and uniting the country which always follows a divisive election: these mean no more than Margaret Thatcher's infamous quotation from St Francis of Asissi.
Dubya and his pals are hell-bent on sticking the boot in to a weak and confused liberal opposition.
*1 earned political capital, and now I intend to spend it, said Bush, to add an extra frisson of horror to those imagining the policies that could emerge in his second 4-year term.
The Republican majority leader in the House of Representatives, Tom DeLay, summed it up even more menacingly, promising California businessmen just before the election:
"We've go the House, we've got the Senate, and if we get another term in the White House, it's Katy, bar the door.
The Bush team hardly needs egging on by the fanatics of the Christian right, who want early action to ban gay marriage, and Bush appointments to the Supreme Court that would enable a reversal of the Roe v Wade ruling that legalised abortion.
On the economic front, the huge tax concessions Bush has already made to the wealthiest minority would be dwarfed by the plans now being advanced to dispense with inheritance tax altogether, and to replace banded income tax with a single flat-rate "flat tax".
These policies have already driven the US economy from surplus into massive deficit, but Bush has also outlined plans to spend more on "star wars" technology, and on privatising state pensions - at a cost of $2 trillion over the next ten years. on April 25 2004 in defence of abortion rights More than a million Americans marched through Washington