This was the first election since 1968 in which war was the fundamental and defining question. Much has changed since, but then as now, the pro-war Democrat lost to the pro-war Republican as the anti-war movement futilely chained itself to the lesser evil.
There are numerous other Issues, of course, from socalled "values 10 the economy to the raw memories of the stolen election of 2000. But the debacle that Irag has become was the factor that made the Bush gang so vulnerable.
It's been astonishing to see, on the one hand, the genuine energy and voter mobilisation growing out of the popular anger over Bush s disastrous war; and on the other, the Democratic Party establishment's display of cynical contempt for its core anti-war supporters in running a better war" campaign.
The politics of John Kerry fit snugly into what used to be called, when such a thing existed, the moderate wing of the Republican Party. Perhaps this election's greatest irony was the desperate effort of the US peace movement to rescue Kerry.
In return for their efforts on his behalf, the leaders of this movement got from Kerry exactly what they asked: nothThe successful mobilisation by the Republicans of the mainly white religious conservative vote in the US elections and the capitulation of the Democrats over the war were key factors in the Bush victory writes DAVID FINKEL TO UNDERSTAND what happened in the US elections, you have to think of the United States as a kind of Christian Iran, only with actual and not hypothetical nuclear weapons.
That's somewhat of a caricature, obviously, but there is a parallel. The government of the Islamic Republic brought its people to virtual ruin in the Iran-Irag Gulf War of the (*) with apologies to Nina Simone
It has run the Iranian economy about as far into the ground as is possible for a country with such oil wealth. Yet the regime has survived and maintained a powerful social base, even though much of the population loathes and despises it.
The Republican right wing in the United States dragged the country into a war that was based on lies and, it's now clear, that cannot be won. Its fiscal subsidise-the-rich and military spending policies have produced budget deficits that pose the real danger of full financial meltdown in the dedicated to screwing them. next economic downturn.
On top of that have come the torture photos from Abu Ghraib, the Halliburton war profiteering, the collapse of Enron, the health care crisis and the taunts of Osama (*T'm Back") bin Laden.
The Democrats and, it must be admitted, many on the left who might have known better, assumed that John Kerry had this election in the bag.
They thought to clinch his victory he required only a large LULLOLL from the African American community and other sectors alienated by the Bush gang and furious over the stolen 2000
The conventional pollsters, we were assured, had it all For a complex set of reasons, the bulk of the religious wrong when they showed an extremely tight race with a slight edge for Bush.
They were missing the youth vote, the kids with cell phones who weren't in the phone book. And this time, the Democrats were mobilising their base and their legal apparatus to check the harassment and "suppress the vote" tactics of the right. Kerry would win and it wouldn't even be that close.
The calculation was half right. The Black vote, above all, was there. The anti-war vote, taken for granted by the Democrats with their pro-war candidate, was there.
Labour poured tens of millions into anti-Bush ads, voter turnout and lawsuits to keep Nader/Camejo off the ballot in many states. The problem was that something else was there, too, which the pollsters saw but the left didn't - the mobilisation of the right-