"Just imagine," jokes Peter Camejo, the vice-presidential running mate for Ralph Nader's independent presidential campaign, "there's a group of liberals talking over coffee about the election.
They're whispering about John Kerry, and reassuring each other-that he's lying! *He says he'll send more troops to Iraq.
He says he'd bomb any country that really threatens uS. I'm sure he's lying, right? Their biggest hope is that their candidate isn't telling the truth!"
The funniest thing about this election, if you call it funny, is the way almost the whole peace movement is trying to save Kerry's pro-war candidacy from its own nearshipwreck.
Meanwhile, perhaps just in time, Kerry himself awakened to the fact that polling results showed a clear majority of likely voters (just over sixty per cent, plus or minus three per cent with a 0.95 confidence level) strongly preferring a candidate who showed tangible evidence of being physiologically alive.
Having failed to provide such evidence throughout August, Kerry had slipped
Never, probably, has
a sitting president
had a 50-50 chance
of winning the
election when so
much of the political
and social elite consider his administration to be a
disaster. behind Bush to the point where it appeared Bush would win without even having to steal the election.
To his supporters' delight, however, Kerry responded with a 47-minute address in which he pilloried the Bush gang's "colossal error in judgment" in invading Iraq with no international support.
The omissions in Kerry's speech were even more striking than his indictment: no mention of torture at Abu Ghraib or Guantanamo, nothing about the routine largescale killing of Iraqi civilians in "precision" bombings.
As for the real situation in
Kerry and the Democrats - who are above all loyal to imperialism - far from dramatizing the disaster it has become, actually understate it.
Nonetheless, the liberal left took courage from Kerry's revival, which was strengthened further when all pundits agreed he trounced Bush in their first televised debate.
(This article is being written hours before the second debate, where remains to be seen if Kerry can maintain this momentum.)
This turn of fortune appears to mean that the presidential election will indeed be a rat race to the wire.
In fact, contrary to previous experience and this cynical observer's expectations, the Edwards-Cheney vice-presidential debate gathered huge television lalilgs an estimated 44 million viewers) against a New York Yankees playoff baseball game on the Fox network.
By all accounts voter registration is booming in many critical states, and the public is not bored even though U.S. presidential campaigns now last about eighteen months.
For those keeping score, Ralph Nader's polling numbers usually come in at about three percent, which probably means his actual vote count will be between one and two percent.
The official Green Party candidate David Cobb (it should be noted that the majority of active Green Party members are pro-Nader, but these forces did not control their party's convention machinery) will get something under half of one perCCUL
Beside the peculiarity of the peace movement supporting a pro-war candidate, there's another striking feature of this election.
Never, probably, has a sitting president had a 50-50 chance of winning the election when so much of the political and social elite consider his administration to be a disaster.
We're not just talking "Fahrenheit 911" and MoveOn.org here; the flood of insider books exposing Bush & Company's lies about Iraq, the insanity of unilateral militarism and the irresponsibility of half-trillion dollar budget deficits resulting from candy-store tax giveaways to corporations and the very rich, should have swept away this administration by now.
It's no wonder either: From the standpoint of the longterm stability of U.S. capitalism and global leadership, this administration may very well be the worst in history.
Bush at this point has generated as much if not more opposition in the ruling class as Richard Nixon at the height of Watergate.
It is astonishing in this context that the Democratic Party might not be able to unseat You've got to see the funny side ... Bush tells Kerry the Florida votes have already been counted
What remains unknown? There's the potential for some major new crisis just before the election (if, for example, Israel drops bunker-busting megabombs on supposed Iranian nuclear facilities).
There's the possibility of explosive struggles around Republican suppression of Black voting rights or fraudulent electronic voting machines.
There's the impact of a major U.S. military offensive against Iraqi insurgent centres.
How any of these might play out is outside the scope of purely rational prediction. I hope readers understand