The third and last nationwide broadcast television debate between President George W. Bush and his Democrat challenger John Kerry passed off like its predecessors with neither man landing a knockout blow. However, the person who came out best from these over-managed exercises was Kerry simply because he was the man who was expected to fail thanks to his supposed lack of charisma and wooden style. In the event, he presented himself well. His achievement is reflected in the opinion polls which suggest that his campaign has recovered. He is now running neck and neck with Bush.
The outright winner in this process may yet, however, to turn out to be “reality.” The broadcast fencing between the candidates has attracted huge audiences among voters, contradicting predictions that there was a low level of interest among the electorate. Kerry has kept the issue of the administration’s ineptitude in Iraq to the fore and it has clearly resonated with viewers. Little by little in this campaign, the president has been obliged to retreat from all the hawkish certainties with which he used to justify his invasion of Iraq and his ouster of Saddam Hussein. All he has left is the political talisman of the January elections in Iraq, when voters will make their voices heard and as if by magic the men of violence will throw down their guns and slink away.
This is the final gauze of deception which the Bush campaign obviously hopes will obscure the reality of Iraq until after US voters have filled in their ballot papers. If come Nov. 3 when the votes are in, W. Bush is back in the White House, he can let the last veil drop and allow the American people to see Iraq for the chaotic mess that he has made it. By then it will be too late and he will be able to switch his policy to “Bringing the Boys Back Home” and abandoning the Iraqis with as little face saving as he chooses.
Conventional analysis has it that US campaigns are always won on domestic, not foreign policy issues. Yet pollsters have been finding that the Iraq War and subsequent debacle are having an impact because they reflect on the reliability of Bush himself and his team. Perhaps, significantly, attention is moving away from the relatively small number of swing voters to disenchanted registered Republicans who are having serious doubts about their candidate. If Bush has alienated too many of his core supporters because they no longer trust him, then he has lost.
It is time to wonder what a Kerry White House will be able to do to unravel the tangled web of misjudgments in Iraq and the wider Middle East. The Democratic campaign must now be thinking that if the realities of the Iraq debacle have become an issue, then their man has to start putting forward concrete ideas to adjust US policy. What Kerry cannot promise is that his administration will produce more of the same. Yet, dare Democrat strategists risk alienating the powerful US Zionist lobby by getting real and pinpointing Israeli aggression in Palestine as the key destabilizing factor in the region and the greatest source of succor to Al-Qaeda and the ruthless men of violence?
