STRANGE AND AGGRESSIVE WORLD OF AMERICAN POLITICS

US ELECTIONS 2004

STRANGE AND AGGRESSIVE WORLD OF AMERICAN POLITICS

Monthly Herald Staff Writer, Sam Kozma

They're off ... and it's going to be dirty

As Bush kick-starts the race for the White House, America looks set for another nasty knife-edge contest

President George Bush addressed 180,000 screaming car-racing fans in Florida last week and uttered the words they love to hear: 'Gentlemen, start your engines.' Dozens of brightly coloured rally cars thundered down the track, but it wasn't just the Daytona 500 rally Bush was starting: it was the presidential election. Recent weeks have defined the 2004 campaign as the most divisive and dirtiest in US history. Rarely have voters been faced with a choice between such stark opposites. Rarely has so much rested - for America, and the world - on one contest. Never will so much money have been spent on buying the electorate's support. And there are nine months to go before a vote is cast.

Everything Bush does is now aimed at one goal: re-election. On a tour of the South last week he carefully aimed a message that will be repeated endlessly in the months to come. Republican strategists can sum it up in two words: national security. Speaking at a military base in Louisiana a day after his appearance in Florida, the President used the word 'danger' 11 times in 25 minutes. He also mentioned 11 September six times. The message is hammered home: the Democrats will leave America unsafe. In times of terror alerts and a war in Iraq this Republican strategy makes for powerful politics. The Democrats know it too. 'The number one factor is whether the Democrat nominee can persuade Americans they will be safe in a physical sense. That is most important of all,' said Larry Haas, a Democrat adviser and former aide to Bill Clinton. But the Republicans' dirty tricks department is in full swing. False rumours about a sex scandal have already hurt Democrat frontrunner John Kerry who suffered a drop in the polls after the right-wing gossip website The Drudge Report published the story. A faked photograph of Kerry sharing a stage with Jane Fonda during anti-Vietnam war demonstrations has also mysteriously emerged.

Democrats have not taken it lying down. It was Democrat officials who led the charge to criticise Bush's record of service in the national guard. Some Democrat supporters, including the singer Moby, have openly approved of the planting of rumours on the internet about Bush's youth, including a story about a woman forced to have an abortion - there is no proof, but it has already gained wide currency on the internet. To pour oil on the fire, pornographer Larry Flynt has said he will publish a book on the subject later this summer. Flynt's book will be one among many. No fewer than 25 anti-Bush books will be published in the next six months, including titles like Fraud: The Strategy Behind the Bush Lies and The Book on Bush: How George W Misleads America. The vitriolic nature of the attacks on both sides springs from so much being at stake. Voters face a choice between one of the most radical Republican administrations and a newly charged Democratic Party determined to reverse America's course. A hint of how high the stakes are is given in a book recently published by former