Dialogue: America's choice is easy, really

Here in a distant corner of the American empire it has been hard to read the election.

Anyone who caught half an hour of the first televised debate, which is about as much as the average voter would watch, must have noticed that Al Gore knew his stuff and George W. Bush did not.

Gore looked and sounded in command. Bush was off-balance, vague and defensive, looking for all the world like a loser.

But in the United States that didn't matter. In the US, long before the debate began, the spin was in.

The Republican campaign had assiduously conceded weeks before the event that the Vice-President was the superior debater. So when it came to picking the winner, the pundits looked past the boring, predictable fact that Gore had it all over the Governor.

They decided that because Bush had not collapsed into a blubbering wreck, he had exceeded expectations, and some even called it a draw on grounds that Gore had been ungracious to a less-gifted performer.

Such are the wonders of spin.

It is a much misunderstood term. At its best it is not lies and deception. It is a reasoned point of view, which can work because there usually is more than one reasonable point of view in politics.

There is our interpretation - that's called analysis - and theirs - that's spin.

When Bush is marked by the achievement-based assessment system that New Zealand schools are supposed to adopt shortly, he did well enough. But if you insist on using School Certificate methods simply for the sake of choosing a President, he failed.

It would be nice to believe - political commentators certainly like to believe - that their work is received as it is offered, as a piece of considered opinion to be taken with critical faculties on full alert.

But spin merchants seem to think an instant verdict in a newspaper is enormously influential. Even in this country, they sometimes go to the trouble of calling the reviewers of election debates just before or very soon after the broadcast.

There is just something they thought you might want to consider, and it is the hardest thing in the world to tell them you don't want to hear it. Because you do.

Even though you know that what voters cannot see is not relevant to the task, and hearing it can only make the task harder, you want to hear it. It might be interesting.

American political tacticians spin much more effectively than ours, in large part because they do it publicly.

Campaign consultants and partisan analysts go on panel shows and let themselves be quoted by name in the press. In Britain, too, "Downing St sources" are becoming less bashful.

Political advisers can often put a point of view that their clients cannot. There is nothing more deadly to a politician than to be engaged in a public discussion of politics.

In American elections, the ritual has become institutionalised. Near the venue of televised presidential debates there is now a designated "spin room," where flacks from the rival camps descend on hundreds of reporters to offer instant response.

During the debate, campaign directors have been plugged into continuous polls and focus groups. They know what has worked for the candidates and what has not. Armed with that intelligence, they give their staff four or five points to push and send them along to the spin room.

A strategist for George Bush the elder in 1992 describes going into the room as, "like the attack of the locusts. People are all screaming at the same time and you're trying to answer all their questions ... It feels like you're being spun like a top, simultaneously terrifying and invigorating ... "

Out of that feeding frenzy came the idea that genial George Bush did creditably well against an insufferable swot. And the verdict was soon reflected in public polls, which can only mean that most Americans were watching the World Series.

Ironic, really. Their national baseball championship is in no sense a world series but their presidential elections most certainly are.

The perennial American election topics - abortion, positive discrimination, school choice, campaign finance - are issues the White House alone cannot decide. But subjects that attract less attention - the Middle East, military intervention abroad, global trade liberalisation and environmental regulation - depend crucially on the inclinations and calibre of the next President.

So George W. Bush is a worry. To a question on the Middle East during the television debates, he said: "It is important to keep strong ties in the Middle East with credible ties because of the energy crisis we are now in. After all, all the energy is produced from the Middle East. And so I appreciate what the Administration is doing.

"I hope to get a sense of, should I be fortunate enough to be the President, how my Administration will react to the Middle East."

But then Gore can make me nervous, too. There is something to the American distrust of the seriously driven politician. Gore really might lock up the Alaskan oilfields for the sake of the tundra.

But despite the polls, despite the towering priggishness of the man, he must win comfortably. All things considered - the economy, the candidates, their performance in the debates - this must be one of the easier decisions ever put to American electors.

Sometimes people do not come to the obvious conclusion until they pick up the pencil. It should be a landslide.