Dialogue: Gore-Bush face-off no gunfight at OK Corral

Imagine the gunfight at the OK Corral with no one prepared to draw. That's the American presidential campaign.

In the original match-up, a consumptive psychopath, Doc Holliday, and a bunch of bottle-fed, child-poverty psychotics couldn't wait to strut their stuff, to assert their drawled conviction of superiority, even though the stakes were life and death.

But neither Al Gore nor George W. Bush, psychologically scarred by nothing much more than high school zits, can think of a reason why they oughta draw. No ideal, no conviction is pressing hard enough to split their resolve to be buddies.

Back in the OK Corral days, economy had a lower case e and literally amounted to a row of beans; whereas nowadays the Economy has fat and contented American electors - make that potential electors - telling the gunfighters to play if they must but not to disturb the neighbourhood or they'll call the noise abatement officers.

Because everyone's been surfing the boom for a decade, it's hard to get anyone distracted by politics.

The middle classes and poor may be comparatively worse off in terms of income than, say, the 1960s and 1970s, but they do have regular incomes and, hell man, who remembers back that far.

So the one conviction is that the nice guy will win. Big Al wouldn't cuss if George W. kicked his shin, and wouldn't shoot back even if he could see the whites of their lies.

And the Texas Kid, whose IQ sometimes seems only marginally higher than his holstered .45, would smile ebulliently and praise Big Al's family values if one of the Gore tribe ran over him in an RV. Big Al would say later that he threw himself over the Texas Kid's body to save him, even though he was out of town at the time.

And both of them love rousing jingles and jaunty songs, and keep fiddling while the Middle East burns.

Yep, here in the Big Apple, presidential politics is the Big Yawn, totally overshadowed by baseball's World Series, which is shaping up as a match between two New York teams, the Mets and the Yankees.

The gentility of the presidential campaign has obscured what the issues are. Some digging and I find they're much the same as in New Zealand: how to provide better health care for a wider range of people; how to lift the average education level to meet the needs of the so-called Information Age; and whether the rich should be encouraged to get relatively richer and the poor relatively poorer.

Back in the OK Corral, Doc Holliday and the boys announced their policies literally in bullet-points. Doc thought that the Hippocratic Oath was the string of expletives you fired when your gun jammed; that education was learning when to get out of town; and the rich only got richer when they robbed a bank - violently through the front door. Awful but folklorish, which is more than this campaign will ever be.

But a big difference between the US and New Zealand, apart from the superficial fact of the unending boom here, is that some subjects basic to cultural and intellectual disputation must remain taboo. Off the agenda are guns, God and judicial killings.

Candidates must not make any serious attack on the insane gun laws. You may discuss firearm restrictions only with extreme caution.

Don't reveal even the slightest hint that you don't fulsomely and unequivocally believe in God and pray to him every day.

And only a political deathwish - if you'll pardon the grisly pun - could induce any candidate to speak up against capital punishment.

So, in this otherwise big, generous nation with a liberal impulse that stretches into many corners of ordinary people's lives and with more dazzlingly talented people than any other, a know-nothing nice guy is up against a know-all nerd for the top job. Scary, eh?

Who would I vote for here were I eligible? Well, if George W. were as smart as Benjamin Franklin and as intellectually gifted as Abraham Lincoln, I would be unable to support him because of what a New York Times writer, Bob Herbert, refers to as this relentless bombardment of state-sanctioned homicide that occurs in Texas, the state Bush governs.

A National Public Radio documentary has revealed how damaging to the prison staff and other people involved is the continuing stream of executions in the small Texas town of Huntsville. One guard participated in 130 executions and then had a breakdown, which he describes vividly.

It's only fair to say that Governor Bush has no right to commute death sentences, only to postpone them, but his state kills many, many more than any other in the US, the only Western country that allows capital punishment.

The evidence is so clear that executions do not deter murder that even its supporters don't invoke that argument any more; and the evidence that the system is palpably unfair to the poor and the black is compelling.

And yet not only does the killing go on, but Bush expresses no personal anguish and, worse still, the subject is not considered politically safe territory for Gore to enter. This is a blot on the honour of a great country.