Roger Franklin: Tuesday's result - no one wins

COMMENT

First, a declaration so readers can judge where the rest of this column is coming from. Full disclosure leaves no choice. To write about George Bush and what will happen on Tuesday means dispensing with even the pretence of objectivity. This President is that kind of figure, a man who doesn't encourage ambivalence. So here it is, all upfront and honest: I quite like the guy and hope he wins the election by a country mile.

Now for the rest of this piece: Why in these, the final and frantic minutes of this interminable election campaign, that opinion has jeopardised quite a few friendships, and why, a couple of times during recent heated exchanges at dinner parties, in bars and on the golf course, there have been moments when I didn't much care if I never again exchanged a civil word with those who hold the opposing view.

All of the above is by way of explaining why on Tuesday night - or perhaps weeks later if the decision goes to the judges, as it did in 2000 - there will be no real winners.

Yes, either John F. Kerry or George W. Bush will secure the right to shiver on the Capitol Steps, place a hand on the Bible and swear to uphold and defend the Constitution of the United States.

But a winner, a genuine winner? A man who can express in a single voice the discordant chorus of modern America's politics and passions? No chance of that. No matter how the votes are cast and counted, the man who proceeds down the Mall to 1600 Pennsylvania Ave will be no better than the runner-up.

The real victor will be rather more ephemeral than either of the flesh-and-blood candidates. Call him President Bile.

If you are an ardent Democrat, a Bush victory on Tuesday will speak to nothing but the corruption of the US electoral system and, for some, the irredeemable stupidity of their fellow voters.

The Republicans stole the last election in Florida and the courts, they will say, and now they have done it again. Across America, both sides have planes chartered and flying squads of lawyers standing ready to jet in and argue the toss.

If you are a Republican, the prospect of a Kerry presidency conjures images of fraud and ballot-stuffing and dirty tricks. In Ohio alone are five electorates where activist organisations aligned with the Democrats registered so many new voters there are now more names on the rolls than US census data indicates live in those precincts.

At the end of this interminable campaign, that's how far apart both sides are, each waiting with its reasons and excuses to dismiss whatever the official result turns out to be.

And it is everywhere, too. Two months ago in Harlem, cabbie Etzer Jerome picked up a woman who asked him what he thought of Bush. The Haitian immigrant said he would be voting Republican, explaining that he had been hacking for fares near the old World Trade Center when the towers were hit. He was about to add that, by his reckoning, Kerry lacked the right stuff to stop another attack.

"She said it was a disgrace for a black man to vote for Bush, then demanded to get out of my cab," he told me. A month later, he was summoned to Taxi Court to answer his passenger's complaint of offensive behaviour, fined $500 and banned from driving for three weeks. "All because I like Bush," he told me, shaking his head in wonder. "This country, it's becoming not the one I know."

To this reporter, it was a revelation. Despite their reputation for cowboy enthusiasms on the international stage, Americans have always tended to be restrained, reserved, and infuriatingly polite when discussing politics. The idea of total strangers assailing each other, well ... In more than 20 years covering this country, I had never seen such bitterness and fury.

Jerome figures he lost more than $2000 in earnings, but that sum is trivial in comparison with some of this election season's other deficits. Wherever you look - the professional political class, the pollsters, the press - again and again, no winners. Start with the media, which are limping to the finish line with credibility in tatters. A month ago, the CBS news show 60 Minutes went to air with a scoop based on documents that alleged Bush had been given preferential treatment during his time in the Texas Air National Guard.

That may be the case, although it has never been proved, and the documents the network offered didn't advance the case. No sooner made public than exposed as clumsy forgeries, what they did establish was CBS' clumsy willingness to make itself a tool of the Kerry campaign, even to the extent of co-ordinating the release of its story with Kerry campaign operatives and ad men.

Meanwhile, at rival ABC, news director Mark Halperin unwisely issued a memo that accused both candidates of dealing in deceptions, but stated that Bush's were worse and instructed reporters to slant their coverage accordingly.

Once, it might have mattered. No longer. Bloggers, websites, talk radio, Rupert Murdoch's Fox News - those new voices have been quick to assail the old, to put out their own versions of "the facts". The result is a cacophony of competing screamers and shriekers, truth and civility lost in the bedlam.

And the pollsters? It's now clear that they no longer have a clue. Throughout the Clinton Administration, such was the prevailing faith in the number-crunchers' ability to peg the present and ever-changing state of the American mind that pending decisions were filtered through focus groups and phone surveys as a matter of course.

The faith in their arcane arts was even brought to bear on the choice of a First Dog, with Clinton getting himself a labrador when the surveys indicated voters regarded the breed as boasting the appropriate "presidential" dignity.

Today, as the uncertainty over Tuesday's result demonstrates, confusion is the pollsters' sorry lot. In March, leading pollster John Zogby believed Kerry was a lead-pipe cinch. By last week, he had the Democrat at the longer odds. Why? Because technology has made his profession a guessing game.

Cellphone users who can't be reached for their opinions now represent around 7 per cent of the electorate, and their absence from samples skews the samples, as do all the households that weed out dinnertime pests with caller-ID systems. You can see the resulting confusion at work in New Jersey, which Al Gore won at a canter in 2000.

Last week, two polls had that state's race as a dead heat and the others showed it surprisingly close. Yet in Ohio, which Bush carried and needs to do so again, Kerry is said to hold the advantage. Except Bush hasn't been campaigning there to any great extent, which indicates his own party's private polls put him ahead.

Go figure - or rather, don't, because it isn't worth the mental effort. Might as well disembowel chickens and examine their entrails as put any faith in the polls, especially with the vast influx of new voters which both parties have been stacking on the rolls.

Which way will those millions of additions break? No way of telling, nor even of knowing how many may actually exist. Just last week in Colorado, a pair of paid recruiters were charged with electoral fraud after being caught with registration forms heavy on made-up names and addresses.

In another incident in Ohio, a canvasser told the police who arrested him that he was being paid with crack cocaine for adding fresh names to the rolls.

Come Tuesday, which group is more likely to vote: Junkies and residents of graveyards or the evangelical Christians Bush has been signing up and firing up?

Whatever the answer, because the stakes are so high and the fractured polls make it impossible to anticipate the result, the bitterness will only get worse. If Bush wins, he will have four years to stack the Supreme Court with his nominees, meaning an unassailable conservative majority likely to last for a generation - and leave Democrats out in cold. On Capitol Hill, regardless of who wins the presidential contest, Republicans will almost certainly also retain control of both houses.

How will that frustration manifest itself? Well, it already is - and it isn't pretty. In Florida on Wednesday, attorney Barry Seltzer, 46, steered his Cadillac on to the footpath and drove it straight at campaigning Republican Congresswoman Katherine Harris. "I was exercising my political expression," he said, after being released on bail.

So, apparently, was Republican Michael Garone, 52, whom Florida cops charged that same day with pulling a gun on a Democrat activist. If you were to compile a list of similar incidents, they would be drawn from all over the country and fill page after page.

So, given the stakes and the acrimony, by what right does a non-US citizen like me wish for a Bush victory? This President has run up a huge deficit, alienated much of Europe, dissed the United Nations and campaigned for the government's right to stick a wowser's nose into private citizens' bedrooms, especially if the occupants happen to be gay. All of this Kerry has noted, and he hasn't been wrong.

But for me, none of that compares with the big, square hole at the tip of Manhattan where the World Trade Center once stood. I lost friends when the towers came down. I went to their funerals. I don't want to attend any more.

For all Bush's faults, for the past three years, I haven't had to. The Taleban, which harboured September 11's hijackers, Bush swept from power. As for Saddam, well he might not have had direct links with Osama's martyrs, but he funded other terrorists, gave them a roost in Baghdad and made threatening noises about inflicting further damage on the Great Satan (and my property values).

Now he's gone, as is Libya's covert programme to build a nuclear weapon, which Colonel Gaddafi revealed and abandoned rather than risk a US assault.

Kerry says he would stay the course, smiting terror wherever he finds it. But after all his changes of direction and contradictory pronouncements, you have to wonder. With Bush, you don't. You know he will try to kill the animals, hopefully before they have a chance to bring down more skyscrapers or stage a replay of Beslan's massacre of the innocents.

And that's why I'm hoping for four more years - even if the real winner is President Bile.