'.the central lie of this campaign is the way Bush morphed Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein, the religious fanatic and the secular dictator. we are led in a dangerous time by a man who calls chaos 'freedom on the march', a president who uses Sept 11 as his cover story.'
(Ellen Goodman: 'A Post-Bush Mind-Set,' Washington Post, October 30)

'Slouching towards Bethlehem' is a phrase from Yeats' famous apocalyptic poem, 'The Second Coming', with its often-quoted lines: 'Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;/ Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,/ The blood-dimmed tide is loosed./ The best lack all conviction, while the worst/

BIN LADEN. has his appearance helped or hurt Bush?

Are full of passionate intensity.' Yeats' poem offers the speculation so beloved of the George Bush evangelical right today: 'Surely the Second Coming is at hand.' And it ends with a horrified image of the anti-Christ:

'And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?'
This column has used the title and quoted the lines above before. But that's a sign of the times.

At any rate, at around 3:00 pm on Friday, when my computer hung and, while waiting for it to reboot, I switched on CNN and saw, in these exhausted, exacerbated, dying days of the most prolonged, hate-filled, bitterly divisive US presidential election campaign in living memory (a campaign looking, moreover, increasingly likely to end, not in the cymbals' clash of November 2nd but in a weeks'-long cacophony of bitter recriminations and recounts, of partisan lawsuits and ragings over provisional ballots and absentee ballots and voter suppression thuggery and electronic voting machines' fraud, while both Americans and the watching world remain stuck on 'Pause', waiting to exhale, and beyond even the spectre of another four years of Bush looms the greater dread of an America with its democratic system crippled) - when, as I say, in the midst of this looming madness, I turned on the TV and saw Osama bin Laden abruptly inserting himself into a hundred million American living rooms as if to say quietly, 'Peekaboo,' I have to tell you: my blood crawled, and all I could think of was Yeats,
'Surely the Second Coming is at hand', though with the waking, weekday part of my mind I don't believe it.

(I e-mailed the Mermaid: 'I have a spooky sense of 'things coming together: the threat of chaos at the US elections,
Arafat lying dying of unknown causes in Paris, the imminent razing of Fallujah, the Israelis' preparing to bomb Iran, and now this!' She responded: 'It's all alarming and seems to be linked in ways that are not clear. I can't help thinking that in another age the [lunar] eclipse two nights ago would be interpreted as a portent of these momentous events-in-waiting.'

She was right, of course, and Shakespeare, had he been around, would have jumped up and congratulated her for seeing it. The moon, the moon! What the Bard through the lips of Othello called, 'The very error of the moon!')

The Americans have their own portent. It appears that whenever in the past the Washington Redskins have lost their last home game before an election, the sitting president has been defeated, whereas, whenever they've won, he's been re-elected. The Redskins play the Packers at home tonight (Sunday night). I suppose the reader interested in the fate of the world might do worse than to tune in to the game.

So, two days before the election that will decide the fate and future of the world, here we are, exchanging what ought to be an educated, predictive, taut column for one reduced to trafficking in signs and omens (and a prose that's itself turning tautological and portentous). Why is this?
Because:

1 Even before bin Laden's last-minute insertion of himself into the American Dream, there seemed to this columnist no way to call the coming election. I wasted days trying to understand how reputable polls could repeatedly be all over the place - just a few days ago, eg, there was an 8-point spread between Gallup and Zogby - a state of affairs that should have sent the stocks of polling companies into freefall, and may yet do so.

(In fact, CNN/Gallup were evidently so embarrassed that their polls kept giving Bush a 5 to 8-point lead over Kerry when most other polls were showing a tie that they began replacing their results with those of a 'poll of polls': an aggregate of five polls, including their own - which latter, of course, skewed the result in Bush's favour anyway, though not as drastically as it had been doing on its lonesome).

There were various reasons, I learned, for these disparities: the order and way in which questions were put, the differing criteria pollsters used to distinguish likely from registered voters, the differing extents to which they pressed 'undecideds' to say which way they were leaning, whether a poll engaged in demographic weighting, and if so, to what extent. But all this was of academic interest only, and had no predictive value.
For what they're worth:

The most recent polls have been AP's and Reuters/Zogby's. The latter, a tracking poll taken Wednesday through Friday and published on Saturday, gives Kerry a 1-point lead overall. 'Bush continues to hold on to solid support among Republicans, investors, married voters and born again Christians,' pollster John Zogby explained. 'Kerry [has been] expand[ing] his lead among young voters, African/Americans and Hispanics.'

The Reuters poll saw Kerry as having a 48-41 per cent edge among newly-registered voters, a group Zogby calls 'a wild card' whose influence will depend on how many of its members actually vote. According to him, Bush was leading in Ohio, Colorado, Iowa, Michigan, New Mexico and Nevada, while Kerry was leading in Florida, Minnesota, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin - a last-minute reversal of a fortnight-long trend which had Bush pulling ahead in Florida and Kerry winning Ohio. The conventional wisdom has long been that whoever wins two of the big three 'battleground states' (Ohio, Pennsylvania and Florida) would win the election. By yesterday the CW was at least considering shifting to, 'Whoever wins Wisconsin wins.'

Also Saturday, the Associated Press (which headlined its story 'Bush-Kerry in Electoral College Tie') declared: '26 states are solidly behind Bush or lean his way for 222 electoral votes. Kerry has 16 states plus the District of Columbia secured or leaning his direction for 211 electoral votes.' The AP analysis sums up: 'Bush needs to scrape together at least 48 of the remaining 105 electoral votes to keep his job. Kerry needs 59 to move into the White House.
The remaining 105 electoral votes are in the eight most competitive states: Florida, Ohio, Nevada, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Iowa, Minnesota and New Mexico. The poll gave Bush Florida, and Kerry, Pennsylvania and Ohio. But the other variables were daunting.
All this, as I say, for what it's worth. Even before bin Laden played his joker, the polls were behaving in ways unlikely to inspire confidence.

2 Republican thuggery designed to block or otherwise defraud the voting electorate has been taking place on such a large scale, the defining question of this election may be: To what extent are a roused and alert Democratic Party and its monitors able to thwart it? As the Washington Post's Harold Meyerson fumed ('The GOP's Shameful Vote Strategy,' Oct 27):

'With Election Day almost upon us, it's not clear whether President Bush is running a campaign or plotting a coup d'etat. By all accounts, Republicans are spending these last precious days devoting nearly as much energy to suppressing the Democratic vote as they are to mobilising their own. Time was when Republicans were at least embarrassed by their efforts to keep African/Americans from the polls. For George W Bush, Karl Rove and their legion of genteel thugs, however, universal suffrage is just one more musty liberal ideal that threatens conservative rule. Today's Republicans have elevated vote suppression from a dirty secret to a public norm.'

And Meyerson reports: 'In Ohio, Republicans have recruited 3,600 poll monitors and assigned them disproportionately to such heavily black areas as inner-city Cleveland, where Democratic '527' groups have registered many tens of thousands of new voters.This is civic life in the age of George W Bush, in which politics has become a continuation of civil war by other means.' (cf last week Sunday's 'In our Time', titled 'Total War': WB.)

The likelihood is, however, that the result of Tuesday's election won't be forthcoming for days, probably weeks - and that, according to a CNN poll, 66 per cent of the supporters of the losing candidate won't accept it when it is. (What does 'won't accept it' mean there?)
All this, and we haven't even begun to discuss the likely effect of the intervention of bin Laden.

The Republican spinners say, of course, that it returns the focus to terrorism from Iraq, and a 'Terrorism' election is bound to favour Bush. The Democrats counter that simply by presenting himself, bin Laden showed Americans their gunslinger president has failed. Certainly, by changing the subject from Iraq's missing explosives and a cataract of bad news coming out of that 'dying country' (the phrase is from
Action Against Hunger, the Paris-based humanitarian organisation which announced last Wednesday that it was pulling out of Iraq. 'Action Against Hunger is obligated today,' the organisation said, 'to leave a country that is dying'), bin
Laden has helped Bush - a consequence some experts think he may well have intended.

My own view is that the bin Laden tape won't change much: support on both sides has already hardened, and the handful of true undecideds are equally free to choose between the Republican and Democratic 'spins' described above.

As for this column's prediction of the outcome of Tuesday's election - try Chaos.

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