John Rapley - Foreign Focus THE WARM-UP fight is now finished in the United States Having all but locked up the Democratic presidential nomination with his near-sweep in the 'Super-Tuesday' primaries, Senator John Kerry will now turn his guns on President George W. Bush. He will find that Mr. Bush already has a huge battery lined up against him.
The Democratic Party establishment created a compact primary schedule in order to produce a candidate early. The result was a fast-paced campaign which gave an insurmountable advantage to the candidate with 'momentum'. Once the candidacy of Howard Dean was destroyed, that favoured John Kerry.
The upside of this is that the campaign was much less bruising than in past years. Mr. Kerry emerged in good shape for the fight ahead. The downside is that he received so little scrutiny during the campaign that Mr. Kerry may be vulnerable to the aggressive attacks the Bush camp will shortly launch. The difficulty here for Democrats is that their loyalty to Mr. Kerry does not provide him with a strong fallback position: exit polls revealed little affection for him, as most voters who supported Mr. Kerry did so because they judged him the most 'electable' of the candidates.
Therefore, if for any reason the Republicans can portray Mr. Kerry as less electable than initially supposed, he may find himself in a difficult position. On the other hand, favouring him is the sheer degree of Democratic antipathy to Mr. Bush which the primaries revealed. The Democrats are more mobilised and energised than they have been in years.
This augurs well for the party. In a polarised and evenly divided electorate, most analysts are predicting that victory in the presidential election will go to whichever party turns out its supporters on election day. In recent years, Republicans have enjoyed an edge here. The party has built an impressive grassroots organisation to match its astonishing prowess in raising corporate cash.
Furthermore, eight years of Bill Clinton both mobilised right-wing Republicans and demoralised left-wing Democrats. The resulting edge in turnout both lost the Democrats the 2000 election and brought further gains to Republicans in the 2002 Congressional elections.
However, the candidacy of former Vermont governor Howard Dean in this year's primaries gave the Democrats a renewed populist streak. Party-members returned from their living-rooms and showed a degree of commitment and energy not seen in years. Meanwhile, there have been signs that conservative Republicans are growing just a little bit disenchanted with President Bush. Most analysts see his recently-announced support for a constitutional ban on gay marriage as a rearguard attempt to shore up this support.
This brings up the Nader factor. Ralph Nader, the Green Party candidate in 2000, has announced he will run again in 2004, though this time as an independent. Because many disaffected Democrats voted for Mr. Nader in 2000, it has always been easy to blame him for losing the Democrats the election.
In fact, polling data indicate that most of the people who supported Nader in 2002 were not going to vote for Al Gore. Instead, Nader turned on many people who had been turned off by the Democratic shift to the right. My guess is that this year, determined as they are to remove Mr. Bush, few committed Democrats will give Mr. Nader a second look.
CLINTONITE FACTION
That is, unless the Democrats once again manage to alienate their left-wing. It is worth noting that Mr. Kerry, despite his 'huge' margins of victory, was still supported by less than half of Democrats. As eager as they are to dethrone Dubya, voters who supported more left-wing candidates than Mr. Kerry could conceivably still be separated from his candidacy. To prevent this eventuality, Mr. Kerry will probably need to avoid too close an embrace of the Clintonite faction in the party (a fine balancing-act, given the latter's influence in the party).
At the end of the day, though, this election is likely to be influenced by one factor more than any other: jobs. Right now, economic optimism is low because employment remains sluggish. If it continues that way, President Bush will be on the defensive. However, if employment picks up this year, independents are likely to gravitate to him. Look to Friday's employment figures for a possible omen of things to come.
John Rapley is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Government, UWI, Mona.
