In continuing my ecstatic wave goodbye to W., I've placed below an article, "The Big Boss of the World," that appeared in Australia's Sydney Morning Herald on November 3, 2004. Written by my most favorite of writers, the uber-talented expat, Bill Bryson, it is an attempt to explain the Bush / Kerry election to the people of Australia. I've read this article too many times to count these past four years and so it seemed fitting to include it in my ongoing adieu.
The Big Boss of the World
Brain versus corn ... Kerry is perceived to have the intellect, but cannot inspire his supporters, while Bush seems able to do almost anything - such as eating raw vegetables - without denting his folksy image. Photo: Reuters
George Bush, the regular guy happy to feed a live fish to his dog, is up against a man with the hair to be president and an air of unconquerable aloofness. Bill Bryson untangles the contenders.
I've been thinking a lot lately about the mysterious bulge in George Bush's jacket. The idea that Bush might have been wired for assistance has a kind of endearing charm. With the best will in the world - and of course I am not offering anything as generous as that here - you have to concede that a radio transmitter would explain a great deal, not least Bush's interesting tendency to order himself to pipe down at odd moments in the debates.
Days before any thought of wireless nefariousness entered my head, I remember being struck that Bush referred to the Italian Prime Minister as "Sylvia Burrus", and then a minute or two later, when the name was no longer conspicuously germane, blurted out "Silvio Berlusconi" as if it had just miraculously come to him. Which, as we now know, it may well have.What is interesting in this is not how swiftly the story faded from the nation's attention - news is really just a series of nano-events these days - but how little effect it had in its brief spell of lively consideration. Bush, I'm told, could have walked up to the lectern with television rabbit ears strapped to his head and it would have made little difference to how most Americans perceive him. Those who dislike and distrust him do so maximally already, while those who adore him are equally unwavering in their devotions.For those of us who are not on the adoring end of the equation, the question that naturally springs to mind is: what would it take to get people not to want to vote for him? One quality that doesn't seem to matter as it once did - and I am sorry to bring it up because it is an awfully touchy subject - is the matter of presidential intelligence. Consider an interesting historical parallel. In 1976, while wooing Mexican-American voters, President Gerald Ford was presented with a large, freshly made tamale to pose with. The tamale was wrapped, in the traditional manner, in a corn husk to keep it warm.Unfortunately for his reputation, Ford proceeded to try to eat the whole thing, fibrous husk and all. This was roughly equivalent to sitting down to lunch in a diner and trying to eat the place mat. He looked so foolish that millions of people decided not to vote for him, and instead we got four years of Jimmy Carter and his very odd family, which was a national sacrifice, to be sure. Now cast your mind forward 28 years to August 2004. Sensing a photo opportunity while campaigning in Iowa, Bush stopped his motorcade and bounded over to a vegetable stand, bought an ear of corn and, as cameras excitedly clicked, proceeded to try to eat it raw, discovering in the process what all other grown people know already - that eating raw corn is like eating raw wheat or raw rice, which is to say not remotely satisfactory.In the same week, while fishing, Bush tossed his dog a live fish to torment to death on the lawn. I hesitate to show disrespect for the President because, as the radio talk show people constantly remind us, criticising the President (or any of his actions or the actions of anyone who has a gun or wears an American flag on his lapel, or such a person's mother) gives comfort to the enemy, so I'll just say very quietly that both of these incidents made him look just a little bit not-too-smart. Yet neither action, as far as can be told, affected Bush's standing with the electorate even a trifle.Just as Bush seemed constitutionally unable to dismay his supporters, so Senator John Kerry seemed throughout the campaign constitutionally unable to galvanise his. The only thing rarer than someone who feelingly supports John Kerry is, it has to be said, someone who understands what his policies are. It is hardly a novel observation to note that roughly half the electorate has voted not for Kerry, but against Bush.On the face of it, Bush would seem to have the lead in accumulated negatives. The economy is not looking terribly rosy. The budget surplus of $US200 billion ($268 billion) that he inherited four years ago has become a projected deficit this year of $US422 billion and is heading for aggregated arrears of $US2.3 trillion by the end of the decade. More than a million jobs have been lost in the same period. The rebuilding of Iraq is such a mess that even many conservative commentators - notably George Will and Tucker Carlson - have become outspoken in their criticism of the Administration's foreign policy.America has achieved, under Bush's command, the extraordinary distinction of not only failing to find the weapons it sought, but then losing 340 tonnes of those it did find. The President's approval rating is stuck below 50 per cent, which is hardly a ringing endorsement. He can't even be said to be a hard worker. Extraordinarily, considering all that was going on, Bush spent 98 days at his ranch last year.This compares with the 19 days of annual vacation that President Bill Clinton averaged in his two terms (though comparisons are perhaps unfair as we now know that Clinton took much of his relaxation in the Oval Office) or the 41 days a year that President Ronald Reagan averaged - which, it should be noted, includes his recovery time after being shot. Bush, in short, would seem to have an abundance of vulnerabilities. Yet it was Kerry who spent most of the campaign on the defensive. The consensus view seems to be that he has excellent hair and a good presidential manner - and these things count for more than we might comfortably suppose - but that these are offset by the more mixed signals that emanate from his patrician bearing and slight air of unconquerable aloofness.Specifically, Kerry is smart but not endearingly self-deprecating. He doesn't seem wholly at ease with strangers. He is proficient in French - a language spoken, notoriously, by men who sometimes kiss each other on the cheeks and make faithless allies. He's married to a woman of independent wealth and mind who looks as if she would have to ask a servant where the brooms in her house are kept. When he puts on a hunting jacket or fishing gear, it always looks as if it has come straight out of the packaging. You kind of suspect he doesn't own a single old hat.Bush is unquestionably the winner in the regular guy department. Like all successful presidents, he is effortlessly comfortable with ordinary people and wholly unashamed to be folksy, and there is no question that he inspires trust among millions. His wife is adored universally. It's really only his daughters (who look, as one observer acutely noted, like the sort of young women you would expect to see jumping out of a cake at a bachelor party) who seem a little sketchy, as I believe the younger people say, but they have been kept mostly in the background during the campaign.On the basis of trust alone, I think Bush has probably got the edge. Still, this being America, anything is possible. This is a country, never forget, where 11 per cent of young adults can't locate the Pacific Ocean on a map, where nearly half of all adults and a quarter of university graduates believe that the Earth was created in seven days, by God, sometime in the past 10,000 years, and where 20 per cent of adults evidently believe that Saddam Hussein not only had weapons of mass destruction but used them on us. It is often remarked how worrying it is that half the people don't vote. I think I should find it rather more worrying if they did.In any case, however accurately pollsters track voter preferences, the critical factors are how many people turn out on election day and where the turning out is done. The US presidential election is not really a popularity contest at all. It's about winning the right states and collecting the requisite number of electoral votes. Al Gore, as I am sure you will have been reminded many times already this week, received more votes in 2000 than any other candidate in history except Ronald Reagan, and still didn't become president.The most unnerving fact of all is that about 5 per cent of voters make their minds up on election day. They just see how they feel when they get out of bed in the morning. It is these decisive souls who will determine who leads the free world for the next four years.
Winner of the best monkey impression at the the 16th summit of the Asian Pacific Economic Cooperation. Other talents include pretzel choking, confidently speaking nonsense and an 8-year record that has him in the running for the title of Worst President in History. 
The cost, very high cost, of a Presidential pardon.
