The excitement is in the election and who can win And the media are going to have to give it to them if they want to keep their ratings up.It also suggests that Michael Howard has got his tactics wrong. He - just as Bush - was in the forefront of making politics into a video game of power.Charles Kennedy is right that much of the public - especially women - don't like the cattiness and insults of party politicking. The BBC wasn't responsible for the growing personalisation of attacks on the Prime Minister and his colleagues. If voters sense a candidate has a chance, then the punters pile in behind him or her with half an eye to making a contest of it.Translate this into British terms and what do you have? The war has opened up an even more profound divide than in the US but it has also aroused an almost violent determination among those who opposed it and felt betrayed by Blair to want the Prime Minister out, in the same way that Democrats want to see Bush fall.That doesn't bode well for politicians, and Lord Hutton, who dearly wish to restore a sense of respect for public office and to end the visceral attacks on ministers. But, whatever they say, as soon as the public makes up its mind that the candidates are not up to making a contest, that is it The poor politician is yesterday's story. When the next race is due, then the voter takes an interest again, but from the point of view of whether the contender has a chance not what he has to say.Howard Dean (or William Hague, or Iain Duncan Smith) arouse an interest in the initial stages because they are new and seem fresh. The excitement is in the election, and who can win.Politicians tend to blame the press for this, just as the press tends to blame the professionalisation of politics which has made everything into a process of opinion manipulation But the end result is what we've seen in recent elections. As elections approach the voter takes an interest if it is a real race. As soon as it's over, the loser is simply cast aside as of no more interest. The aim is not so much to pursue a different policy as to get Bush out.That would certainly accord with a deeper trend developing in politics - its depoliticisation. As party loyalties have declined and voters have taken less and less interest in policy debates, so the public has grown to regard it more and more as a sporting event. What the Democrats want is not a candidate who best expresses their views on education, taxes or even the war but one who has a real chance of beating the incumbent President.
It may be that Democrats want a more open race before finally settling on a choice. In which case he may return to the fore in the primaries in the southern states next week.But it may be that what we are seeing in America, and will see here, is a dramatic sharpening of the party divide on personality lines. It may be to do with a voter preference for experience and authority as the election draws closer. It is also serving to sharpen the divisions between the Labour Party in Britain and the Democrats in the US, forcing Blair more and more into an association with Bush on party divisions.But the really interesting point is that the beneficiary of the anti-Bush, anti-war mood in the US among the Democrat contenders at the moment is not Howard Dean, who staked his reputation on opposition to the invasion of Iraq from the start, but John Kerry, who was as enthusiastically pro-invasion as Iain Duncan Smith was on this side of the Atlantic.Just why this should be, and why Howard Dean should fall so quickly from being the odds-on favourite to be Democrat nominee for the President to a limping also-ran, is something of a puzzle. That could have its own reverberations over here as the accusations and information grow in the US just as Tony Blair is trying to quieten down the whole debate post-Hutton in Britain. If Michael Howard - or Charles Kennedy - want to learn a few lessons on how to cope with a triumphant Prime Minister and how to pursue the Iraqi issue they could do no better than look across the Atlantic. There, despite every initial calculation, the reasons for going to war, have become a major issue in the political campaigning. The country's intelligence head, August Hanning, arranged the exchanges and was on his way to Israel yesterday More from Robert Fisk. The remains of three Israeli soldiers - Beni Avraham, Avi Avitan and Omar Saoud - were handed over to their country's military representatives at an airport near Cologne in Germany yesterday. They were seized - dead or dying - after Hizbollah guerrillas had attacked their base at Shebaa farms in a tiny rectangle of occupied Lebanon in 2000, months after the Israeli army's retreat from the south of the country.Later today, the Israelis will hand over 460 Hizbollah and Amal militia bodies which have been lying, most of them, in shallow graves in a secret Israeli "enemy" cemetery.Ariel Sharon, the Israeli Prime Minister, has been criticised for yesterday's hostage bazaar but the German government comes out of the whole affair smelling of roses. It was for Mr Arad that Mr Tannenbaum had flown to Lebanon, lured apparently by the Hizbollah who were convinced he was a Mossad agent.Mr Tannenbaum was a free man yesterday, along with Mr Obeid, Mr Dirani and the other Lebanese prisoners and the 400 Palestinians - most of whom were to have been released later this year anyway - and today it will be the turn of the dead. His son had maintained a website for the imprisoned father he had never seen. Only recently did he receive a visit from the Red Cross.Ditto Mr Dirani, abducted by Israeli troops in Lebanon's Bekaa Valley because he had originally held Mr Arad, who was captured when the aircraft he was navigating was shot down during an Israeli raid on the Palestinian refugee camp of Ein el-Helweh in 1986.If Mr Arad is still alive - and the Lebanese, Syrians and Iranians have denied holding him captive these past 18 years - then Israel will later release its longest held Lebanese hostage, Samir Kantar, who killed three Israelis in 1979. Sheik Obeid was a tough, bearded supporter of the Lebanese Hizbollah when he was kidnapped by Israeli troops from his home in 1989. |
 |
 |
