I have only once been to a county cricket match; I have never been again. The problem was that, from the stands, I couldn't see the ball. That didn't matter, my companion told me, because you can infer the presence of the ball from the body language and movements of the players. In that case, I asked him, why have a ball at all?
The same thought went through my mind in the early hours of last Friday morning, just after the first US presidential debate had finished. As the candidates left the stage at the University of Miami, the camera cut to the BBC's correspondent Katty Kay in the nearby press-room.
ILLUSTRATION: YU SHA
"What's going to happen in this room in the next hour," she told us, "as both candidates send their teams out to speak to the media is going to have a huge impact on how voters decide how this debate went."
It didn't really matter what President George W. Bush and Senator John Kerry had said or how they had said it; what mattered was whose version of what they'd said and how they'd said it the media would pass on to the people of America.
This bizarre circularity was already being breached, however. Within minutes, Reuters was reporting from St Anselm's College in Manchester, New Hampshire, where seven voters had been watching the debate. Three were for Bush and stayed for Bush, three were for Kerry and stayed for Kerry, but the seventh, one Adam Schibley, now said he was leaning strongly toward Kerry.
Early analysis concentrated on the bodies, not the ball. Kerry had won the cutaway campaign, said those who'd watched it splitscreen on C-Span. He took notes when Bush spoke, whereas Bush variously grimaced, winced, smirked or almost shook his head while Kerry was talking. Within hours, the Democratic National Committee had released a video of Bush's cutaways.
I thought Bush looked a bit scared while Kerry was right at home. Once again, with his height, booming voice and dense hair, the senator reminded me of a tree, while the prehensile lips and small button eyes of the president have always suggested a small monkey to the cartoonists of the world. At one difficult moment, you half expected Bush to run up Kerry's trunk and take refuge in the topmost foliage, far above the carping, difficult world.
The simian image ended at looks. Bush will have surprised jaundiced Europeans by getting his countries right, recalling what the US had done in Liberia and knowing that, in Darfur, "the rainy season will be ending soon." It was Kerry, strangely enough, who erred, locating the cells of the KGB headquarters in Moscow as being "under Treblinka Square." He must have meant under the Lubianka or under Dzerzhinsky Square -- Treblinka was a Nazi extermination camp.
Bush was more religious and emotional, climbing a mountain to see the valley of peace and tearing up with a war widow; Kerry was more incisive and analytical. But their tasks had been delineated long before Thursday night. In a piece written for the latest issue of Atlantic Monthly, James Fallows predicted that each would have a single message.
"George Bush will try in his every answer to convey, `I am a wartime president, and I am strong.' John Kerry will try to convey, `You don't know what you are doing and you are weak,'" Fallows said.
So they did.
"He changes positions and you can't change positions in the war on terror if you want to win," Bush charged. "Mixed messages send the wrong signals."
"You can be certain and be wrong," Kerry replied.
Or, as a Democratic strategist said on Friday: "Go back through the transcript and you'll see it boils down to four words: more of the same. Kerry is a new direction for the future and Bush seems stuck in the past and doesn't acknowledge the troubles."
Given the need for the candidates simultaneously to avoid making a big mistake, to have their body speak the correct language, and for them to repeat the core, boiled-down message, perhaps we Brits shouldn't pay too much attention to what was actually said. Who, after all, remembers what was promised in the Gore/Bush debates of 2000? I certainly don't.
And the situation is the situation. Whatever Kerry says he would or would not have done in Iraq (the invasion of which he compared to conquering Mexico because of Pearl Harbor), the fact is that the coalition is there, the violence is happening and the elections are planned for January, the month when a president Kerry would be inaugurated. What can we tell from the debate about the way this potential new head of state might behave?
"Under Bush," said Kerry, "the best case scenario -- what we have now. Worst case scenario -- civil war. I can do better." Or, as he put it for the benefit of US troops in Iraq: "My message is: help is on the way!"
What help? Take this passage from Kerry. "Today, we are 90 percent of the casualties and 90 percent of the cost: US$200 billion -- US$200 billion that could have been used for health care, for schools, for construction, for prescription drugs for seniors, and it's in Iraq."
The suggestion here, repeated elsewhere during the debate, is that Kerry will reduce the cost in men and materials by getting more allies to sign up for duty in Iraq, presumably during the post-election period. The troops are to be saved not by the US, but by the German cavalry.
Yet, though he cited failures in Afghanistan (leaving Bush to comment on the scale of voter registration there), Kerry never allowed that perhaps the greatest failure has been that of NATO countries to provide the peacekeepers they had promised. So he replaced one illusion -- that things are basically all right -- with another, that "help is on the way."
And if it isn't, what will president Kerry do to get his fire stations, health care and prescription drugs? Withdraw? And if he faces other challenging situations, how far will he be guided by the political and economic requirements to build almost consensual coalitions?
On Sudan, he said there was, indeed, another genocide, and: "We could never allow another Rwanda." But how would "we" stop it? If he has followed the painful progression of the matter of Darfur through the UN, he must know that some other countries, like Dickens' Circumlocution Office, are dedicated to the business of not getting things done.
And this takes me to what was the most worrying part of Kerry's thinking, as revealed in Miami. "You know, the president's father did not go into Iraq, into Baghdad, beyond Basra," Kerry told viewers approvingly. "And the reason he didn't is because there was no viable exit strategy. And he said our troops would be occupiers in a bitterly hostile land. That's exactly where we find ourselves today."
Quite so. So, instead, he allowed the Shiite and Kurdish rebellions to be crushed and the result was 12 years of crippling sanctions, of bombings to enforce the no-fly zones, of non-compliance with UN resolutions and, of course, of Saddamite state terror. Of course, there were no cameras there, except when the Baath command wanted there to be, no visitors except when Saddam allowed in his tame Galloways. Was that, as Kerry was never asked, good policy, because no US troops died, though hundreds of thousands of Iraqis did? And what did that stoke up for the future?
There are a thousand reasons for hoping that Kerry wins the election next month, not least because of the chance of cooling the anti-American fever in much of the world. But I will also want to know that he sees the same hard ball flying through the air that I see.
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