Democratic Populism Trumps Republican Values: Bush and Kerry have been neck and neck in the polls for months. With the numbers so close, campaigners on both sides are fighting for a narrow, geographically specific section of the middle class in key states that have been most impacted by job losses and the march of their young men and women to war. This segment of the U.S. population is marked by resentments and insecurities not seen since the pre-Reagan era. It’s not a fertile market for the Republicans’ value-based campaigning. Particularly, the appeal by Bush and allies to hot-button issues such as same-sex marriage (which seems to have replaced abortion as their favourite bête noire) threatens to alienate moderates and swing voters who are more pragmatically inclined. The late President Richard Nixon, who prided himself on his pragmatic approach to politics, won in 1968 against Democrats weakened by divisive ideological fights, thanks to his appeal to the “Silent Majority.” If that majority still exists, it’s likely to be partial to the Democrats.

Nothing captures the change more than the Democrats’ vice-presidential choice, John Edwards, who has built his short political career by speaking out credibly for “middle-class working Americans” in a way that the Democrats haven’t been able to do for a decade. Edwards even comes with a ready-made rags-to-riches story. Although his previous career as a trial lawyer earned him an estimated $44 million (U.S.), he’s the son of a poor mill worker. And his empathy skills rival Bill Clinton’s. The Edwards speech on the “Two Americas” is a classic: with lines such as “one America that does the work, an¬other that reaps the reward” or, more pointedly, comparing “a middle-class America whose needs Washington has long forgotten” to “another America whose every wish is Washington’s command,” Edwards captures the sunny but hard-edged populism that Reagan managed to perfection. Conservative commentators such as Fred Barnes, editor of The Weekly Standard, say this throwback populism won’t work with independent and swing voters who “don’t see America as a nation in which an economic elite oppresses everyone else.” Maybe, but it’s no coincidence that during his campaign for the Democratic nomination, Edwards promised “the most vigorous enforcement of the anti-trust laws that we’ve seen since Teddy Roosevelt.” Roosevelt, a Republican president, once memorably warned against putting power “in the hands of those who sought not to do justice to all citizens, rich and poor alike, but to stand for one special class, or for its interests, as opposed to the interests of others.” Take that, Enron.

The Conservatives Are Eating Their Young: One of the most interesting political books to come out this year is The Right Nation: Why America is Different, written by two journalists from The Economist, John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge. The book argues that the Conservative movement in the U.S. has been one of the most successful political stories of modern Western democracy, having moved slowly and stealthily from its Goldwater beginning to the triumph of Ronald Reagan. The secret of its success, they say, is the right’s ability to channel its intellectual arguments through institutions that now dominate American culture. There are now hundreds of Conservative think-tanks, they point out – a kind of “Right Bank” of conservative thought created from a fractious and unlikely mix of Jewish intellectuals, Christian evangelists, anti-tax crusaders, and gun-rights advocates. The Left, by comparison, is worn out by decades of infighting and has few new ideas, they add. It’s a powerful argument, and at first glance it seems accurate. This “Right Nation” is the America that Canadians and the rest of the world see: strident, self-assured, comfortable in its sense of historical inevitability.

But that coalition has become increasingly crunchy. And pieces of it are starting to fall off. In the early years, the inner circles of the Bush government had the rigorous discipline of Marxist cells – and the same fervent sense of mission. At the Executive Office Building next to the White House, announcements of prayer breakfasts peppered the bulletin boards, and earnest young men in obligatory suits and ties strode the corridors, in pointed contrast to the laid-back sartorial and intellectual restlessness of the Clinton era. Now some of the most vicious gossip about the administration is being spread by former Bushites in books and leaks. The “neo-conservatives” who provided the intellectual arguments for the war, and for the aggressive, unilateralist foreign policy that underpins it, are colliding with traditional Republicans who have always felt uncomfortable with foreign entanglements. Meanwhile, the evangelicals simmer over what they believe is lukewarm support for their own favourite policies. And moderate Republicans are privately enraged by the air of incompetence and disarray hanging over Washington. The Bush troops have even lost Nancy Reagan’s support over their objection to stem-cell research.

The Ground War Favours The Democrats: This time, it’s all about the ground war, stupid. Although the 2000 election was famously (and controversially) close, it’s easy to forget that Bush was several points ahead of Al Gore in national polls during the final weeks of the campaign. Only a last-minute push by re-energized campaign workers among core constituents such as African-Americans pulled states such as Pennsylvania into the Democratic column. The same razor-thin battles are likely this time around – and Democrats are now better prepared on the ground than they were in 2000. Armies of workers inherited from the volatile Dean campaign, activists from unions, anti-war organizations, women’s groups, and ethnic constituencies have so far avoided the ideological squabbling of earlier campaigns to demonstrate a grassroots unity that was notoriously lacking in the Bush-Gore contest. One result: the Democrats amassed a bulging war chest early enough to challenge the Republicans’ spending. Another helpful factor is the number of Americans who say they will vote this time. A Pew Research Centre survey in July found that 63 percent said this year’s election result “really matters,” almost 20 percent higher than in June, 2000, when only 45 percent felt that way. In a re-election campaign, that’s another sign of a galvanizing opposition. Just as telling is the difficulty Ralph Nader, America’s consumer safety crusader, has had in gaining support and attention for his repeat run for the White House – so much so that concerned Republicans have been quietly helping him out. They can read the polls as well as anyone else.

Polls can be misleading, as anyone who followed the Canadian election knows. Nevertheless, based on those four general propositions, Kerry is my bet to win. Some thoughtful right-leaning Republicans seem to agree. Writing in The Wall Street Journal on July 14, Hoover Institute Fellow Morris Fiorina complained that Republican operatives “have bet the Bush presidency on a high-risk gamble.” Their strategies so far, he observed, “suggest that they are attempting to win in 2004 by getting out the votes of a few million Republican-leaning evangelicals who did not vote in 2000, rather than by attracting some modest proportion of 95 million other non-voting Americans, most of them moderates, not to mention moderate Democratic voters who could have been persuaded to back a genuinely compassionate conservative.” Barry Goldwater couldn’t have said it better.

But if not Bush, what would such a Genuinely Compassionate Conservative look like? I asked Goldwater in 1996 who he thought could lead the Republican Party to the kind of victory that would ensure the New Conservatives’ staying power in American politics. He didn’t hesitate. “Colin Powell,” he said.