Thinking about John Kerry's recent behaviour inspired me to look up this account of his performance I wrote during the 2004 Presidential election.
In Normal, they know who'll be President...and it isn't going to be Senator Chloroform
Forget the babble and chaos of the big cities, America's small towns are the true heart of the nation - and they've bad news for John Kerry
By: PETER HITCHENS in Normal, Illinois
Mail on Sunday 5th September 2004
They call this place Normal, but for most of the world it is an unattainable, abnormal paradise of safety, peace and prosperity. Here on Planet America all the problems are small ones. This is not the multicultural chaos of distant, noisy New York, a place viewed from this vantage point as a more or less foreign city, Babylon on the Hudson, only just clinging to the edge of the United States.
The Republican Convention in Manhattan has been little more than a distant yelling noise somewhere on the horizon, swimming briefly on to the TV screens of those who were not quick enough to change channels in time to avoid the strange, guttural orations of Arnold Schwarzenegger and the embarrassing public debut of the Bush daughters.
In Normal, life is sweet and enviable. Power and politics do not trouble its people very much, so they are unlikely to give much trouble in return. The secret of good government is to let men alone, and that is what happens here. There is so much space that even the poorest homes stand on their own amid little private patches of green. Grim blocks of council flats, terrace houses, even semidetached homes, just don't exist.
They work and keep most of what they earn for themselves. It is not much of a place for the adventurous, but for those who want a town where they can raise children and let them roam the shaded streets without fear, it is about as good as it gets. Many of its citizens go out into the wider world for a little and then return to Normal to bring up families.
Yet it is not a museum of Eisenhower-era segregation. Black and white citizens manage to live alongside each other in middle-class suburbs. I even spotted a game of cricket in a park, played and watched by the Indian computer geniuses who have come here in large numbers to help run the insurance business that is the town's main activity.
Schools are good, white-collar jobs plentiful, and while the Mitsubishi car plant has just announced several hundred job losses, there is a good chance that most of the victims will quickly find new work. A flourishing university keeps the town centre alive while the suburbs at evening glow with the alluring lights of sports-bars and steakhouses, promising the rewards of fun, pleasure and relaxation at the end of the full, hardworking day.
This is the USA foreigners fly over without seeing, and the USA whose citizens rarely travel abroad and often never possess a passport. But it is closer to the American reality than the famous cities of the East. Here, a little more than 100 miles southwest of Chicago, the great cornfields sweep right up to the edge of the city.
Huge silver express trains pause for a minute as they roll down towards Kansas City and St Louis, emitting those long, nostalgic moans originally designed to frighten buffalo; a reminder that they are in the middle of a vast, peaceful continent with thousands of miles of friendly territory on all sides. If there are enemies, they are a long way away. It's a wonderful life. You half expect to find James Stewart or some other symbol of good-hearted America swinging down the street.
Chris Koos, the town's mayor, is not a bad substitute. A tall, rangy, affable Vietnam combat veteran who runs a busy bike shop, Koos is carefully non-political because Normal has a sensible rule banning the parties from contesting local elections.
He explains: 'People don't generally talk about their politics. We don't run for election on political platforms because it keeps us focused on the local level.' I suspect that Koos, quietly impressive like most men who have seen the face of war, is a very liberal Republican and a very conservative Democrat in a single body. This is wise. He explains that in a small place like Normal, with little more than 40,000 people, everyone has to be careful not to go too far when times are polarised.
But he suspects that the Iraq war - with the failure to find weapons of mass destruction and the continuing bloodshed - is damaging President Bush even in this very Republican part of the world. 'I have a very good friend, a Republican, who says he will not vote for George Bush.' But here's the interesting bit: 'He won't vote for John Kerry either.' Just down the road, in the coffee house on Beaufort Street, I found Marc Lebowitz, an administrator at Illinois State University. Marc, in his 50s, is a keen Democrat who very much wants George Bush evicted from the White House in November.
But he admitted: 'I have a hard time separating what I would like from what I think is going to happen. I suspect George W. Bush will be reelected unless there is a more dramatic economic downturn than we have seen so far. People will be afraid to have a new administration when we still have troops committed overseas.' In many other conversations, some private, I get the same impression over and over again: that the Democrats fear their man will not make it, while the Republicans fear their man is not up to it. This is not a recipe for regime change in Washington. The likely closeness of the result shows just how many people have doubts about their commander-in-chief. This is a contest which the incumbent President ought to be able to win easily. But, as Mr Bush well knows, a victory is a victory, however close.
Some - and they are a significant number - are unshakable supporters of George W. Bush. The President may look corny and false to weary Old World observers, but we need to realise that many Americans find him both inspiring and convincing.
Paul Woolsey, a 22-year-old Military Police specialist, is the sort of American everyone should talk to.
Movingly and persuasively, he speaks the straightforward language of the American Dream. Any country that can bring up someone like this, idealistic and courageous, has reason to be proud, whether you agree with him or not. And when I told him that I disagreed with him about the war he politely and reasonably accepted that I had another point of view.
This is no caricature fanatic. He has no doubt that he lives in the best and most free country in the world and he wants to spread its benefits as far and as wide as possible. Paul took part in the liberation of Iraq and expects to be there again soon. He is passionately committed to the war as a good cause. 'My justification was the little children that I saw, the people who I saw liberated on the streets of Baghdad.' Millions of others think like him and will, like him, vote for the President.
Jack Capodice, 45, a surgeon and leading Republican, is cool and cautious but explains why he, too, is sticking with Mr Bush. He says that while there's no great enthusiasm for the President, there is not enough discontent to unseat him either. If he misled the American people, he did not do so intentionally. He has few illusions: 'I don't think George Bush is a particularly intelligent person.
On the other hand Bill Clinton is an extraordinarily bright person - but I think he was an ineffective leader.' He accepts that if the Democrats had a better candidate they would be more of a threat: 'If Bush wins, it is due to the weakness of the Democrats. John Kerry looks stiff, rich and spoiled, as old-establishment as anybody could be.' I can confirm that. When I left Normal I headed to Nashville, Tennessee, to watch Senator Kerry speak to the American Legion Convention, a rather moving assembly of military veterans, where patriotism is taken for granted and every speech ends with the words 'God Bless America'. The day before, President Bush, a man who has never been within a thousand miles of a battlefield, had spoken to the same audience and had successfully charmed them into warm acclaim.
Kerry, who has seen real battle, failed to move the Legion and won nothing but tepid, polite applause. He never even managed to make it into third gear. His whole appearance smacked of incompetence and demoralisation. There was a long wait while Kerry's team set up the machine that enables him to look as if he has memorised his speech while he is in fact reading it. But he might as well not have bothered. The candidate's weary, lifeless delivery had all the passion and uplift of a train cancellation leaking out of a station loudspeaker. The only striking-thing about Mr Kerry is his very peculiar appearance. His hair, extraordinarily luxuriant for a man of his age, looks as if it has had helium pumped into it.
This makes you wonder what happens when he lies down, and also emphasises the amazing length of his famished, coffin-shaped face, like one of those enigmatic statues on Easter Island. His fat-free frame is so spare that he only just manages to look three-dimensional.
And then he messed up his big chance. The truth is, Mr Kerry is in trouble. Merciless, effective TV commercials, disowned by the White House but very helpful to it, have torn into his one strong point - his war service. They as good as say he is making up his record. Worse, they remind veterans that Mr Kerry once compared the US armed forces to Genghis Khan and chucked away the medals he now makes much of. For conservative ex-soldiers, this wipes out all the credit of his actual service.
He could have dealt with this. He could have pushed aside the advisers who always urge caution and asked angrily why he, a man who actually did fight for his country, was being pilloried when George Bush, who skulked at home during the Vietnam war, was let off. But he didn't. Mr Kerry waited two more days before he was finally goaded into a reaction by Republican mockery, delivered in a midnight speech which received scrappy coverage on the crucial morning TV shows and in newspapers, partly because it came so late at night, partly because of the rapid approach of Hurricane Frances and partly because it was overshadowed by President Bush's nomination speech in New York.
Damning the Republican gathering in New York as 'a convention of anger and insults', Kerry directly compared his Vietnam combat service with Vice President Dick Cheney's repeated deferments, saying: 'I'll leave it up to the voters whether five deferments makes someone more qualified to defend this nation than two tours of combat duty.
'I'm not going to have my commitment to defend this country questioned by those who refused to serve when they could have and by those who have misled the nation into Iraq,' he rasped, in words which many of his supporters feel he should have used weeks ago, when the attacks on his record first began.
Kerry's haggard, late-night rebuttal contrasted with Mr Bush's smooth, shameless speech, broadcast live by the main stations, in which he posed as the nation's defender against terror, and almost brought tears to his own eyes as he praised the courage of American troops.
Kerry has also been attacked for being inconsistent, in a clearly concerted attack by Republicans. But the President has been far more inconsistent. In a TV interview he admitted earlier last week that the 'War on Terror' could not be won. This is obviously true, since there is no defined enemy and no objective way of judging the moment of victory.
Then, realising that he had made several speeches saying the opposite, Mr Bush panicked and declared that it could be won after all.
Ignoring this open goal, and the chance to throw back the accusation of inconsistency, Kerry idiotically agreed with Bush's stupid retraction and pronounced that the 'War on Terror' could be won, must be won, would be won. He droned on about veterans' benefits and health care, spending theoretical billions of tax dollars. He gave a decent but uninspiring defence of his actually quite intelligent position on the Iraq war.
All around me in a hall half the size of Belgium eyes were closing and heads sinking on to chests as his brave but far from youthful audience-drifted into slumber or boredom-You could almost hear the shuffling-sound of minds wandering as Senator Chloroform anaesthetised the room and solved the sleep problems of any voters who might have been watching the occasion on TV.
Again and again, I thought he was about to wind up and say 'God Bless America'. Again and again, he began a new chapter of spending plans and healthcare schemes.
The final applause was one of the oddest things I have ever seen. Everybody was clapping, almost everyone was standing up but there was no real noise or force to it as palm feebly slapped against palm, and you felt they were longing for a signal to sit down. Perhaps they were. Two weeks ago Mr Kerry spoke to a similar gathering, the Veterans of Foreign Wars, and the applause was so thin that silence would have been better. The American Legion prides itself on its good manners and was obviously determined to be polite.
Afterwards, I took an unscientific poll of these grizzled old charmers in their forage caps and got the impression that most of them rather despised Kerry. If he cannot win them over, when he is a warrior and his opponent has messed up a major war, I do not see how he can win.
He is the wrong candidate in the wrong year. The Democrats never really expected to have a chance of winning the White House this time.
Hillary Clinton, who intends to be the first woman President of the USA, still needs to persuade most of America that she is really human, a task that will take effort, money and time. She needs four more years of George Bush to help soften her outline. She certainly does not need eight years of John Kerry, which would probably put her out of the race for good. Perhaps that is why he simply has not been able to attract the army of ultra-clever cynics who ran Bill Clinton's brilliant, conscience-free campaigns against better men than him in 1992 and 1996.
People have become President by accident. Many think George W. Bush did exactly that, and that his smarter brother Jeb was always supposed to get the job. For a while it looked as if John Kerry might do the same thing thanks to Bush's clumsiness and folly. But judging from what I saw in Nashville and heard in Normal, Mr Kerry has lost his nerve and his way and George W. Bush will get those four more years. It is not much of a choice. Those of us who like America and Americans must just hope that the second Bush term will be better than the first.