Connect: To most Europeans, it's a mystery: how can Americans consider re-electing George Bush? After all, has recent history not shown him to be a liar, a threat to liberty, an agent of polluting corporations? Furthermore, he's a warmonger, who won - opponents say stole - a dodgy election victory four years ago and he's clearly not the sharpest tack in the box.
Yet, according to the polls, he has a strapping chance of securing another four years in power. How can this be? Presumably, Americans, like other peoples, like their leaders to be at least competent.
But if Bush's shortcomings are so blindingly obvious to Europeans and most of the rest of the world, is it simply that Americans don't get it? Perhaps they are brainwashed by the wretched Fox News. Without doubt, Fox has profound effects but even the most abject propaganda has to find some purchase on pre-existing beliefs. The rest of mainstream American media has been, despite some improvements latterly, appalling throughout Bush's tenure. So, a lamentable media has helped him but there's more to it than that.
It's not simply that Bush-voters are all gung-ho militarists, religious lunatics and anti-welfare state.
There are, of course, elements among his support, who could be fairly so-described. But millions who will vote for Bush are ordinary, reasonably decent people, who sincerely believe he is the better option for the US and for them.
Perhaps the most bizarre aspect of the Bush image is that he is just a regular guy. That's utterly ridiculous. He's the president son of a former president of the US. He's a multi-millionaire with an Ivy League education and he used to be the governor of Texas. Regular guy? Yeah, right! Most Bush-voters have comparable CVs.
Dressing in a Stetson, blue jeans and cowboy boots, like the Ray Krebbs character from the old TV soap Dallas, chopping wood and spouting folksy guff do not make Bush a regular guy. His tax cuts enrich the mega-wealthy; his social agenda discriminates against millions of Americans and his foreign policy ensures that real regular guys are regularly killed in Iraq.
Yet, for all that, he and his supporters have cast him as a kind of guy-next-door. In contrast, John Kerry, Bush-ites argue, is an aloof Boston Brahmin lacking the common touch. Even if he is that still doesn't make the "president as Ray Krebbs impersonator" a regular guy. Indeed, the fact that privileged Bush is already president makes wannabe Kerry more 'regular'.
John Pilger recently wrote in the New Statesman that re-electing Bush might be the lesser evil because "supremacy is the essence of Americanism". By implication, the supremacist goal is more clearly visible under Bush than it would be under Kerry.
It's true that supremacy is the goal of Americanism as it was for the British empire and all earlier empires.
But Kerry, while he will not veer from that goal, at least promises to pursue it in a less belligerent manner. In a sense then, November's election is more about means than ends. It's a striking statistic that, unlike the majority of other industrial democracies, American men consistently vote to the right of American women. Is that macho or proof of a fear of women? You could argue that the gains of American feminism have alarmed millions of American men and made them extra conservative. Certainly, Bush supporters hate a strong woman such as Hillary Clinton, who 12 years ago insulted the largely Republican country and western, "regular guy" constituency by ridiculing the mawkish Tammy Wynette ideal of "stand by your man".
It's ironic too that America, the country of newness and innovation, should now be so conservative.
Selling a risible version of "patriotism", Bush and his cronies hark back to a pre-feminism, pre-fair-play-for-minorities, pre-multilateral world.
Meanwhile, European support for Kerry must remain muted, for nobody - not just macho conservatives - likes to be lectured on how to vote.
Still, the Republican con job - working in the interests of the wealthy while convincing millions of mostly male, average-income voters to support Bush - is astonishing. It must speak to notions of identity - as the Catholic church formerly did in Ireland or the 'royal' codology used to do in Britain.
That is the deep purchase that propaganda seeks and all parties know it.
Fox News and the other spinners know it too. They seek to make all the "regular" Ray Krebbs-ish guys feel good: one of their own is the most powerful man in the world. The problem is that Bush is not one of their own.
Sure, he's Texan but unlike his average-income supporters he's not, as they say in Texas, "all hat and no cattle". They are and he'll keep it that way.
Anyway, whatever the election outcome, the US is certain to remain deeply divided. It's unsurprising that the coasts will largely support Kerry and the interior will largely support Bush. The coasts, after all, have greater links with the rest of the world while the interior remains caught in a time-warp, with too many "regular folk" believing lies that threaten to swamp them.