World View: Bill Clinton is a great political campaigner, well able to identify key issues and present them simply to voters. This was one of the critical reasons for his success in 1992 and 1996. George Bush is also an excellent campaigner, creating a real bond with his supporters. Understanding his appeal and the discourse on which it relies is central to taking him on. John Kerry may have left it too late to drive this lesson home in Tuesday's voting.
Clinton did it again on Monday in a speech supporting Kerry. "If one candidate is trying to scare you, and the other is trying to get you to think; if one is appealing to your fears, and the other is appealing to your hopes - it seems to me you ought to vote for the person who wants you to think and hope."
Fear and pessimism have been central to Bush's rhetoric and discourse since the 9/11 attacks in 2001. He immediately defined them as acts of war, from which he has not deviated since. Clearly they did have some of these characteristics. But the attacks were claimed by no state, they were not military and there was no formal declaration of war.
It would have been open to the President to define the attacks as a crime rather than an act of war, requiring police action to redress an injustice rather than victory. Indeed this is how they were seen elsewhere in the world, notably in Europe.
A few different responses flow from such characterisations. A war requires an enemy. It forces other states to decide whether they are friends or enemies. It creates a sense of national unity, in which to disagree or criticise is to be disloyal or unpatriotic. It allows the rhetoric of good and evil to be mobilised. And it enables the state to be strengthened and civil liberties curtailed in the name of national defence.
Of course this war is different, waged against a vast network of terrorists and those states which harbour or facilitate them. That requires pre-emptive action to head off threats before they materialise. The Bush administration's rhetoric speaks of a long, indeed virtually a permanent, war against terrorism and a war objective which will not end until "every terrorist group of global reach has been found, stopped and defeated". The word "terror" is endlessly repeated, despite its abstract and ambiguous content.
In the meantime Americans are threatened and require firm leadership. As one writer has put it, "to Orwell's world of permanent war Bush adds permanent fear. His message is clear and simple: Be afraid. Be very afraid. But trust me." Bush put it like this in his September 20th, 2001, speech to Congress: "Americans should not expect one battle, but a lengthy campaign, unlike any other we have seen ... I ask you to live your lives and hug your children. I know many citizens have fears tonight ... Be calm and resolute, even in the face of a continuing threat".
Analysing Bush's rhetoric last year in the Nation magazine a clinical psychologist, Renana Brooks, said his opponents "are caught in a fantasy that they can win against him simply by proving the superiority of their ideas". Those who are caught in despair and desperation will not respond to rational criticism of the people they are dependent on but to "plausible and forceful statements and alternatives that put the American electorate back in touch with their core optimism".
That was Clinton's message this week - and Kerry's strong finish shows he has absorbed some of its lessons in an extremely tight and polarised election.
Studies of Bush supporters show how much they rely on demonstrably untrue beliefs about the war against terrorism and the war in Iraq fought to concretise it. Three out of four of them still believe pre-war Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction or active programmes to produce them, according to a poll conducted by the University of Maryland's Program on International Policy Attitudes. The same proportion believe Saddam Hussein provided substantial support to al-Qaeda. Both beliefs have been refuted - by the Iraq Survey Group and the bipartisan 9/11 Commission.
According to Steven Kull, director of the study, a major reason Bush supporters have these erroneous beliefs is that Bush and Cheney continually repeat them. As he says "to support the President and to accept that he took the US to war based on mistaken assumptions likely creates significant cognitive dissidence and leads Bush supporters to suppress awareness of unsettling information about pre-war Iraq".
There is also a remarkable difference between Bush's stated positions on major international issues and what his supporters believe them to be. Majorities of them believe he supports multilateral approaches to the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, the land mine treaty, the International Criminal Court and the Kyoto Protocol. Only one third of them believe most people in foreign countries oppose the US war in Iraq and most of them think a majority of people outside the US favour Bush's election.
Another Bush term would see a rude awakening from these cognitive dissidences as the rest of the world comes to terms with its consequences. A significant number of the influential neo-conservative group in the Bush administration has been schooled in the rhetoric of friends and enemies developed by the philosopher Leo Strauss, who taught at the University of Chicago from 1948-73. He was born in Germany but left for France in 1932. Before he departed, he had been part of a right-wing group in the 1920s, along with the political and legal philosopher Carl Schmitt, who joined the Nazi party in the 1930s, becoming one of its most important theorists.
Strauss and he argued that the distinction between friends and enemies is the kernel of politics. Their work is enjoying a major renewal today, not only academically, but in high policy-making. Moral clarity between good and evil, the importance of honour and courage, and the need for the wise to rule are their major themes.
This election has brought them right to the centre of US political life.