Photos: Bush-Cheney Inc 04 and Kerry Edwards 2004 Inc
'Bush managed to avoid any glaring examples of his trademark malapropisms, but did have moments of "brainlock" when you wondered if any response was coming at all.'

Helen Angove feels a little left out of the US presidential election

Traditionally the US elections are preceded by a series of presidential debates, in which the main candidates have to face each other and answer the questions set to them by the chairman.

I watched the first of these debates the other night, and the best feature of it was the unprecedented opportunity to watch an hour and a half of television with no advert breaks.

The consensus of opinion among my friends is that Kerry came over as strong minded and resolute, although he doesn't of course have Bush's charisma, and he was a little too obvious about squeezing in references to his war record.

Bush, on the other hand, managed to avoid any glaring examples of his trademark malapropisms, but did have moments of "brainlock" when you wondered if any response was coming at all.

His repeated assertions that its "hard work" being president were irritatingly whiny. One of the TV stations spliced together the footage of each time he said it, and the resulting montage that was frankly hilarious.

Make-or-break issue

I am getting the impression that the Iraq War is likely to prove the make-or-break issue in this election. This of course, is obliging Senator Kerry to tie himself in knots.

He has taken a firmly anti Iraq-war stance, but there is no denying the fact that before the war he did vote in favour of the resolution that gave the President power to initiate hostilities against Iraq.

Now he has to try and justify his perceived change in position by saying that he believes he was at the time right to consider Iraq a threat, but that Bush failed live up to the spirit of the resolution because he made insufficient effort to avoid war.

This is not a particularly easy distinction to get over in debate. After this first presidential debate, however, the pundits seems to be coming to a consensus that Kerry has managed to do so. Whether this will be sufficient to swing the vote in his favour remains to be seen.

One of the things I find hard to get over, living here, is just how geographically segregated the voting is. Everyone I know, here, is a dyed-in-the-wool Democrat. I don't believe I know a single Republican (we knew one, but he's since moved back to Kansas).

Polls

If I just went by what the people around me say, I wouldn't be able to imagine any way in which Bush could possibly win. But the polls, of course, have consistently told a different story.

Take a look at a map of the States, coloured according to voting preferences, and you will see a central heartland of solid red (Republican) with narrow chunks of blue hugging the East and West coast, denoting the traditional Democrat voters.

Those few States in which there is a genuine doubt over which way the vote will go are known as "swing states", and electioneering is largely concentrated on those states.

This means that, here in California, we are spared a great deal of election fever. It also means that some of my friends feel disenfranchised, aware that their vote here will count for very little. A lot of conversations down the pub recently have centred around schemes for influencing votes in other states.

Proselytise

Ideas so far have included sending busloads of Kerry voters over the border to Nevada proselytise the population (night out in Vegas, anyone?), and the entertainingly tasteless "Tits out for Kerry" campaign.

This involves a hypothetical website on which one promises to post a topless picture of oneself if Kerry wins. I'm quite relieved that the website so far remains hypothetical.

In the mean time, I too, am feeling oddly disenfranchised - this huge election going on around me in which I am not entitled to vote.

My South African friends who live across the way tell me that it is jokingly suggested in their home country that they ought to be allowed to vote in the US elections, because the choice of president affects them just as much, if not more, as it does the Americans.

By that criterion, I not sure that the American suffrage shouldn't be extended to the rest of the world as well.

Helen Angove is an Anglican priest from the UK, who moved to California in July 2003.

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