Bread and butter issues melt before the firepower of war rhetoric

THIS is a War President and as little as 24 hours in the US will make you fully realise how much of a war election it is.

Of course, the bread and butter issues - that traditionally win and lose elections - have featured but they have been completely eclipsed by Iraq.

All week, a story about 380 tons of missing explosives in Iraq has dominated the campaign. Kerry has mocked Bush for being “incompetent” and not fit to be Commander-in-Chief. After being slow on the uptake, Bush is hitting back with scorching comments of his own.

Yesterday, he accused Kerry of saying anything to get elected. But all he was doing was following his absolutist - and absurd - line that anybody who makes even the slightest criticism of the war in Iraq undermines the effort and gives comfort to the enemy.

One of his scriptwriters, though, had a novel take on Kerry’s ‘wrong war in the wrong place at the wrong time’ attack. Bush described Kerry as the “wrong man for the wrong job at the wrong time.”

OK, it’s not James Joyce. But even the slightest variation from the continuous-loop speech that both men have been giving for the past ten days is almost worth celebrating.

In the meantime, having lived through the debacle of Martin Cullen’s €40m experimentation with electronic voting, maybe our Minister for Transport could be drafted in to give some damage limitation advice to beleaguered officials in places like Florida.

The Sunshine State was determined that it would never have to go through the nightmare of butterfly votes, hanging chads and pregnant chads again. So it has introduced electronic voting machines instead. Cullen could have told them what happens next. The weasel words “no verifiable audit or paper trail” have cropped up regularly. Democrats are suspicious of Republican skullduggery and say there’s no way to double-check or verify votes if the dispute does arise. Sound familiar and groundhoggy? Difference here is that the system has gone ahead without a pilot programme.

Meanwhile, there are a couple of States which seem to be throwing up possibilities of surprise results. Hawaii, usually Democratic, is one. Amazingly, New Jersey is another. The East Coast State is not one that’s usually associated with the GOP. But they have made an extraordinary charge there.

There are two reasons for that. One is that many of those affected by 9/11 actually lived in New Jersey and commuted into Manhattan. Their support for Bush’s response to 9/11 would be less conditional than many New Yorkers. The second is that the Democratic Party in the State have shot themselves in the foot. Governor Thomas McGreevy resigned in disgrace earlier this year when it was discovered that he, a married man, had given a senior adviser’s job to his gay lover.

Meanwhile, George Bush’s official re-election website went kaput for anybody trying to access it from outside the US.

The site, georgewbush.com, was the main source of news and views from the GOP party. But now you can’t access it from outside the US.

The reason? Apparently access was denied for non-US based surfers for “security reasons.” But according to the BBC, which alerted people to the story, there are ways and means of overcoming the problem. The site can be easily accessed by means of several alternative net addresses used as proxies.

So much for Homeland Security.