Stunts, fear and Bubba: the last days of the campaign are upon us

AMERICANS don’t even have to glance at a calendar to make an educated guess at what date it is.

If they zap on the TV, they will know that the last seven days of the campaign are upon us.

The stunts have reached desperation levels. The claims and statements have climbed to hysterical proportions.

As the weekend approached, John Kerry went deer-hunting. Of course, the purpose of the exercise wasn't to do any shooting, but to get shot himself by as many TV and stills cameras as possible.

It was a pretty pathetic scene. Kerry and three other hunters emerged from a cornfield in Eastern Ohio dressed up in clobber that suggested Dad's Army goes to 'Nam. Kerry was dressed in camouflage fatigues, and one of his companions carried four geese. The geese were dead, which left them marginally worse off than the past couple of days of Kerry's campaign which has seen his own figures plummet south.

Had Kerry spend valuable hours in the last week of an election campaign going off on a bird shoot? Or were the geese excuse the phrase pre-shot by somebody else for the benefit of a photo-shoot?

"Everybody got one, everybody got one," shouted an excited Mr Kerry as he emerged.

More cynical members of the press corpos noticed that though his hand was smeared with blood, he himself was not carrying a carcass.

Feel the Fear and Do it Anyway

One of the great contradictions of this campaign is the endless efforts made by George W Bush and John Kerry to out-macho each other. Both have tried to foster a home-on-the-range and simple folksy image, notwithstanding that both are scions of highly privileged East-Coast aristocracies.

And so Kerry goes hunting. And does wind-surfing off the Massachusetts coast.

While Bush, wearing a Stetson and T-shirt, gets down and dirty to clear brush on his ranch in Texas.

And if Kerry can clock a 100 miles on his $3,000 racing bike, well that's nothing for Bush. Cue footage of him mastering the rugged terrain on his equally expensive mountain bike.

Dick Cheney isn't adverse to wearing a Stetson either. But his overpowering macho appeal is in the verbal rather than the physical arena. In the shrillest and most hysterical stump speech of the campaign, he laid out an Armageddon scenario in Ohio that was breath-taking in its paranoia.

"The biggest threat we face now as a nation is the possibility of terrorists ending up in the middle of one of our cities with deadlier weapons than have ever before been used against us biological agents or a nuclear weapon or a chemical weapon of some kind to be able to threaten the lives of hundreds of thousands of Americans."

Phew! That could have been lifted straight from the era of the Cuban Missile crisis.

Bubba is Back

Bill Clinton will have his first public outing with John Kerry tonight, after recovering from his recent heart operation. Both men will appear at a Democratic rally in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania one of seven "swing states" where the gap between both candidates is considered bridgeable by the two camps.

There are mixed views within the Democratic Party whether or not Clinton and former vice-President Al Gore are electoral assets. The former President is as despised a figure among Republicans as Bush is for liberal Democrats? On balance, his endorsement will probably be of some benefit to Kerry.

You have to feel sorry though for Al Gore. This weekend he has been campaigning in Florida, where his own dreams of being President foundered on a couple of thousand "hanging chads."

Campaign Quote:

"I had forgotten that Mrs Bush had worked as a schoolteacher and librarian, and there couldn't be a more important job than teaching our children."

Teresa Heinz Kerry apologises for one of the major gaffes of the campaign. She had suggested that Laura Bush had never held down a "real job."