Final frantic efforts and a dash of scripted ‘humour’

IT’S like a vast, frenetic game of Monopoly in its closing stages.

Most of the real estate is already bought up. Now the two players chase each other around the board, in increasingly frantic efforts to seize the last seven or eight spots.

With a week to go from today, the campaign has distilled down to just nine key swing-states.

Unsurprisingly, in the past week both candidates rarely left those battleground States.

Some days, each visited three different states for rallies and on several occasions, both men were speaking at rallies within a hundred miles of each other.

Kerry thinks Ohio so crucial that he will be making stops there every single day, except today. For the Bush camp, Florida seems to be the major pre-occupation. He spent a good portion of the weekend there and will visit the State another three or four times before polling day.

With the days remaining down to single figures, both players will narrow their focus to the Ailesbury and Shrewsbury Roads of this campaign: Ohio and Florida.

Ohio is the weather vane. The old chestnut goes that whoever wins Ohio wins the Presidency.

No President since Lincoln has gone to the White House without taking the State, which gives as near to perfect a microcosm of the bitter and wide fault-lines that have emerged in the America of 2004.

Southern Ohio is rural, prosperous and conservative; its northern part - known as ‘the rust belt’- is blue-collar, depressed and has been flattened by the demise of the American steel industry.

In the cities, Columbus and Dayton, the dividing lines are those of the values and moral outlook of both candidates as much as their economic policies.

And Florida. Could the story of the 2000 election be the story again in 2004? If similar sticky problems emerge, both sides have private jets on stand-by to fly in teams of big-swatting lawyers.

Yesterday was typical: Bush flew from Greeley in Colorado to make two stops in the marginal state of Iowa. Kerry started the day in the North East, in New Hampshire, before flying to Philadelphia for the lunchtime rally with Clinton. Afterwards he flew to Warren in Michigan before finishing off with another rousing-the-troops rally in Green Bay, Wisconsin.

This column has gone to inordinate lengths to discover if either of the candidates possess the tiniest traces of a humorous side.

American presidential hopefuls don’t do spontaneous moments very well. Everything is scripted, even the ad-hoc comments are carefully planned for.

On Sunday, Bush attacked Kerry’s criticisms of the war by wondering aloud about Abu Musab al-Zarqawi had the US not gone to war. “What does Senator Kerry think they would be doing? Peaceful small business owners? Running a benevolent society?” he asked.

In the first debate in Miami, Bush had told the American people that being the Prez was “real hard work”.

Meanwhile, the grave and unhumorous Kerry recalled that moment while speaking on Sunday and, after a dramatic pause shouted: “Well, Mr President. I’m ready to relieve you of the hard work,” to cheers and the biggest laugh he got for the weekend, though it’s pretty clear from reading it that it’s a case of you’d have had to be there.

Craziest campaign promise of the day: Bush on socks. Apparently the American sock manufacturing industry is being threatened by cheap Chinese imports. Bush has pledged to impose more tariffs on these darned foreign socks. Way to go! Sock it to ‘em Dubya.

Compiled by Harry McGee.