TRUE BLUE

The Dems have turned right, says Mark Steyn,

and a libertarian candidate has, literally, turned blue. The outlook for Bush is not good

New Hampshire THIS has been the strangest election campaign. For one thing, round about the beginning of October, it dropped off the national radar screen entirely: you'd turn on one of the A-list Sunday talkfests and, instead of the shifty Congressman and the pompous Senator, there'd be some guy droning on about how it's clear we're dealing with a psychotic personality who underneath his apparent arrogance and sense of superiority is consumed by a deep sense of inadequacy perhaps stemming from his childhood.. . .

And you'd think, yes, yes, that's an excellent analysis of Al Gore, but when are we getting to the interview with the man himself? But we never did. For three weeks, Governors and Senators and the like have been banished, and the cable networks have been immersed in a 24/7 sniperthon with an entirely different crew of characters. For once, Tip O'Neill's great cliché is true: this year, all politics is local, confined to local radio, local TV, local advertising. And the odd fragments you pick up from around the country are hard to piece into a coherent whole.

Take Montana, where a US Senate candidate was forced out of the race after an attack ad implying he was a gay hairdresser. Mike Taylor was a hairdresser, but of the non-gay persuasion. This was 20 years ago, when he promoted hair and beauty products on TV. Although there's plenty of old clips of him coiffing comely young ladies, the negative ad uses a scene of him fussing over some male customer. Back then he was a svelte young man with a beard in tight-fitting disco suit and a huge shirt collar open two or three buttons down to reveal several gold chains nestling in his chest hair. The narration is something to do with some arcane point of Montana business regulation, but I'm darned if I can remember what it is. All you notice is the Boogie Nights lettering, the Seventies soft-porn elevator music, and Mr Taylor limp-wristedly patting his client's face as the ad's tagline declares, 'That's not how we do business in Montana.' Translation: Too gay for the Rockies. Even I. the most vigorous heterosexual on the Speccie payroll, might seem vaguely swishy in such a context.

Those homophobic Republicans, they'll

stop at nothing, right? But, in fact, poor Mr Taylor was the Republican candidate and the attack ad was made by the Montana Democrats. Had it been the other way round, there'd have been a lot of huffing and puffing from the media, and accusations of queer-baiting and 'hate speech'. But, because it wasn't, the media ignored the story, and the gay groups declined to disapprove of their Democratic chums, taking cover in the sophistry that, by whining about your opponent implying you're a gay hairdresser, you're implying that there's something wrong with being a gay hairdresser. So Mike Taylor quit: hair today, gone tomorrow.

The beneficiaryof the Republican votes might have been the Libertarian candidate, Stan Jones. But he's blue. Literally. His skin is blue, due to his drinking a colloidal silver solution to strengthen his immune system. It was 1999 and he was worried that societal breakdown resulting from the Y2K bug might result in a shortage of antibiotics and other medication. So he began mixing his own concoction by electrically charging two silver wires in a glass of water. He started turning blue a year ago and, although he's now given up the colloidal silver, the skin condition — argria — is permanent. Mr Jones's blueness is emphasised by his white hair and white shirt: he looks like Grandfather Smurf dressed up for a Smurf Rotary

Club meeting, If I were him, I'd wear a tan shirt and see Mr Taylor about getting some highlights. But Mr Jones complains he's the victim of colour prejudice: people won't vote for him because they're judging him by the colour of his skin not the content of his character. I rather like it myself, and in a subtle way it reminds you that the Green party candidate isn't in the least bit green. Anyway, stung by the accusations that he's yellow, Mike Taylor has now re-entered the race.

The difficulty, when all politics is local, is trying to figure out what general conclusions to draw, The first blue-skinned Senate candidate in US history probably has no wider significance, although, in its combination of paranoia and self-reliance, it might well serve as a cautionary tale for those British Tories tempted by a libertarian future. I'm of a broadly libertarian persuasion myself, but it'd take a bigger threat than the millennium bug to get me jump-starting my medication in the sink. I'm a believer in private health care, but not that private.

But the hair-care ad could be considered part of a broader trend. There's nothing surprising about Democratic shamelessness, only the particular direction in which this year's shamelessness is being pushed. For example, here's Alex Sanders, South Carolina's Democratic Senate candidate, savaging his Republican opponent because he's been endorsed by Rudy Giuliani. What's wrong with that? Well, says Sanders, Giuliani is 'an ultraliberal. His wife kicked him out and he moved in with two gay men and a shih tzu. Is that South Carolina values? I don't think so.'

This is a reference to Giuliani's turbulent marital meltdown, in the depths of which he wound up taking refuge in the guest room of a couple of gay friends. I can't vouch for the shih tzu, though Mr Sanders is right that it doesn't seem a terribly South Carolina kind of dog. As with Mr Taylor's bad hair day, a Republican would have a much harder time with this sort of crack. But this year the Democrats have decided to run as cultural conservatives. They've learned the lesson of 2000, when Al Gore managed to lose his home state of Tennessee and traditional Dem strongholds like West Virginia and Arkansas mainly because of cultural issues. The most accurate predictor of voting behaviour two years ago was gun ownership, so now Democrats in competitive races (as foreseen in this space last December) are all nominally pro-gun. Paul Begala, the loyal Clinton attack dog (no shih tzu he), is ruthlessly on-message: on TV the other night, he held up snaps of him and his brother enjoying a weekend's hunting. In Arkansas, where Republican Tim Hutchinson has offended his base with a messy divorce and is in considerable trouble, Mark Pryor, his Democratic opponent, makes sure that in every ad Mr Pryor is brandishing either his gun or the family Bible.

As a social conservative myself, I'm proBible, pro-gun, but relatively relaxed on the matter of shih tzus and gay hairdressers. But I think it safe to draw the conclusion from South Carolina, Arkansas and elsewhere that, though it may be variously and imperfectly interpreted at the local level, the Democrats' broad strategy for Campaign 2002 is to run several degrees to the right of where they were two years ago. Whether these alleged 'conservative Democrats' believe what they're saying is not the point: it's the fact that they feel obliged to say it, By contrast, the Republicans have no discernible strategy. They approached this election with only a few isolated tactics to pick up one or two seats and restore the Senate to GOP control. Back in the spring, they had hopes that Minnesota's Green party candidate would drain away enough votes on the Left to scupper Paul Wellstone, the Senate's most far-out Democrat. In New Jersey, they figured that Senator Bob (The Torch) Torricelli was so mired in sleaze that any Republican who kept his head down and wasn't a convicted paedophile could beat him.

Alas, the best-laid plans of mice-like men, .. . With polls showing him certain to lose, the Torch was prevailed upon by Democratic HQ to extinguish himself, while the New Jersey supreme court obligingly tore up the state's election law and allowed the Democrats to install former Senator Frank Lautenberg on the ticket instead. The Torch had been passed to an old generation: Lautenberg is 78 and complained during his last six-year term that he found the Senate a bit tiring. It would be no surprise if he resigned in late January and the governor appointed Torricelli to replace him; the Dems didn't get where they are in Jersey by being squeamish. There were some suggestions from GOP cynics that maybe the Republican nonentity, Doug Wossname, should pull a Torricelli and resign in favour of, say, Condi Rice. The party's even running some mischievous ads in which a grade-school kid tells teacher he knows he's going to flunk the test so he's bringing in Frank Lautenberg to take it instead. But, despite the fact that Lautenberg is barely campaigning and, when he does, seems barely capable of campaigning, the guy's a shoo-in. So long, GOP hopes in New Jersey.

As for Minnesota, that remained a slightly better bet, until last Friday lunchtime, when Paul Wellstone's small plane went down, killing the Senator, his wife and daughter, and five others. Torricelli and Wellstone couldn't have been more different: one a grubby machine poi, the other a goofy individualist. Wellstone was one of American politics's few genuine independent spirits; a man who saw nothing wrong with losing a Senate vote 98-2 as long as you voted with your conscience, not something Torricelli has ever been burdened with.

In Minnesota, as in New Jersey, the Democrats ransacked the archives for a new candidate and hit on Walter Mondale. Oh, come on, you must remember: vice-president under Carter, linchpin of the administration that brought you energy crises, double-digit inflation, Cuban troops in Angola, American hostages in Tehran, a botched rescue mission, dead US servicemen having their corpses prodded and poked by gleeful mullahs on Iranian TV.... Apparently, to Democrats these are the good old days. When Mondale ran for the presidency in '84, he was 56 and he made the 73-yearold Reagan's age an issue. The Gipper shrugged it off: 'I'm afraid the age factor may play a part in this election,' he said. 'My opponent's ideas are too old.' Would-be Senator Mondale is now a year older than Reagan was then. The Democratic party's candidates have finally caught up with their ideas: now they're both tired and creaky. The Dems are the party for the old and the old at heart.

The GOP figures it can beat Mondale, if they get to talk about him. But Democrats want to make the Minnesota Senate race a posthumous vote of thanks to Wellstone, and, in between the moist-eyed tributes and mounds of flowers on CNN, party hatchetmen pop up to berate Republicans for being so tasteless as even to mention the election. 'Couldn't they wait until Paul is in the ground?' Nevada Senator Harry Reid demanded. 'And his wife and his child?' With encouragement from the media. Democrats will keep this up until Tuesday.

The Republicans might get lucky in Missouri. Then again, they might get unlucky in Colorado, and South Dakota, and North Carolina, where the steel magnolia Elizabeth Dole is showing signs of metal fatigue. Right now, the best bet is that the Republicans will just hold the House and the Democrats will just hold the Senate. In other words, the same national 50150 split as two years ago. The GOP spin is that, as the party in the White House traditionally loses Congressional seats in midterm, no change is effectively a victory for the Republicans. The Dem spin is that, given 11 September and the rise in Bush's numbers, no change is effectively a victory for the Democrats.

I'm with the Dems on this one. On the home front, the President is (in Jonah Goldberg's words) 'missing in action'. On foreign policy, we've got a war presidency without a war. In the Telegraph's 11 September anniversary special a couple of months back I put it this way: 'On election day in November. without Saddam's scalp on his bedpost, Bush will be right back where he was on 10 September 2001: the 50 per cent President, his approval ratings in the fifties, his 'negatives' high, the half of the country that didn't vote for him feeling no warmer toward him than if the day that "changed the world" had never happened.'

Which is pretty much where we are. True, Bush's approval ratings aren't, yet, in the fifties: he's hanging in there at 60-61 per cent, according to the latest numbers. But they won't translate into anything useful on election day, and the Democratic Senators who've blocked Bush judicial nominations and obstructed plans for real 'homeland security' will get away with it.

George W. Bush had a chance to remake the political map, to put Democrats on the defensive not just over guns and the Bible but on a broader range of values: everywhere from nukes in North Korea to energy exploration in Alaska, you see the failure of Democratic bromides about the world we live in. But, in contrast to Bill Clinton and his 'permanent campaign', George W. Bush seized on the war as an excuse for a permanent non-campaign. If 11 September was, as they say, 'the day everything changed', this 5 November, the first national election after the event, will be the day nothing changes. And, any way you slice it, that doesn't reflect well on the President.