This may involve a task that could prove to be much harder than expected. An honest analysis of the candidates’ positions yields important results.

Election experts believe that possibly as much as 10 per cent likely voters have no strong allegiance to either candidate and are open to persuasion.

Assuming Kerry wins, there will be no radical changes in US policy. Let’s look at their election manifestos. The differences between them are only in the nuances. They are treading the same old ground.

Foreign policy

As foreign policy concerns are mainly dominated by the Israeli-Palestine conflict and the war in Iraq, it is very important that these are given serious consideration.

So Bush, a lousy President but ludicrously over-demonised, is bracketed by a Democratic candidate, Al Gore, who was calling for immediate war on Saddam Hussein back in 1999, flanked by all neo-Cons, who subsequently flocked to Bush, and by Kerry, who now says he holds exactly the same position, rationalised by the same neo-Cons.

Kerry voted for many of Bush’s key foreign and domestic measures and his statements and interviews over the past months dealing with foreign affairs have mostly been vague and incoherent, though he is explicitly and ardently pro-Israel and unequivocally for regime-change in Venezuela, while his policies on the Middle East are identical to Bush’s. Not even the scandal regarding the treatment of Iraqi prisoners evoked Kerry’s criticism, despite the fact that it has profoundly alienated a politically decisive segment of the American public.

When it comes to Iraq, after all, Kerry sounds an awful lot like the guy who got the Americans and their allies into this mess.

Mr Kerry recently stated that he would have voted for the Senate’s war resolution even if he had known that Saddam Hussein had no significant cache of weapons of mass destruction. Mr Kerry also basically agrees with the President that it is now necessary to stay the course in Iraq. It’s no wonder that this issue hasn’t provided the Democrats with much traction. The sole and minimal difference here lies in the fact that much of the Democrats’ counter policy for Iraq involves the conviction that as President, Mr Kelly could still get the broad international support that Mr Bush failed to rally before the invasion. Many of Mr Kerry’s other ideas on Iraq are similar to those of the current administration, but he says that he could have done a better job of it.

Kerry, like Bush, promised that the USA would stay the course in Iraq until the country was secure, saying: “We have to do what we need to do, to get out and do it right.”

Many of John Kerry’s detractors have questioned whether the Massachusetts senator’s policy on Iraq differs all that much from that of President Bush. Kerry had, after all, voted for the October 2002 authorisation for the use of military force against Iraq.

Mr Bush has tried to convince that he and Mr Kerry agreed on the need to get rid of Saddam Hussein.

Mr Kerry also said that he could replace most, but not all, American troops in Iraq with foreign forces.

Whose word is it, anyway? Although a recent poll shows that 95 per cent of Democratic delegates oppose the Iraq war, Edwards vowed, in a prime-time address, to double the number of special forces in Iraq and to increase funding for military research.

Kerry is not against pre-emptive attacks, he’s for them, just as Bush is. Both Bush and Kerry have virtually the same exit plan for Iraq. Kerry promotes the war on terrorism, just like Bush. He is for the same restrictive civil rights that Bush supports to “stop terrorism” as well.

After all, isn’t this a deja vu polity? Both the Democrats and the Republicans have led the American people, as well as all their allies, down the path of wars of terror and aggression!

Military strength is a key issue for the Bush and Kerry campaigns in the run-up to November’s presidential elections.

Kerry is more an echo than a voice! In a speech to the veterans of foreign wars, John Kerry criticised President George W. Bush’s decision to bring back up to 70,000 US troops based abroad. “When I am President you will have a true brother-in-arms,” he told them.

Anybody expecting a shift in the United States foreign policy from a President John Kerry should think again. Rand Beers, the national security adviser in the Kerry campaign, states, “in many ways, the goals of the two administrations are in fact not all that different”. No details were offered on policy questions ranging from Iraq to the Middle East or America’s withdrawal from the Kyoto Treaty and the International Criminal Court. Only equivocal and ambiguous statements that John Kerry is a “fundamental internationalist”.

But why are the Democrats so afraid of peace? One of the rules to the speakers at the National Democratic Convention was that no show of or support to the ideal of peace should be manifested and that, “you must not commit the party to any specific promises or programmes. Just stick to platitudes. Keep it all so vague that even George W. Bush could endorse anything you say”.

Kerry, like Bush, has been critical of Yasser Arafat and the Democratic platform talks about “promoting new and responsible leadership” within the Palestinian Authority.

Furthermore, in today’s America there is important bipartisan support for resurrecting the Atlanticism that Bush is in the process of smashing.

Could it be that the traditional Democratic vision on such issues and their greater finesse in justifying these policies is for more dangerous than that of the inept, eccentric melange now guiding American foreign policy?

Regardless of who wins next November’s election, an increasingly dangerous American adventurism will remain. To be critical of Bush is scarcely justification for wishful thinking about Kerry.

Whether Bush remains in the White House or it is taken over by Kerry, the political ideologies of the USA remain intact. What may change are the tactics and strategies!

Internal policy

I couldn’t find any significant difference. What about the plight of the ordinary American working people? No succour in sight for Kerry here, either. The obvious must be drawn out and stated.

As a political force on the national stage, organised labour, manifested in the big unions in the AFL-CIO (American Federation of Labour and Congress of Industrial Organisations) is dead. Kaput, it’s over. As a fraction of the work force, non-government union membership is now down to 11 per cent and that number is sinking by a digit a year. Here we are in 2004 and labour hasn’t managed to elicit a single significant pledge from Kerry. His only concern is Wall Street and the bankers. Back in April, he said that he would make the deficit his prime concern, which means goodbye to any decent jobs programme. So big labour’s sole significant political function is to try to enforce discipline on their members to vote for Kerry. That’s the essential story, just another mile-maker in the declines of labour since the late 1960s. Kerry is not going to do anything to arrest that decline.

Mr Kerry states that he will not raise taxes, but he voted to raise taxes and raise gas prices as proposed by the Bush administration. Few people believe that Kerry is a candidate of the left and progressive movements. Most Americans know that he is clearly tied to the US ruling class and a defender of capitalism, as is Bush.

The final choice

Most Americans do not feel terribly excited about the choices.

The proof that both parties are really the same party is simple. Neither wants to repeal much of what the other party has achieved. The Republicans now promise to preserve and even aggrandise all the Democratic programmes and agencies they used to oppose. Both parties are one in seeking an indefinite, irreversible accumulation of power by government. When they “change”, they always mean more government, never that the premise itself will change.

As Chesterton once wrote: “It is futile to discuss reform without reference to form.” The Republicans sometimes try, in their gauche manner, to amend the Constitution, but the Democrats have long since learned to circumvent it (especially through the judiciary) by inflating a few passages and forgetting the rest – the “living document” approach, which denies that words have objective meaning.

Kerry can beat Bush... but who cares? The question should rather be: Does the winner of this contest have to smack to make the USA and the world a better place without forcing more into poverty, staring down the barrel of a gun or alienating every person who has a belief other than one accepted in the US? The US president is primarily a mouthpiece for Congress and big business. The democracy he represents is so easily distorted by the money that drives it, that it only lives in the minds of the population.

The wallpaper in the White House may change, but not one iota of American policy would change.

Is it a question of “Anybody but Bush”! or “Better the devil you know”? Could it be that Kelly is “the lesser of two evils”? Your guess is as good as mine.

At the end of the day, the American citizen would still have an option. To replace the Toxic Texan in the White House with a Bigot from Boston!