U.S. election results affect us all

Guardian News Service, London

An opinion poll taken across America just before this week's mid-term elections found U.S. voters split down the middle between Republicans and Democrats. The voters are almost as equally divided on whether their country is heading in the right direction or not. The poll confirms that there are two Americas today -- Americas with different values and priorities -- just as there were two Americas in the presidential vote in November 2000. In Tuesday's elections, however, there was only one winner -- President George Bush's Republican party.

Once again, U.S. voters confounded Washington's often useless punditocracy, who had predicted big Democratic gains at state level and no change in the split control of Congress. True, the Democrats won some important governors' races -- a significant descant to the night's losses elsewhere.

But they lost Georgia to the Republicans (for the first time since 1872), failed to hold Maryland for the first time since Spiro Agnew, and fell well short of unseating Jeb Bush in the night's big grudge contest in Florida.

In the battle for Congress, though, the Republicans scored triumph after triumph, extending their hold in the House, and winning all of the most keenly contested Senate races bar one. As a result, Bush's first term, which began in such controversy, has now been massively secured. A presidency which once faced unprecedented challenges of legitimacy, has now won a political lock on the Congress such as few Republican leaders have ever enjoyed.

The implications are vast, both at home and abroad, and anyone who ever pretended that the two parties are indistinguishable is about to receive a cruel lesson in political reality. Carried on a wave of post 9/11 patriotic approval, Bush took on his demoralized opponents with total ruthlessness.

He out-fundraised, out-spent, out-campaigned and out-worked the Democrats. His reward is a position from which he will launch a fresh round of tax cuts for the rich and welfare cuts for the poor, from which he will dismantle key parts of the federal government in favor of the states and corporations, and, most important of the lot, from which he will now make a raft of conservative judicial appointments, aimed at shifting power in America's courts conclusively to the right for decades to come.

Like Thatcher after the Falklands, Bush has won a war election. The one in six of Americans who actually voted for his party gave him everything of which he could have dreamed. Whether they will again feel as generous to Bush in 2004 will depend on the economy and on whether Democrats can hammer out the alternative strategy they so lamentably lacked this time.

Americans have made a fateful choice this week. Both they and the world will have to live -- or in some cases die -- with the consequences.