"Two Americas"

So the debates are over, and by the polls John Kerry decisively won all three - not a startling achievement, admittedly, for an educated man pitted against this particular incumbent. Bush himself (in what was not a confession but a roughneck's boast) once declared that he didn't read the papers. But the defining moment of his presidency, to this columnist, was those seven minutes on 9-11 during which, having been told that America was under attack, the president remained sitting there in that Florida classroom pretending to listen to children reading.

'Pretending to listen' doesn't mean Mr Bush was thinking. No - what Mr Bush was doing, that fateful morning, was trying to think. (The reader wishing to verify this should get hold of Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 911, now out on DVD.) For, faced with the enormity of what he'd just been told, you could see the gears in that long-disused brain grinding and seizing, the electrical impulses balking at the synapses. In default, they left on the president's face an expression of the saddest vacuity - for vacuity in homo sapiens is always sad. In that mortal crisis, in Mr Bush's head, many things were trying to happen - and couldn't. Watch the film of those seven minutes if you don't believe me.

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