New York Times

Tuesday Night's Script
November 3, 2002

Tuesday's elections are going to be both very close and very important. Control of the House and Senate could be decided by a few thousand voters in a handful of states. The scenarios for a cliffhanging election night are endless. Twice in the last two years, after all, the American public has seen tossup Senate races transformed in the final days when one of the candidates died in a plane crash. We have been through a presidential election with a finale that no one would accept as a plot in a TV movie. Over the last few weeks two ex-senators in their 70's suddenly stepped out of the wings to attempt to save the Democrats' chances in New Jersey and Minnesota. Control of the Senate could wind up being decided in a runoff in Louisiana in December. It is possible, with just a bit of imagination, to envision control of the House depending on a seat near Toledo, Ohio, where the incumbent is running from prison.

It's easy to appreciate the closeness, but a good deal harder to explain to people why, when all the counting is finally over and all the court challenges have been exhausted, the results will make any difference. There are obviously critical decisions facing the country over the next two years, and Tuesday's vote will decide who gets to make them. But the political parties are doing their best to conceal their differences from the voters. They have both stuck to the same page on supporting President Bush's policies on Iraq. The Democrats want to focus on the economy, but since many of their candidates in swing districts supported the President's destructive tax cut program, there's a limit to what they can propose. The Republicans' determination to be identified with protecting Social Security from change is remarkable given the party's determination to change it. Both sides express total support for a prescription drug program for the elderly, despite their inability to pass a bill. The differences on a Department of Homeland Security are excruciatingly obscure.

With both parties saying the same thing, it isn't surprising that the public is divided pretty much 50-50, as the Senate races show. And no matter who wins, nobody will be able to claim a real mandate, although we can be sure that someone will try.

In the House, where only a half dozen seats separate the two parties, and only a couple of dozen contests are really too close to call, much of the attention keeps turning to Iowa. Having taken the unique approach of creating Congressional districts in a bipartisan manner that makes no effort to protect entrenched incumbents, Iowa has more real races than either New York or California. Iowans may wind up having more input into the nation's destiny over the next two years than all the politicians on both coasts who went to such exquisite efforts to protect their own political necks in the last redistricting. In that way at least, the bottom line on next Tuesday will be that virtue triumphed.