Politics and politeness

"Et tu, Brute!" presidential hopeful John McCain might have felt inclined to exclaim as his old friend and fellow Republican Colin Powell came out to endorse Barack Obama for the top job.

Bitter blow though it must have been for the candidate, he bit his lip and played it down.

"It doesn't come as a surprise," he said.

"I've always admired and respected General Powell. We're long-time friends . . . I will continue to respect and admire General Colin Powell."

But it was just the news the struggling McCain campaign, behind in the polls and in some of the traditional Republican strongholds, did not need.

Mr McCain's measured response highlighted an irony, for Gen Powell had just revealed that prominent among the reasons for his decision was the McCain campaign's negative advertising and scare tactics - in particular the attempt to portray Mr Obama as something of a bogeyman.

"They're trying to connect him to some kind of terrorist feelings and I think that is inappropriate," Gen Powell said, adding that these "kind of approaches to the campaign troubled" him.

They weren't, he said, what the American people were looking for.

He had heard, he continued, "senior members of my own party drop the suggestion [that Obama's] a Muslim and might be associated with terrorists" and was "troubled" by such expressions.

Gen Powell's endorsement and the reaction to it highlights a tension in the make-up of the US election campaign, images of which come to us largely via the looking glass of the television screen.

The contest appears exotic, urbane, polite and interesting - in short, a far cry from the chaotic, sometimes corrupt Hunter S. Thompson-esque world of Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail.

But as Gen Powell has all too clearly pointed out, this is not to say fear and loathing does not exist: how else to explain the proliferation of McCain attack advertisements aimed at undermining Mr Obama's candidacy - calling him "mum on the markets" and "a risk your family cannot afford"; labelling him "dishonourable" for commenting on civilian deaths in Afghanistan; or raising the spectre of the Democratic candidate's relationship with former "domestic terrorist" William Ayers.

There is a hint of McCarthyism in these fear tactics.

While a much lesser proportion of Mr Obama's own advertising is negative, he is outspending Mr McCain significantly, which means his own attack ads are close to acquiring airtime parity.

And yet, watching the formality and studied politeness of the debates, and seeing and hearing Mr McCain defend Mr Obama against some of the hotheads at his own rallies, it is easy to come to the conclusion that chivalry in this campaign is not dead.

The truth may be that the US electorate as a whole, rather than the pockets of partisan political junkies surrounding the candidates, is not impressed by overt displays of rudeness and aggression in their presidential candidates.

They evidently prefer them to be "presidential", to be able to remain polite while simultaneously and silently twisting the assassin's knife.

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