With their embedded journalists and tales of military bravado, they encourage America to imagine itself as more noble in battle than in peace. In the unspoken hierarchy of victims, Russians count for less than West Europeans and Americans – or they did until terrorists decided to target the youngest and most vulnerable.As the school siege turned into a bloodbath, it was reported in Moscow that the suicide bomber who attacked a metro station on Tuesday, killing 10 people and injuring 51, was a woman, Roza Nagayeva. Pausing to pick up a pizza or a carton of frozen oven-ready chips is probably the most exercise these youngsters get. But he has yet to pull off the trick of posing as a man of the people.And he is up against Blair, a supreme tactician of crossover politics. Howard has accepted that the Tories have to be big spenders on health and schools. At least he is still on Bush’s shoulder as they come round the last bend.The excitement of the close finish is in stark contrast to sleepy tenor of politics on this side of the Atlantic. The Conservatives are stumbling towards a Bushite position of being the socially conservative party of big government.

Kerry may not be as adept at crossover politics as Bush or Blair, but he is better at it than Michael Howard. That is what you would expect if both parties efficiently seek votes in the centre ground. Paradoxically it ensures both that the policy differences between them will be small and that the competitive passions will be high.On the evidence of the party conventions, I fear that Bush understands crossover politics better than Kerry does. A Time magazine poll carried out before the President’s speech and published after it gave him an 11-point lead, the first big break in the deadlock, even before the traditional “convention bounce”. A Zogby poll carried out at the same time gave Bush only a three-point lead, but it is Kerry who has to make all the running over the next two months, which include the television debates between the candidates. And partly it is because the outcome of the election looks so close.

As Andrew Sullivan, the conservative commentator, observes: “The only difference between Republicans and Democrats now is that the Bush Republicans believe in big insolvent government and the Kerry Democrats believe in big solvent government.”Why then is the US election so polarised and the country so divided? Partly, it is the product of Henry Kissinger’s dictum about student politics: it is so vicious because the stakes are so small. The right still trots out the rhetoric of the small state – sometimes with toe-curling results, as with Howard’s “I believe” credo: “The people should be big. The immediate cause may have been the Tory leader’s opportunistic attempt to distance himself from the Iraq war, but Blair’s closing of the ideological gap made it possible. The state should be small.” But it never amounted to much, even under Ronald Reagan and the blessed Margaret.Now the gaps between the parties are smaller. Bush does even not pretend that he will shrink the size of the state; all he promises is to “restrain federal spending”, with the implication that Kerry would spend more, and ignoring the question of how he would pay for his tax cuts.