America - Andrew Stephen finds the Democrats have a chance

I went to a literary organisation's gala dinner last Monday night, and a guest speaker was fantasising about what would happen if the White House became more accessible to the public. "You'd call up the White House and the president himself would answer the phone," he said. "But after two or three minutes, you would demand: 'Can I speak to your supervisor?'" The audience, including Republican senators and other Washington movers and shakers, subsided into loud laughter and hoots.

This past month has marked a watershed in American politics: Dubbya's post- 11 September halo has slipped, and it has suddenly become acceptable not only to criticise the president but to laugh at his inadequacies, too. The Washington Post now feels it safe to accuse Vice-President Dick Cheney of, in effect, lying over his ties with Halliburton (the oil services company he used to run that has been awarded more than $1bn of contracts in Iraq) and over alleged links between pre-war Iraq and al-Qaeda. And at the very whiff of scandal in Washington - the illegal naming of a CIA agent, the wife of the former US ambassador who found there was no truth to the claim that Saddam Hussein tried to buy enriched uranium from Niger - Democrats feel free to question probity in the White House and call for, yes, an Inspector Starr-type investigating counsel.

So, in just two years, Dubbya has squandered much of the goodwill that came his way after the 2001 atrocities. Now General Wesley Clark has decided he is a Democrat who will pursue Bush in the elections in November next year, and the polls show that if voting were held now, President-elect Clark would swear the oath of office in January 2005. With Bush looking vulnerable after seeming unassailable only weeks ago, the Democrat nomination has become highly valuable - so much so that Al Gore or Hillary Clinton could still jump in.

Until about three weeks ago, the nine Democrat candidates chasing Boy George's job looked a lacklustre lot. Then General Clark - the former supreme allied commander of Nato who led the war in Kosovo and helped to negotiate the peace in Bosnia - stepped into the fray, just over two years after singing the praises of Ronald Reagan, both Bushes et al. (He explains his support for Dubbya by saying he thought he was supporting a compassionate conservative but has since discovered that he is neither conservative nor compassionate.) In just about his first public statement, he said he would have voted for the invasion of Iraq; next day, he revised his position by saying the opposite. But none of these flip-flops seems to have done any harm, and in most polls he is now ahead of the previous front-runner, Howard Dean, a former GP and governor of Vermont.

Clark, 58, has just the right amount of gravitas to be seeking the presidency; that he is not popular with those who have worked with him is so far not a problem. Three generals have been elected to the presidency before - Zachary Taylor, Ulysses Grant and Dwight Eisenhower - while a professional wrestler, Jesse Ventura, was elected to the governorship of Minnesota in 1999 with record ratings. Clark's great advantage is that he can out-militarise Bush; he can make Dubbya's landing on an aircraft carrier in US airman's togs to announce the end of major combat in Iraq look as silly as it was.

But Bush still has strong advantages - not least his occupancy of the White House and all the official trappings that go with it, such as Air Force One. He has raised around $50m in the past three months, triple the money raised by Dean; in less than six months he has gathered $82.5m, with a goal of between $170m and $200m by the election. The Democrats' fundraising is paltry in comparison, though Clark raised $2.5m in the fortnight after he announced his candidature.

The primaries for the Democrats begin on 19 January with the Iowa caucuses, followed by voting in New Hampshire on 27 January. "Super Tuesday" falls on 2 March, with elections in 13 states. By then, the identity of the Democrat candidate who will challenge Boy George will probably have been settled, though the Democrats' coffers will have been depleted by the long, arduous and personalised campaign of just getting into the ring with Dubbya.

With his opposing candidate politically tired and temporarily skint, Dubbya's machine will then be able to bombard television and right-wing radio talk shows with ads - and it will be up to the Democrat candidate to retrench and produce steady news-grabbing ammunition until his or her own war chest starts to fill up during the summer.

Clark and Dean have awakened exciting new possibilities in US politics, with Clark in particular able to depict the Bush administration as a tawdry failure rather than a team of integrity-filled patriots. Whatever happens, a Democrat is now certain to give Boy George a run for his admittedly considerable money.