Here is a political mystery worthy of Sherlock Holmes at his best. Why was Al Gore found in the library last week with a dagger in his back?
Recent opinion polls show him falling behind his rival, George W. Bush. But pretty well everybody, including the Bushites, agrees that in the final crucial television debate, Gore did a much better job on the issues than Bush.
Gore showed he had mastered the details of his budget, and also that he had a better grasp of budget issues, including the cost of Bush's budget proposals, than Bush himself. Bush explained his idea of what budgeting is all about: "It's clearly a budget," he said, "it's got a lot of numbers in it."
A debate question that should have been a home run for Bush, every bit as decisive as David Justice the same evening hitting a home run for the Yankees, was from a 30ish woman who wanted to know how the rival tax policies would affect her.
Bush told her we needed a stronger military. Come again? Well, somewhere in an irrelevant rambling answer there was a vague reference to his plan to cut taxes across the board, but the bewilderment of the woman was shared by everybody.
A little later he stumbled into the realisation that his partial privatisation of social security would take $1 trillion from future retirees, a key voting constituency.
The spear-carriers in the press for Bush agree that he does not have the right answers, but now say that doesn't matter. The play is that Bush is really that older governor from California and people love him for his cosy woolliness just as they loved Reagan.
It's a switch sale. It is true Bush still scores higher on likeability, but that is not enough to explain the contradiction between voting intentions and judgments on brainpower and policies. American voters may not be the most attentive in the world, but they also kick the tyres when offered a "great deal" at the used-car lot.
So why did Gallup/CNN/USA Today, for instance, give Bush an astounding 10-point lead in voting intention, but report nonetheless that a majority of these same people scored Gore six per cent ahead of Bush on the quality of his policies and nine points ahead on clarity of expression?
THE clue to the mystery, as for Sherlock Holmes, is the dog we don't hear barking. Nobody at the national level has an ear to something that is happening in millions of homes across this vast country. It's this: when families sit down in front of the television, they are assailed and wooed night after night, hour after hour, by the most momentous political advertising campaign in history. So far Bush has spent $120 million and Gore only $60 million.
This advertising blitz, from the richer party, with more support from business, makes a farce of elective democracy, but it is only a Republican revenge for what the Democrats did to them in 1996 when Bill Clinton routed Bob Dole to win a second term.
Nobody noticed in the early summer of 1996 that the Democrats were spending advertising millions unconventionally early. They concentrated the investment outside the media capitals of New York and Los Angeles. Neither the press nor the Republican Party caught on until it was too late.
The scale of the Bush advertising campaign is one thing. The other is the cleverness of its disinformation. Ordinary people watching may well believe that the Gore they saw is really "Gore-gantuan", who secretly has plans to raise federal spending more than any president since Johnson's Great Society.
They are being misled. As a percentage of national income, the only meaningful standard, Gore promises to reduce federal spending. Another scare ad says he will spend three times as much as Clinton envisaged in 1992. Again, it is not true.
THE most outrageous telly-con of all is the one stating that Gore's prescription drug plan will subjugate senior citizens to the dreaded health management organisations which may overrule doctors. In fact, Gore relies on the government's respected Medicare programme. It is Bush who intends to create pressure on older folk to join managed care plans.
What is at stake in this election is not so much this or that social security plan. It is the future of American democracy. All the barriers to control the insidious influence of money are down. If Gore wins, there will be reform.
Bush refuses to commit himself. Why should he? He has made his position perfectly clear in Bush-speak: "I do not agree with this notion that somehow if I go to try to attract votes and to lead people toward a better tomorrow somehow I get subscribed to some - some doctrine gets subscribed to me." Work that one out, my dear Watson.
Harold Evans lives in New York. He is a former editor of the Sunday Times and the Times of London