Winner's tough task: governing

Similarly, Bush might have problems with his proposal to make personal savings accounts a feature of Social Security - something he has been touting as a major initiative for his second term. There are reasons Bush has not yet pushed these accounts, and they still hold. Retirees worry the change might mean benefit cuts, and costs of a transition to a new Social Security system might be huge. To enact it "he'd really have to mount a massive public-pressure campaign," says Thomas Schaller, a political scientist at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County.

American presidents remain perhaps the most influential people in the world, despite their constraints in Washington. The nation's chief executive has enormous leeway to set foreign policy, as President Bush has shown.

Yet on the central issue of Iraq, Bush may have little choice but to march forward, if reelected. US allies have made it clear they won't be sending their own troops to help, meaning no large numbers of US soldiers will come home any time soon.

This can be judged as either staying the course, or being stuck in the course, notes American University political scientist Allan Lichtman.

But it's not clear that Kerry, if he wins, will be able to construct an Iraq policy that looks much different from today's. Kerry says that he would be able to get allies to help in Iraq, where Bush cannot. However, there are many indications that France, Germany, and others would still say "no" to another request for troops, even if it comes from a new resident of the Oval Office.

"Kerry has been much more vigorous in attacking what Bush did [in Iraq] two years ago than in saying what he would do," says Allan Lichtman.

In the end, whoever wins will be limited by the fact that nearly half the nation opposed his election. The US is split into blue and red camps that disdain each other's choices in clothes, music, and food, not to mention political candidates.

That's the theme of many analysts, anyway, and they may well be right. Tuesday's results are likely to depict a nation riven in two, with one side only slightly ahead.

But some social scientists disagree. They say political elites and the media have distorted complex attitudes toward such difficult issues as abortion and homosexuality. Voters seem polarized on these issues because polarized choices are all they are offered, in this view.

"If the views of all Americans, and not just party activists, are taken into account, the people of the United States are actually more centrist than they've been for some time," concludes Alan Wolfe, director of the Boisi Center for Religion and American Public Life at Boston College, in a recent article in The Wilson Quarterly.

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