residential contests are taffy pulls.
The Republicans and Democrats stretch to opposite poles, and the undecideds are like the taffy in the middle, gradually pulled to one pole or the other, the gooey middle getting thinner-thinner-thinner, till at the end one pole has the larger blob of votes.
That process requires polarization of the people in the middle. Each campaign tries to portray the other guy as an unsafe choice. So the Bush scheme is to demonize Al Gore on the theme: You can't trust him. The Gore scheme is to portray George W. as a dope who would wreck the economy and screw up Medicare and Social Security.
You'll hear a lot of this from both men when the first presidential debate of the season is uncorked Tuesday night at UMass-Boston. Each man will try to draw a stark picture of the policies of the other.
Since the economy under Clinton has just won the gold medal for being the most super-duper economy ever, the Republican attacks on Gore probe elsewhere: He's a liar, he exaggerates the cost of his dog's arthritis pills, he believes he invented the Internet, etc. And then there's the Republican claim that the Clinton-Gore administration ''hollowed out'' the military, gave it too much to do, weakened our nation's security, and won't spend enough on missile defense.
It was to insulate defense and foreign affairs from political mudslinging that President Clinton chose as secretary of defense Bill Cohen, the Maine Republican who had served 18 years in the Senate, six years in the House, and who had crafted a reputation for independence and probity that spanned the partisan canyon that has riven the Beltway Mentality.
Cohen recapped Clinton's appeal to him, saying the president told him, ''I want to send a signal to the country'' that Washington's partisanship would stop at the water's edge. Cohen spoke Thursday at the New England Council's 75th anniversary dinner for 700 business types at the Westin Hotel, where he received the ''New Englander of the Year'' award along with Blue Cross-Blue Shield chief William Van Faasen.
The election-year criticism of the Democratic administration's custody of the military and national security was coolly rebuffed by Cohen, a lifelong Republican: ''Every country in the world looks to us,'' he said flatly, ''for setting the standard, for prosperity, equality, liberty.''
Cohen has logged over 700,000 air miles visiting troops in the field, been in every country of any consequence, as the civilian chief of the mightiest military ever constructed. He talked of seeing flight crews work in 140-degree heat on the USS George Washington in the Persian Gulf, of Marines landing in East Timor to build shelters for refugees, of Marines in Kuwait.
US troops are ''the most advanced, respected, and feared'' in the world, but, ''They're far more than warriors; they're peacekeepers and relief workers.'' We are the ones who are there when societies collapse, and order needs to be restored in some Godforsaken hot spot.
That's why we have 100,000 uniformed men and women in Asia, and as many in Europe, and 23,000 in the Gulf. We are there ''to keep the peace, making the world safe to be free and prosperous.'' Pointing to the Serbian election just lost by dictator Slobodan Milosevic, Cohen said the 78-day NATO air war saved a million Albanians from ethnic cleansing in Kosovo.
''In 38,000 sorties, we lost two airplanes and no pilots,'' a technological miracle credited to the skill and equipment of US fliers. ''We settled their lives,'' he said of the Albanian Kosovars.
Cohen's speech was not broadcast; it was heard only by 700 people. In the campaign, as in the Congress, other issues crowd in, some of them basic, some of them trivial. Neither the hugely expensive national missile defense system (which Clinton has stalled so the next president can make the costly decision) nor America's complicated role abroad has been thoroughly ventilated by the debate to date.
Cohen repudiated the isolationist wing within his own party when he addressed those who would argue that America should pull back from its interventions around the world. Plucking an admonition from Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. to an earlier generation of Americans, Cohen quoted: ''We must sail, and not lie at anchor, or drift.''
What we're sailing now is aircraft carriers in the Persian Gulf, not square-riggers built of New England oak. But the mission is the same, to Cohen as to Clinton: projecting America's role, mission, and force, if need be, wherever and whenever deemed vital.
Despite Ralph Nader's argument - it will be amplified today in a big Green Party rally at the FleetCenter - that there's not a dime's worth of difference between the two big parties on issues that matter, Bill Cohen would beg to disagree.
On a new missile defense scheme that would outrage our allies as well as our adversaries, on whether to deploy Marines here or there wherever massacre looms, on the newly authorized abortion pill, or on the appointment of US Supreme Court replacements, there are differences between the leading taffy pullers that the Greens cannot honestly deny.
David Nyhan is a Globe columnist.
