President Bush has won his war - if not all of it, the first round certainly - and more normal politics is resuming in the United States. Patrick Smyth reports on the start of the mid-term election campaigning
They paid $10,000 a head on Wednesday night for the privilege of hearing a few words from the hottest property on the fund-raising circuit, President and Commander-in-Chief, George W. Bush. All pretty tame stuff, however, as Mr Bush rattled the tin for brother Jeb Bush's re-election campaign for Governor of Florida against the formidable former Attorney General, Janet Reno.
But even if the President confined himself to a few words of praise for the brother - who is going to complain about that? - it was an important symbolic dipping of the toe back in the pool of partisan domestic politics, and complemented a tough speech at the weekend blasting Democratic economic policy.
War or no war, this is mid-term election year, and the inevitable has happened. The potential prize is huge. If the Democrats can simply hold their own in the Senate and win six seats in the 435-member House, they can control the entire legislative process against Mr Bush. The gloves are off, and as Sen Phil Gramm, a conservative Republican from Texas, put it bluntly: "Bipartisanship is over in Washington."
He blamed the Senate Majority Leader, Tom Daschle, whose speech on Friday blamed the President's tax cuts for provoking "the most dramatic fiscal deterioration in our nation's history".
"They have one unchanging, unyielding solution that they offer for every problem: tax cuts that go disproportionately to the most affluent," Mr Daschle insisted, taking to the country a debate that has been largely confined to Congress. He has a difficult line to toe. Not only must he avoid appearing unpatriotic by undermining the President's war effort, but on domestic issues he has to straddle a party deeply divided along ideological lines.
His emphasis on the deteriorating deficit, whose disappearance had been the achievement of the Clinton era, pitches the Democrats as financially responsible while fudging their spending plans. But will such a nuanced strategy be enough to put clear space between his party and a President whose latest approval rating of 86 per cent suggests the public needs a lot of wooing? Democrats insist that polls also show voters are likely to vote on domestic issues on which the President has a rating "only" in the 60s, and they manifest remarkable optimism about the coming elections.
Terry McAuliffe, the combative chairman of the Democratic Party, was in no doubt of the certainty of a Republican rout when he spoke recently to a Washington DC gathering of Irish-American Democrats. He pointed to the uncomfortable reality for Republicans that in the House, of 23 seats which are not being contested by incumbents, the President's party is defending 15.
Incumbency is the surest way to get elected in the US system. Twenty-five to 30 of the 435 House seats up for grabs are likely to be competitive, a major advantage for an opposition party. In the last 50 years every president's party has lost House seats in the first mid-term after winning the White House. Albeit by a margin of only one, Democrats already control the Senate, and every president bar Reagan and Nixon lost Senate seats in their first mid-term. Thirty-six governorships and all 34 seats in the Senate are on the line.
The Democrats believe that by focusing their smaller war chests on the most vulnerable seats, they can overcome the Republican fund-raising advantage.
The Republicans' only real political gain of the autumn, their success in retaining the Giuliani crown in New York, only came about because their candidate, Michael Bloomberg, until recently a lifelong Democrat, spent $69 million on his campaign and the Democrats self-destructed in internecine warfare.
But Republicans are far from down-hearted. Voters may not disapprove of Democrats' position on the war, virtually indistinguishable as it is from the President's, but they regard Republicans as better able to handle defence-type issues. And many believe Clinton is responsible for the economy's woes, not Bush.
Former House speaker Newt Gingrich has acknowledged that Mr Bush may not have public confidence on the economy but argues he may benefit from what he calls the FDR or Kennedy "effect". Both presidents failed to solve immediate economic problems they were elected to fix "but gave the country hope". Mr Bush, he argues, has done that.
September 11th has given an extraordinary jolt to this country's politics and economy, but has not plunged it into a state of despair. Rather, many observers perceive a new, as yet unquantifiable, sense of purpose, which the President has successfully nurtured and identified himself with.