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It doesn't seem like half a decade since the Bush/Kerry showdown in Campaign 2004. I always used to get a little restless toward the end of long US election campaigns, and my traditional method of alleviating the boredom was to predict the outcome and then insist that, if I proved to be wrong, I would of course quit. I did it with Bush/Gore in the 2000 campaign in both Canada's National Post and The Daily Telegraph. And lo and behold four years later I was putting my job on the line all over again. For example, from The Irish Times of October 11th 2004:

It was sobering, on reading the recent flurry of letters in this newspaper under the heading "Balancing The US Debate", to discover that it was this column that had single-handedly unbalanced it. "If Steyn represents the American right, where is the spokesperson for the American left?" demands Conor McCarthy of Dun Laoghaire. The hitherto perfectly poised seesaw of press coverage of the United States is apparently all out of whack because my corpulent column is weighing down one end while on the other up in the air are the massed ranks of Irish Times correspondents, RTE, the BBC and 97% of the European media class - plus Anthony O'Halloran, who opined in these pages a few days ago that "anyone who cares to visit a small town in the Midwest will encounter what can only be described as ultra-right-wing thinking." Prof O'Halloran didn't cite any examples of this "ultra-right-wing thinking", secure in his assumption that most readers would know the sort of thing he had in mind.

As the ne plus ultra of unbalanced right-wing thinkers, it's not for me to suggest how the US debate might be balanced in these pages. I have only one theory on column-writing, which is this: at a certain basic level, a columnist has to be right more often than not, otherwise the reader (I use the singular advisedly) is just wasting his time. If I were Robert Fisk, the famed foreign correspondent with decades of experience in the Muslim world, I'd be ashamed to leave the house. Sample Fisk headlines on the Afghan war: "Bush Is Walking Into A Trap", "It Could Become More Costly Than Vietnam". Sample insight on the Iraq war: when the Yanks announced they'd taken Baghdad International Airport, Fisky insisted they hadn't and suggested they'd seized by mistake an old RAF airfield abandoned in the Fifties. It's this kind of unique expertise that has made him so admired around the world, not least in Ireland.

By contrast, readers of this column may have gained the impression that George W Bush will win the Presidential election on November 2nd. If he doesn't, I shall trouble readers of this newspaper no further. It would be ridiculous to continue passing myself off as an incisive analyst of US affairs after I've been exposed as a deluded fool who completely misread the entire situation. In the bright new dawn of the Kerry Administration, you'd deserve better. If that's not an incentive for Irish citizens to smuggle a few illegal campaign contributions the Senator's way, I don't know what is.

But, if, on the other hand, Bush is re-elected, I make one small request of the Irish and European media: you need to re-think your approach to this Presidency... That's all I'm asking for after November 2nd — that the Euroleft chuck the tired gags about "Shrub" the moron, the idiot, the stupid white man that saw them through his first term. Stow the pop psychology, too — the cracks about the "daddy complex" that supposedly led him to topple Saddam. It's already obvious the 43rd Presidency is far more consequential than the 41st: George Bush Sr's place in history will mainly be as the guy who warmed up the name for George Bush Jr. If you're not prepared to give serious thought to the challenge Bush poses to the UN and EU complaceniks, you're never going to understand the times we live in.

If Kerry wins, I'm outta here. If Bush wins, eschewing lazy European condescension for the next four years would be the best way of "balancing the US debate".

Ah, well. Perhaps that was too much to ask for. Later that month, I made the same offer to readers of The Spectator. Do you remember the afternoon of Election Day in the US that year? The first exit polls showed some sort of Kerry landslide. Mid-afternoon Eastern Time is well into the evening London time, and at the US Embassy election night party I'm told that among the many aspects of the surprise Kerry victory discussed by my Speccie and Telegraph colleagues over the chardonnay in Grosvenor Square was the abrupt finish of Steyn's career. Ha! 'Twas not to be:

My hunch that that first Harris poll is the correct one is only that — a hunch that Bush is ahead outside the margin of error.

Unfortunately, on election day, he also has to be ahead outside the margin of lawyer, which is a tougher call. The Democrats already have thousands of chad-chasers circling the courthouses in Florida, Ohio, New Mexico and even New Hampshire, alas. It's important for Bush to win big enough both to compensate for Democrat fraud and to deter litigation.

In lively elections such as this the media usually run endless features on 'angry white men', a demographic to which they're not notably partial. After 'angry white men' threw out the Democrats' congressional leadership in the 1994 elections, Peter Jennings, the exquisitely condescending Canadian who anchors ABC News, sniffed that 'the voters had a temper tantrum'. But this time round the angry white men are all on the Democrat side, and the media seem to think it's perfectly normal.

The other night, for example, Lawrence O'Donnell, MSNBC's 'Senior Political Analyst' (i.e., Democrat hack), discussed John Kerry with John O'Neill, spokesman for Swift Boat Veterans for Truth. This is a flavour of the senior political analysis offered by the Senior Political Analyst, although for the full effect of his shrieking over Mr O'Neill's attempted answers you really need the big 72-inch screen with quadraphonic surround-sound ranting and digital-quality close-up of his facial contortions:

Etc.

A day after this calm measured display of quiet confidence in Senator Kerry's campaign, his fellow MSNBC honcho, ol' Pitchfork Pat Buchanan, read a prepared statement by the network apologising for its senior analyst going bananas. Out on the street, meanwhile, angry white men have burgled Republican offices in Spokane, Washington; lobbed cinder blocks through Republican offices in Flagstaff, Arizona; shot up Republican offices in Knoxville, Tennessee; assaulted female Republican students handing out flyers at the Gophers football game in Minnesota; and are currently bullying early voting Republicans at polling booths in Florida. If this campaign went on another two months, they'd be seizing GOP county chairmen and beheading them on video. As it is, if Bush wins by a few hundred in Ohio or New Mexico, these fellows don't seem inclined to take it lying down... So the above prediction needs to be able to withstand Democrat fraud, which I'm nervous about. If Tuesday goes off as smoothly as the Afghan election, we'll be very lucky.

Usually after making wild predictions I confidently toss my job on the line and say, if they don't pan out, I'm outta here. I've done that a couple of times this campaign season — over Wes Clark (remember him? ) — but it almost goes without saying in these circumstances. Were America to elect John Kerry president, it would be seen around the world as a repudiation not just of Bush and of Iraq but of the broader war. It would be a declaration by the people of American unexceptionalism — that they are a slightly butcher Belgium; they would be signing on to the wisdom of conventional transnationalism. Having failed to read correctly the mood of my own backyard, I could hardly continue to pass myself off as a plausible interpreter of the great geopolitical forces at play. Obviously that doesn't bother a lot of chaps in this line of work — Sir Simon Jenkins, Robert 'Mister Robert' Fisk, etc. , — and no doubt I could breeze through the next four years doing ketchup riffs on Teresa Heinz Kerry, but I feel a period of sober reflection far from the scene would be appropriate. My faith in the persuasive powers of journalism would be shattered; maybe it would be time to try something else — organising coups in Africa, like the alleged Sir Mark Thatcher is alleged to have allegedly done; maybe abseiling down the walls of the Presidential palace and garroting the guards personally.

But I don't think it will come to that.

This is the 9/11 election, a choice between pushing on or retreating to the polite fictions of September 10. I bet on reality.

Well, I won my bets, but wound up parting company with both publications anyway, for entirely unrelated reasons. I left The Irish Times in 2005 and The Spectator in 2006, which is probably just as well. As for the "repudiation" and "declaration of American unexceptionalism" and all the rest, well, they came along eventually, didn't they?