The candidates’ rhetoric sounds excruciatingly inapposite at a moment when Internet video of the beheading of an American causes no attention to be paid to reports of Palestinians playing soccer with the head of an Israeli soldier. Was it the same head displayed on a Palestinian desk, as seen on Arab and Israeli television? No one can know the effect on Americans–desensitization? radicalization? –of protracted bombardment by such news.

Both candidates skitter around, speaking with studied irrelevance. The economy is humming but John Kerry denies it. George W. Bush has nothing interesting to say about how expectations about Iraq should be amended, or about the advisers who formulated the unrealistic expectations.

The decline in Bush’s job approval has not been mirrored in a commensurate rise by Kerry, who, looking forward, as voters do, differs little from Bush about what is causing Bush’s decline: Iraq. Kerry’s campaign professes contentment with his standing after a more than $50 million Bush ad blitz.

Kerry needs there to be two large issues, the economy and Iraq, and he may need bad news about both. But regarding Iraq, worse news may be better for Bush, for a while. The rising chaos, with its blood-red thread of gruesomeness, triggers the public’s reflex to rallying around.

Ed Goeas, a Republican pollster, says that usually when persons are asked at this point in the election cycle if they are “extremely likely to vote,” about 59 to 64 percent say yes. This year 76 percent do. He says that the weekend before the 2000 election, 16 percent said they were undecided, which was low by historical standards. It is May and even fewer than that say they are undecided. That is largely the Iraq effect.

Iraq, says Goeas, is having different political effects in different portions of the electorate. He says a disproportionate number of Americans killed in Iraq are from rural areas, where everyone is apt to have known the man, and everyone hears about the death, which is a story for a week, not just a day. Bush, he says, is currently weaker than he was in 2000 in rural America. Bush is doing better among Hispanics, partly because, Goeas surmises, a disproportionate number of Americans in uniform are Hispanics, among whom military service is seen as an affirmation of, and in some cases is a path to, citizenship.

Americans rarely pick presidents from among serving legislators (three in 215 years–Garfield, Harding, Kennedy). And they might be least likely to do so during a national-security crisis. About candidates for legislatures, voters ask: Is he or she smart enough to legislate? When picking an executive–a governor or president–their question is: Is he or she strong enough to lead? One reason Democrats have nevertheless chosen a senator is that a decade ago their choices narrowed: Their party lost “bench strength” when a generation of actual and potential governors was thinned by the Republican sweep of the 1994 elections. Still, one senior Kerry adviser believes that Americans associate national officeholders like senators with national-security knowledge and responsibilities, so it would even be a mistake for Kerry to take a governor as a running mate.

While both candidates are mulling their campaign calculations, there is trash talk in Iraq. Daniel Williams of The Washington Post reports from a Bradley fighting vehicle rolling through pools of raw sewage in Sadr City, where one third of Baghdad’s 5.5 million residents live:

“The occupation authority supplied 70 trash trucks and numerous Dumpsters last year to institute garbage collection… Iraqi contractors took the trucks, then illegally charged people for pickups that were supposed to be free. In the meantime, the contractors used them elsewhere in the city for other lucrative chores.

“People wouldn’t pay the fee, so trash built up and clogged the already inadequate sewer lines… Other Iraqis who had contracted to suck the debris from the sewer lines also tried to shake down residents. The sewers were oozing black crud onto the streets. Looters seized the Dumpsters and used them for scrap metal.”

Nation-building.

When Sadr City is sufficiently tranquil, U.S. commanders plan Operation Iron Broom, in which U.S. troops, who may not have enlisted with this in mind, will help clean up the crud. Given that this is the reality awaiting whoever is inaugurated next January, it is understandable, if not admirable, that neither has much to say that is pertinent to the enveloping crisis.

Kerry, disabled by 19 years of Senatespeak, resembles Lord Fawn, a character in a Trollope novel: “He has a wonderful gift of saying nothing with second-rate dignity.” Bush, for his part, recently said: “Most of Fallujah is returning to normal.” That’s good. Or is it?