Vice President Al Gore and Texas Governor George W. Bush will answer questions from the public Tuesday in their third and final debate before one of them is elected to the White House November 7.
With only three weeks to go, the yo-yo-like polls are slightly in Bush's favor, but neither candidate can safely claim a clear winning edge.
Tonight's debate format, a town hall meeting, would appear to favor Gore, who is much more experienced in fielding questions from the public. Bush has had few such question-and-answer sessions and usually with friendly audiences.
The televised 90-minute showdown is scheduled to start in St. Louis, Missouri, at 9:00 pm (0100 GMT Wednesday).
The debate will begin with a sad note as both candidates will likely lament the apparent death of Missouri Governor Mel Carnahan, a 66-year-old Democrat who was reported missing after a small plane crash just south of here late Monday.
Bush and Republican John Ashcroft, a local politician who was running against Carnahan to represent Missouri in the US Senate, have both canceled their campaign activities for Tuesday, local media have reported.
Although domestic issues are likely to be the foremost concern of people asking questions of Bush and Gore Tuesday night, the explosive situation in the Middle East also loomed large in the campaigns of the White House rivals.
With President Bill Clinton attending a summit in Egypt aimed at restoring calm in Israel and the Palestinian territories, Gore and Bush made measured public statements Monday about the crisis.
"The governor hopes that the summit will be a success. It has been important to him that we speak with one voice. He's talked about support for the president this time and he certainly hopes he can bring calm," Condoleezza Rice, Bush's national security advisor, told CBS.
Analysts were unusually unwilling to say whether the Democratic vice president or Republican governor stood to reap more political gain from the unrest, which has claimed some 109 lives since September 28.
Voters unhappy with Washington's course of action may gravitate towards Bush, but citizens could just as well see Gore's quarter-century of foreign policy experience as a decisive asset, experts say.
Going into their final exchange, Gore faces the greater challenge: despite his much-vaunted debate savvy and encyclopedic mastery of policy details, national opinion polls show him trailing Bush by a handful of percentage points after their first two one-on-one encounters.
A Washington Post-ABC News poll published Tuesday put Bush's lead at 48-44, while in a CNN-Gallup poll it was 47-44.
The vice president weathered criticism that he was overbearing in the first debate and overly muted in the second, while Bush -- for whom the debates had been seen as a liability -- has won good reviews for not floundering and making the most of his folksy charm.
But with the Republican standard-bearer's lead within the surveys' margin of error, both camps acknowledge the race is still up for grabs.
"We feel the race has been close and that it will be close until election day," November 7, according to Gore campaign spokesman Dag Vega.
Gore was here Monday preparing with a dozen of what his campaign has called "citizen advisors," all of them from Missouri, and running the usual mock debates with a stand-in for the Texas governor, said Vega.
Bush prepared for the encounter at his Texas ranch before heading through Clinton's home state of Arkansas and then on to St. Louis.
Both candidates were to pursue efforts to woo undecided and independent voters and barnstorm key battleground states that will decide what analysts say could be the tightest US presidential race in four decades.
Already, Gore was stepping up attacks on Bush's record in Texas, targeting his handling of issues atop voters' agendas such as health care and education.
Meanwhile, Bush launched an effort to woo women voters, who tend to favor the Democratic candidate, and dispatched 29 of the nation's 30 Republican governors to toss-up states -- ST. LOUIS, Missouri (AFP)
© 2000 Al Bawaba (www.albawaba.com)
