Swindon student Alex Ogle, who met Senator John Kerry last week, went to a George Bush rally this week to get the other side of the story.

The 21-year-old went to Greendown School and Swindon College, before spending a gap year travelling the world and starting a BA in American Studies at the University of Sussex in Brighton.

As part of his course he is spending a year in the US. He is now in Pennsylvania where he reports on the run-up to the election with just three days to go

DURING one of his final pre-election appearances, President George W Bush asked Democrats to support him when they vote on Tuesday.

The speech I saw revealed a change of direction. Whereas the Republican campaign up to now has been to shore up support among base constituents, the President spoke across party lines, saying he would be honoured if Democrats chose to vote for him. For the 15 minutes he spoke on this issue, the 5,000 strong crowd crammed into an airplane hanger in rural Ohio remained deathly silent.

For one supporter I spoke to, this adjustment in his usual rhetoric displayed a certain desperation, probably because the election is likely to be so close.

Writing for the Pitt News, a college newspaper in Pittsburgh, I have seen a plethora of Democrats the candidate John Kerry himself, and supporting politicians.

The president and other Republicans gave up on the city long ago, so to maintain an impression of balanced election coverage, a friend and I decided we should drive the two hours out of Pennsylvania to bordering Ohio.

There were a number of stark differences to Kerry's rally a week before.

The Democrats held their event on a college campus in the middle of a bustling city, in a large field, in the open air.

It lasted around five hours, with a number of musicians and speakers working a crowd, made up of all ethnic backgrounds.

In Ohio, the overwhelming white supporters had to drive to the remote regional airport, where they had to board buses to the even more remote hangar.

Twanging, patriotic country music blasted out of speakers as the President's airplane Air Force One touched down.

Bush spoke from a podium for an hour, glancing down to his script every 10 seconds. By contrast, Kerry had wandered around the stage with his microphone, making comments and interacting with the crowd, talking in a relaxed, assured fashion.

Paul Harris, the US correspondent for The Guardian and The Observer, stood next to me in the press pen. The president's performance was the most confident Harris had seen in the three months he has been covering the campaign. To me, especially compared with his opponent, Bush seemed to be more puppet-like than I ever imagined he could be in real life. The crowd cheered and booed at appropriate intervals, but I got the distinct impression of dj vu: I had seen this exact speech a dozen times before on television.

Quite amusingly, the President again re-adjusted his administration's rationale for going to war with Iraq.

As opposed to the "imminent threat to world security" and all the talk of weapons of mass destruction that was given preceding the invasion, Bush spent half a minute saying Saddam Hussein was a dangerous leader who had "a lot of weapons and explosives". Two dozen present world leaders fit this description. This was the weakest argument for the war I have heard from anyone.

If the polls are correct, the election on Tuesday will be, at its simplest, a referendum on the Iraq war, and about the state of the declining economy since the invasion. The President will be hoping his judgments have played well with the American people. If not, he will have mirrored his father's downfall in 1992 a one-term president who lost his way somewhere in the Persian Gulf, forgetting about his people back home.