Watching last Tuesday evening’s final presidential debate, I felt I was watching a pivotal moment in US politics – and an unlikely and overlooked parallel unfold before our eyes. Al Gore, his neck muscles twitching with that famed alpha male aggression and his besuited body taut with tension, won the debate overwhelmingly on mastery of facts and issues. In his final statement, he hammered away: “I’ve kept the faith with my country. I volunteered for the army. I served in Vietnam. I kept the faith with my family. Tipper and I have been married for 30 years. We have devoted ourselves to our children, and now our nearly one-and-a-half-year-old grandson.”
How could we not all flock in humble support of such an alpha hero? Then Boy George, looking smaller than Gore in every way and pursing his lips with anxiety, weighed in: “When I put my hand on the Bible, I will swear to not only uphold the laws of the land, but I will also swear to uphold the honour and the dignity of the office to which I have been elected, so help me, God.”
And so help America, one should add. A friend in Beijing e-mailed me just before the debate, asking: “Are they really going to vote for Bush as president? Tell me this can’t be true.”
As I watched Boy George bumble and stumble his way intellectually through the 90 minutes, I realised that my friend’s reaction had an eerie parallel: not the ones conventionally being drawn – that Dubbya looks like his dad, has that same privileged, preppy Waspdom that each has striven mightily to disguise, and even uses the same uniquely verbally challenged Bush-speak that so mangles the English language.
No, the parallel that suddenly struck me was, at first sight, a shocking one: striking similarities not so much between Boy George and his dad, but to his dad’s predecessor, Ronald Reagan. My friend’s reaction to Bush was exactly how the outside world viewed the prospect of Reagan’s making it to the presidency two decades ago. Here was a former Hollywood B-movie actor-belatedly-turned-governor known not to be (to use the vogue American vulgarity) a rocket scientist; a man who almost took pride in his lack of knowledge of political issues. How could Americans be so stupid – much of the world was asking in 1980 and is asking now – as to think of electing this dolt to the White House?
Yet Reagan stumbled and charmed his way into the White House, becoming – whatever history’s final verdict is – one of the country’s most beloved and electorally successful presidents ever. He had an uncanny ability to connect with ordinary people via television, reaching those deep-seated knee-jerk reflexes of Americans that eluded others.
By the time the second question was under way on Tuesday night, I was beginning to wonder whether Boy George could yet use the same technique to bumble along that same phoney, but apparently likeable path into the White House: a woman from the audience started to read out her question, but then quickly realised she could not do without her glasses.
“I’ve got . . . ” Dubbya started to joke, reaching into his pocket to offer the woman his own glasses. “Hi, Norma,” he then nodded amiably to a black woman asking a question. “Hi, Joyce,” to another questioner. To a black man disturbed by Dubbya’s role as the nation’s top executioner: “Hi, Leo.”
We were thus faced by a fascinating spectacle: Gore ignoring the people, but imperiously bombarding them with facts, figures and convincing reasons why his policies were right, while Boy George had that Quaylian look of terror in his eyes when faced with any real policy debate, yet simultaneously managed to connect with people and trigger those primeval Reaganite instincts.
In the privacy of the voting booths in just over a fortnight’s time, on 7 November, therefore, Americans will be faced with a critical choice of packages: Gore’s overwhelming competence combined with his overweening charmlessness, or Dubbya’s no-less overwhelming incompetence combined with seductive Reaganite aw-shucks charm and reassurance. And the signs are that crucial swing-voters will not actually make up their minds over which they prefer until election day. In 1960, just 113,000 voters out of 68 million ended up giving the White House to Jack Kennedy over Nixon – and, although the momentum is definitely now back with Boy George, this election is so volatile that the 2,000 margin could yet end up much the same.
So, while Gore was furiously reinforcing the negative personal images of himself that he managed to convey in the first two debates, Dubbya was quietly spewing out Reaganite reflex lines. He has faith in the people to make decisions about how to lead their lives; his opponent prefers big government telling us what to do. He would send money to the local folks (he used those actual words) to decide how it should be spent. “I don’t like it when the federal government tells us what to do,” was his mantra. Looking towards the taut, overeager, muscle-twitching Gore, he said: “This is a Big Spender.”
Boy George and the Republicans, therefore, are now setting the agenda: Dubbya as the defender of the little guy working hard to make a decent life for his family, Gore as someone who would preside over an Orwellian federal government chipping away at the individuality and rights of those good folks back home.
Real facts – the federal government has shrunk under the Clinton-Gore administration, while bureaucracy in Texas has expanded in Bush’s six years as governor, for example – quickly become irrelevant when instinctual American tenets are mined in this way.
Yet last Tuesday’s debate also managed to highlight some genuine policy differences. On education, for example, Boy George would give parents with kids in bad schools vouchers of no less than $1,500, so that they could spend this munificent windfall on private education. Help the people to help themselves, you see. He would send $2.4bn of federal funds back to the folks at state level to recruit more teachers. Self-help: that’s what has made America great and what it now needs, not a big-spending, all-powerful government from Washington.
Simultaneously, Gore offers staggering promises to anybody still listening: he has pledged to reduce class sizes to no more than 18 for younger children and 20 for high school kids. He would recruit one million new teachers in ten years. There would be no puny vouchers taking funding away from the state schools. Every pupil would be computer literate by 13 under President Gore.
It is just the same with healthcare. Dubbya would help the people to help themselves. Marketplace competition would work its wonders. Instead of creating a vast commie national health service, he would give families a tax credit of – wait for this as a bold move – $2,000, so they could help pay for private medical insurance (that would not go very far, I can vouch from personal experience).
Gore, meanwhile, would gradually change Medicare, so that the elderly would not have to pay for prescriptions at all. And he would double spending on cancer research, over five years.
Then, there was a question on Tuesday night about gun control – an issue that, following a number of school shootings, increasingly resonates with mums across the land. Dubbya (who has a disturbingly intense personal fascination with guns, I am told) would raise the age for handgun possession to 21; he would have background checks on people buying weapons at gun fairs, but only if they can be carried out instantly. (Most cannot, and as gun fairs normally last only a single weekend, this is a blatantly meretricious proposal.)
Gore would introduce mandatory photo-IDs – like driving licences – for all new purchasers of handguns. Background checks at gun fairs would be mandatory, instant or not. Bush, meanwhile, hammered away with his Reaganite themes: “I believe law-abiding citizens should be allowed to carry weapons to defend themselves.”
Over the environment and energy, too, Dubbya’s appeal is to the buccaneering entrepreneurial spirit of good ol’ America. The federal government would get less control, the states more; Gore would spend $148bn over ten years for a cleaner environment. Bush would drill for oil in California and Florida, and even in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska; Gore would ban such drilling. The reason? Bush wants to make America less dependent on Opec and able to produce more of its own oil. Gore would dip into the nation’s oil reserves, Bush would not.
A Boy George administration, too, is now pledged to refuse to allow any US troops ever to be put under UN command; he is opposed to the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty and would rebuild American missile defences, even if that violates the ABM treaty; he would give no more aid to Russia until it gets out of Chechnya. Gore says the US must pay its huge debt to the UN in full. He supports the test ban treaty and believes the ABM treaty is “the cornerstone of strategic stability in the US relationship with Russia”.
The divergence between the approaches of the two candidates is thus startling, yet Americans only began to get their first real glimpse of this last Tuesday night.
I have been saying repeatedly here that the candidate who screws up least will be the one who wins, and so far Gore has screwed up most – not on policy issues, but on how he has projected himself personally to TV audiences. He has allowed his vastly superior intellectual grasp of issues – so far, at least – to be submerged by Dubbya’s simplistic Reaganite populism.
Now, in this roller coaster of a campaign – and to doubting Thomases, I say again that it is both an exciting and important race – the small print of the polls is favouring Boy George, reversing the trend of only a few weeks ago. In electoral college votes, polls now suggest that Bush has 239 sewn up (out of the 538 needed) – and Gore just 168, with the remaining 131 going either way. In the words of a very senior Democratic congressman over dinner last week, this is going to be a nail-biter.
I leave you with two intriguing thoughts: are we seeing the re-emergence of Reaganism in the unlikely guise of Boy George, and if so will Americans go for smoke-and-mirrors illusion over substance?
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