Regular readers will not be surprised to learn that I thoroughly agreed with Barbara Amiel a few days ago, when she wrote in the Daily Telegraph that most British journalists don’t understand the US. But her assertion begs an embarrassing query: why does her husband, Conrad Black, employ so many of them to write so much rubbish?
For years, one amiable fellow on his payroll filled the Sunday Telegraph with bizarre stories of how Bill Clinton was, just for starters, behind drug-running operations and various murder conspiracies. Readers of Another Magazine, which is owned by Black, must also have been baffled by the sheer incomprehensibility of its recent US election-night coverage, though that, I am told, was written by a Canadian.
The main problem, I think, is that many journalists stay here only long enough to poke fun at Americans and reflect back to the UK the image that the British expect from pre-existing stereotypes; ridiculing Americans is by no means limited to Black’s publications. I find that the glee with which so many Britons look on the electoral mayhem in Florida, for example, is invariably because they lack proper explanations of how and why the US behaves the way it does – simply because journalists fail to comprehend basic tenets running through the collective American psyche. It’s much easier just to say “pregnant chad” (an indentation where the voter failed to punch a hole in the ballot paper), get a cheap laugh, and go on to the next story and its innately hilarious American cast of characters. (“Shrinks clean up in election mess” was a headline in the Daily Telegraph of 22 November, referring to an alleged “rush . . . to the psychiatrist’s couch” of those silly Americans suffering from “tension” over the election.)
The point is that there are three very un-British strands running through the Florida chaos. The first is an abiding American faith in machinery rather than humanity, leading to a hopelessly muddled US electoral process; the second is a historical aversion to British colonial power that still, today, translates into a distrust of big government and a resulting reliance on small, hokey government from small, hokey places; and the third is a ruthless aggressiveness in its public life that makes British politics look timid.
Instead of having the simple ballot papers that British voters are used to, therefore, Americans have to endure a bewildering array of voting methods: just 3 per cent use those old-fashioned paper ballots, 37 per cent are required to use punch-cards, 25 per cent to operate optical scan-machines, 22 per cent the traditional US levers, 7 per cent electronic voting, and 6 per cent a mixture.
This confusion stems from that second tenet – the distrust of big government on which Boy George managed to gain so much traction. An Australian interviewer asked me the other day: “Why don’t they have a central electoral commission like us?” The Americans would never have any such thing. In Florida alone (which has about 13 million eligible voters, of whom only two-thirds register and barely a third actually voted in 1998), there are 67 separate, effectively autonomous counties, each making up its own hokey rules as it goes along. The result was the misleading Palm Beach county ballot paper that undoubtedly led many Gore supporters to vote mistakenly for Pat Buchanan. That ballot paper was also probably illegal: under the state’s maze of contradictory laws, the mark for a candidate has to be made to the right of the candidates’ names, but this ballot invited marks to be made both to the left and right.
In 26 of Florida’s 67 counties, machine-counted punch-ballots are used. Even their most ardent proponents concede that these have an error rate of 6 per cent, enough easily to swing the presidency either way. Some of those 26 use the Votomatic system, whereby holes are punched in perforated ballots using styluses the size of paper clips; this system was used in heavily Democrat counties such as Miami-Dade and Broward, leading to thousands of “dimpled” ballots that counting machines failed to recognise. The Datavote system, using hole-punching in non-perforated ballots, was used in primarily Republican counties. But even when those machines were left and the first recount carried out, 3,583 new votes materialised, thus demonstrating the weaknesses of machine counts.
Third, that aggression. It reached its zenith in the last few days when one of Boy George’s increasingly shrill frontmen said of Gore that “it would be very difficult to serve as commander-in-chief when you try to disenfranchise” military voters (whose polling papers had not met legal requirements); never mind that Al Gore went to Vietnam while Boy George flew for the Texas National Guard and his running mate, Dick Cheney, accrued no fewer than five deferments of national service. The Bushies thus tarred Gore with the Clintonian brush, portraying themselves as the party of patriotism when the reverse, in this context, was the case. They were trying to de-legitimise a Gore presidency before the very notion could be taken seriously. And the Bush camp went to court to prevent hand counts in Florida, blithely ignoring Texas state law, which says firmly that “a manual recount shall be conducted in preference to an electronic recount” – legislation signed into law by one Governor George W Bush, in 1997.
I hope I have not been unfair in singling out Black for his publications’ US coverage. After all, the Times recently produced an astonishingly ill-informed account of how the electoral college works. An Independent on Sunday hackette hilariously accused poor former Senator Eugene McCarthy of embarking on a “political witch-hunt” in the 1950s. The list goes on. But at least NS readers know where to turn as America’s political crisis continues over the Thanksgiving holiday weekend.
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