How am I doing? - 02 February 2001

The late - former, former - mayor of New York city...

I almost reverted to my English origins: In America "late" means dead. Happily former Mayor Koch is still with us.

Like all very good politicians he was well loved and well hated but he maintained, at all times, a genial, almost delighted expression.

This tall man with the red eyes and turnip nose, he used to lope through the streets every morning, waving at everybody and hailing passers by, not with a good morning but with: "How am I doing?"

I'm told that President Bush - the new one - greets everybody in the morning with upshot eyebrows and an enquiring smile, saying: "How am I doing?" without having to say it.

An old Democrat who was called in to see during the first week said pensively: "He's going to be hard to fight, he's so damned genial."

Well, how is he doing?

In spite of my suggestion last time that we should make no judgements ever about the new man until he's got into his stride and shown his hand with a policy proposal or two, the fact is that President Bush has shown his hand with an unusual speed and I believe a provisional comment is in order.

The late President Johnson - a politician's politician if ever there was one - once gave a bit of casual advice to a journalist on how to judge an incoming president: Watch his daily habits and notice the first policy he acts on.

It's not a thundering maxim like Lord Acton's "power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely."

Incidentally Lyndon Johnson's slightly shrewder version of that was: "Power corrupts and absolute power is absolutely delightful."

Well let us see how some of the new president's predecessor's did.

Daily habits: Clinton started late in the morning, assembled his cronies - rather his aides - and could go on until all hours of the night.

George Dubya - as he's now being called - gets up at 5.45am, enters his office at 6.45 and apart from a sandwich break he works until 6pm - that's 11 hours.

It's quite a change from his father, or from Ronald Reagan who probably spent about four hours in his office laying out the main lines of a policy which he was quick to delegate to other people - he left the responsible cabinet officer and other experts to fill in the ways and means.

Even so Reagan had probably the most leisurely working habits since Calvin Coolidge - the 1920s old Vermonter who presided over what he was pleased to hear called "the Coolidge prosperity".

Calvin Coolidge - a small, wrinkled, old Yankee - who, Teddy Roosevelt's daughter said, looked as if he'd been weaned on a pickle - Coolidge's record, kept by his butler - the record of his working habits - amounts to a revelation unique in the history of presidents, or I should guess prime ministers.

Coolidge went to bed at 10pm and woke between 7 and 9 in the morning.

In the afternoon he took a nap lasting always upwards of three or four hours, from 1.30 sometimes to 5 o'clock - that adds up to a president who slept on principle between 11 and 15 hours a day.

It makes you wonder how much a president, any president, is responsible for the state of the economy. I have hazarded the conclusion before and shall again: Not much.

Well the first thing to notice about the new president's first steps was the composition of his cabinet.

The Democrats have long claimed, with a lot of credibility, that they are the party in which all minorities should seek salvation.

President Clinton, more than anyone before him, promised an America in which the men and women in power would reflect the rise of black power and Hispanic power.

Oddly we saw only a few blacks and minorities appointed to executive posts.

George W made no such promise, though within 10 days of being in the White House we find he had already nominated for his cabinet the first black secretary of state, two other blacks, three Hispanics and a Chinese American.

An old colleague, a correspondent here in the long ago, arrived on a visit, looked aghast at the list of cabinet officers and said: "Pinch me. This is a Republican administration?"

Well once we got used to the president's stealing Mr Clinton's minority thunder we waited for the other Lyndon Johnson criterion and received a shock indeed.

Down the years I've found much wisdom in the musings of Lyndon Johnson but I'm sorry to say that that second piece of advice - about watching the first act of policy if you want to know the direction he's moving in - well it holds up only about half the time.

Clinton is a prime example of not judging a new president by his first act.

He came in determined to establish a national health system, to care for the ills of welfare, to extend social security and other policies of pressing national interest.

So what was his first act? It was a shocker, and thought by most professional politicians to be a mistake - the mistake of a beginner.

Instead of mounting one of the great themes he suddenly issued an order out of the blue that homosexuals should be freely allowed into the armed forces.

This was a delicate matter that an experienced president well along in a successive term might have broached but as the first act of a new man it threw everybody including his own party.

The chiefs of staff were absolutely opposed.

What came out of it was a declared new policy dictated by the Pentagon called "Don't ask, don't tell", which left homosexuals in the forces in a kind of speechless vacuum.

This weird gesture of Clinton's set many people against him once and for all.

Certainly nobody could have guessed then that he would turn into a master politician, that he would revivify the Nato alliance and would, more than any other man or institution, wipe out the huge deficit and usher in a surplus as surprising as a tidal wave, on which the country would, for the next eight years, ride in prosperity like a Honolulu surfer.

And so how about George W? (I can't keep saying George Dubya. It may be poor Southern English but it's perfect Southern American.)

Well he's been a total shock to the Democrats and no shock at all to the people in his own party we were told would quietly sidle off into the woodwork - namely the Southern fundamentalist Christians, the extreme right wing.

We were told once the election was decided that if George Bush had one quality it was a ready, almost eager capacity, for embracing the Democrats in the Texas state legislature.

We were told also that George W would move to the centre and not bring up the two big contentious issues that have so severely and bitterly divided the parties for over 20 years - abortion and gun control.

So the first act of George W Bush was to cancel, eight years to the day, an order of President Clinton allowing American federal monies to be used overseas to help the poor have abortions.

Mr Bush summarily cancelled this order, thus at a stroke alienating all the European allies.

It should be pointed out that this cancellation will still leave $495m of American aid to give the Third World poor contraceptive aid.

The next statement of how he meant things to go was the nomination as attorney-general of the United States of a former Republican, Senator Ashcroft.

Let me say at once that Senator Ashcroft is a charming man, an extremely skilled lawyer who served for eight years as attorney-general of the state of Missouri without great complaint from the Democrats, who knew him to be also a deeply devout Pentacostalist with certain unshakeable convictions.

Senator Ashcroft is absolutely against abortion, even in case of rape or incest.

He is in favour of retaining assault weapons and against safety locks on privately-owned guns. He voted against desegregating the schools of St Louis.

Yet before the Senate judiciary committee this time he swore he would uphold and enforce all federal laws even when - as with abortion, gun control, homosexuality - he privately hates them and as a free man would work to change them.

He admitted he has always and still wants to abolish Roe v Wade - the law that the Supreme Court adjudicated in 1973 to make abortion legal for all time.

The Democrats are simply bewildered that this honourable man should want an office in which he has promised to enforce laws that he loathes.

To keep that promise he would have to be a saint called on every day to do the devil's bidding.

There was a widely held belief among onlookers and outsiders that Senator Ashcroft should never have been named for this post.

On the other hand the Republican leader in the Senate spoke a truth.

"President-elect Bush," he said, "had promised to form a conservative administration and that's what he's doing."

Well since on one issue alone - abortion - 75% of the people are against President Bush and while at the moment the Democrats are numb with disbelief there's no doubt of one thing: When the young Republic - only 20 years old - was being invaded by Democratic ideas Thomas Jefferson said: "If it's going to be a democracy it will be boisterous."

When the Democrats wake up I suspect the word boisterous will be mild to express the tone and temper of the new Congress.

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