Policies and Popularity - 27 July 2001

There's an old game we used to play with friends who were noticeably partisan - either very conservative or very liberal - in their political outlook.

It was to recall a memorable sentence spoken by one famous man about another and ask the friends to identify who said it about whom.

I think I ought to say that I'm sitting here in San Francisco 3,000 miles from my library - which can, of course, answer any questions about anything - so I have to quote from memory.

Here's the first example:

"He brought into the councils of Versailles a seriousness, knowledge and magnanimity which, if they had been possessed by the principal negotiators of the treaty, could have guaranteed us a just peace."

I never found anybody to get that right. It is John Maynard Keynes writing about President Wilson, Lloyd George, Clemenceau, who conducted the 1919 peace conference that officially ended the First World War.

The object of Keynes's unreserved admiration was ... Herbert Hoover, who to the audience I was addressing was the forlorn, hopelessly incompetent president who went down in the first Roosevelt landslide in 1932 - the year of the very pit of the Depression.

I know lifelong Franklin Roosevelt fans who refuse to believe that quotation, until I produced the little memoir on Versailles which Keynes published in the early 20s. It's called The Economic Consequences of the Peace.

Here's another one to which probably more listeners, a later generation anyway, will be able to relate:

"He has great warmth and candour and is, I'm afraid, woefully uneducated."

That is Mr, later Prime Minister, Harold Macmillan after his early encounters with Supreme Commander General Dwight D Eisenhower.

This could have been said, I'm sure, by many other Britons of Macmillan's social class type.

What Mr Macmillan meant, whether he knew it or not, was that Eisenhower did not have much of Macmillan's sort of education, that is literary, classical, ever ready to spot a quotation from the more famous ancients of Greece and Rome.

General Eisenhower went to a rural Kansas elementary school and then on to West Point - the United States principal military academy and a considerable institution of learning.

Ah but what sort of learning? Mathematics, physics, chemistry, biology, military history, general history of Europe and Asia, engineering, some classes in English and American literature, one foreign language - just about all the things in which Mr Macmillan was indeed "woefully uneducated".

Now for a later example, indeed one that is red hot from a statesman's tongue. A very short remark but one that two weeks ago would have stumped just about everybody on earth with the slightest interest in the subject.

Who said this about whom: "His thinking in these matters is profound, very profound."

Russia's Mr Putin, after a couple of hours talk about a missile defence shield with, wait for it, President George W Bush.

Is that George Dubya - the butt of every grammarian, every faintly liberal commentator and of every European head of government of whatever political stripe?

Is this the president who, before a commencement day audience at his alma mater said jocosely: "Just see where a C-average can get you."

Mr Bush did graduate from Yale with a C-average. His audience responded with a thunderous silence.

That silence puzzled me more than a flock of reported lamentations from European leaders and groans from Democrat congressmen and commentators on both sides of the Atlantic.

So I think we ought to look at what Mr Bush's popular standing was two, three weeks ago when he appeared at Yale or even days before his talk with Mr Putin.

I've not talked about Mr Bush's policies for a while and thought six months in office would be the right time to take up his presidential record since we have a pollster's survey of six other presidents at that point in the graph of their rising and falling popularity.

Some of you may recall that when Mr Bush was declared president I, like many others, took time to plod through the sad history of the Florida mess and recover from the shock that for the first time in history the Supreme Court had moved into the voter's privilege - there is no provision in the Constitution for its so doing - and the result had been a winner who'd been picked, not merely by a five to four majority of the court, but because she's the only unpredictable ideologue on the court, Mr Bush had been made president, literally, by Justice Sandra O'Connor.

Well once in office very quickly Mr Bush, too quickly perhaps, announced his policies on practically everything.

Making a point of declaring a fighting American position on issues which nobody had brought up, that had been slumbering in limbo for decades, like abortion and capital punishment.

Then he gratuitously announced that he was rejecting the Kyoto Treaty - a decision that appalled 188 countries which had also done nothing about ratifying it. Only Romania had the right to be outraged.

And then Mr Bush - bang - proclaimed that the United States was going ahead to make for itself a protective nuclear missile shield. The abruptness and seeming belligerence of this announcement was not preceded by a reminder that when the Soviet Union expressed shock and pain over President's Reagan's announcement of the Star Wars shield, the Soviet Union itself had been secretly working on such a shield for nine years.

Nor did Mr Bush or the secretary of defence or their aides remark that the shield decision had come after at least a dozen years of intense intellectual concentration on the efficacy of such a technological achievement.

In simpler words: Mr Bush's entry into the White House was marked, not so much by shockingly reactionary policies, as by a truly appalling exercise in public relations.

The policies could still be wrong, even abhorrent, to many people but so were many of Franklin Roosevelt's early proclaimed policies.

But Roosevelt was artful in feeding them into the popular understanding, at presenting the attractive face of them that the Republicans - in a depression, it must be said - were actually grateful to him, and like the rest of the country, didn't notice that it was now living under a dictatorship, albeit benign.

From 1933 until 1935, when the Supreme Court woke up and declared Roosevelt's entire New Deal to be "flagrantly unconstitutional", the United States was governed by national socialism.

Well now this year it seemed for the first month or two that honest George Dubya came sprightly to the White House every morning and couldn't wait to think up yet one more announcement that would shock the European allies.

We'd expected from the tone and the substance of his campaign that he would practise something he called compassionate conservatism.

But in practice he came barging in at once like the fuehrer of the right-wing Southern Baptists.

Even staunch defenders had to say: "Ah this is a shrewd tactic. He's securing his right-wing base before he moves to govern from the centre as every effective president must." A rather desperate cop-out.

So after six months in office here was a man expected to be a conservative along the lines of, say, President Ford or even the first President Bush, but who'd turned out to be, to the horror of the Democrats and liberal Republicans, the almost flaming right-wing stand in for the Reverend Jerry Falwell.

The commencement audience at Yale was, the faculty certainly, mostly left of centre which I think explains its sullen silence at Mr Bush's joke.

On the day of the presidential inauguration the American people invariably wish the new man well and in that festive atmosphere the Gallup poll surveys his popularity at that point. Six months later Gallup measures him once again.

In the last 40 years none has failed to increase his popularity after six months except President Clinton, who dropped from a dizzy 59% approval to a glum 41%.

And George W Bush - his result is unique - 57% approval at inauguration, 57% before Putin - no change.

The second surprise to come out of the Genoa meeting was the foreign ministers' changed view of President Bush as an opponent.

Not all had seen him from afar like the French as a political leper or primate but most of them were amazed at the ease and friendliness with which he listened to totally opposing points of view, the geniality with which he filled in the details of his apparently defiant policies.

And Mr Putin, having declared himself ready to abolish all treaties and to go slam bang into a nuclear race, Mr Putin was frankly amazed to have President Bush, of all people, unravel dense complexities of the missile shield business which most of European politicians had never even heard about.

So it was surely good news for the allies and all of us that Mr Bush and Mr Putin are at least ready to review to the ABM Treaty and start studies for a joint protective shield.

How the new Russia-China connection fits into this I doubt we can say but, reminding ourselves that the Russians have been - are - the great masters of chess, we can only hope and pray that their thinking will come down on our side.

THIS TRANSCRIPT WAS TYPED FROM A RECORDING OF THE ORIGINAL BBC BROADCAST (© BBC) AND NOT COPIED FROM AN ORIGINAL SCRIPT. BECAUSE OF THE RISK OF MISHEARING, THE BBC CANNOT VOUCH FOR ITS COMPLETE ACCURACY.

Letter from America audio recordings of broadcasts ©BBC. Letter from America scripts © Cooke Americas, RLLP. All rights reserved.