There's No Place Like Home - 11 January 2002

Last Tuesday evening I switched on the tube and saw a scene, and heard a short run of dialogue, which was so improbable that I first thought it was done with masks by two clever actors in a satirical show that I've not kept up with. It's called Politically Incorrect.

Perhaps this episode was called "The week that could never be".

The two performers were the President of the United States, George W Bush that is, standing at a lectern in front of a great sign which read: Boston Latin School.

It is the oldest, most famous and academically the best public school - in the American sense, for the public - in the United States.

The president was pointing down to a man in the front row of the large audience - an old man with white hair, a ruddy face, several chins - and the president was saying: "This man is a fabulous senator and a good man.

"When he's against you you're dead. When he's with you it's a great experience.

"I could not have signed this Education Bill in Ohio this morning if he hadn't been with me all the way."

To help you register the proper shock the best I can do is to transfer this scene to the British House of Commons today but suppose with me that Mrs Thatcher had not been translated or ennobled and was now the head of the loyal opposition.

And what you see and hear is Mr Tony Blair standing there and pointing to her and saying, almost proclaiming: "She is, was, not only a great prime minister but a fine woman and without her help on this new tax bill I could never have had it passed."

The point is the senator described as fabulous by George W, the owner of the ruddy cheeks and several chins, was none other than the idol of the liberal left, the senior senator from Massachusetts, through several decades the Republicans' black beast - Senator Ted Kennedy.

The fantastic scene continued with the senator rising to say that the Bill would have been impossible without the leadership of President Bush.

President Bush had the final speech of this dizzy little play by saying: "You know what? Two Republican senators and two Democrat senators worked together day after day for months to do something not for the good of their political parties but for the good of the children of America."

The curtain came down to a storm of applause.

The Bill is revolutionary in this country to the extent that, for the first time, the federal government greatly enlarges its role in public education, which till now has been left to the states and to local communities, even to mayors of cities.

The Bill demands annual testing by a national standard of children between the ages of nine and 14.

The president called these "the fatal years" before high school when failing children get, as he put it, shuffled through the system, a process out of which there emerges a national disgrace.

One child in seven going into high school doesn't read well, writes badly, can't add or subtract very well.

One child in seven is functionally illiterate. Imagine, one in seven.

Anyway I go into this not because of the substance of the bill but because the reporting of it was the first occasion in four months that the front pages of the papers have headlined what they call "the president's domestic agenda" - Washington's main business of passing bills that have nothing to do with the war.

Even the New York Times which devoted its first 15 pages to the war - to Kashmir, to Pakistan, to the Middle East, to mischief in Iran, to airport security and other related matters - threw the whole of page 16 over to the president and the Education Bill.

And whereas a conservative paper had a sub-head "President's triumph", the Times, which is editorially judicial and neutral in all matters, carried a sub-head, "President has praise for Senator Kennedy".

I pause to say how odd it feels to be talking about Washington and party politics again just as in the old time, which is any time before 11 September.

I have only one friend, one pen pal anyway, who has written to me since then to ask: "What happened to the regular business of Congress?"

And frankly I had to say well, as a fact they've been too busy passing bills, offering billions and billions of dollars to the crippled airlines, the mourning insurance companies, loans to businesses big and small, most of all for the many aspects of security - more emergency legislation than anyone can ever remember even in time of war.

The truth is I simply couldn't remember the issues we called burning before the blaze that overwhelmed every other issue.

But now let's see one or two I recall.

"Lawmakers fight over Florida recount", "Giuliani divorce squabble", "United Nations devastating report on AIDS in Africa", "Senate nears vote on free prescription drugs for aged", "Microsoft invades the internet".

And many more stories about Rwanda, Haiti, Kosovo and reams still in the New York Times about the approaching three separate trials of Milosevic. Remember him?

Except for the Times which still puts out a daily encyclopaedia on every aspect - military, political, Asian, Arabian, economic - of the war, there's been a noticeable pause in war reporting, a treading of water after the unbelievably swift conquest of most of Afghanistan.

Even the Democrats, including Senator Kennedy, praised the president for his performance as a war leader - 90% of the country agrees.

I do believe even Ralph Nader, the Green candidate, who got 3% of the last presidential vote, I do believe even Mr Nader grudgingly admires Secretary of Defence Rumsfeld.

And an old, left-leaning Democrat who himself was close to the Pentagon, said of Rumsfeld: "Twenty five or whatever years ago he was a very good secretary of defence, but I have to say he's one heck of a secretary of war."

In short I expect, with the help of Bin Laden, I expect we shall read more and you will hear more of domestic politics because time marches on and candidates for election or re-election in November - which means one third of the Senate and the whole of the House of Representatives - are already lining up, going out with cap in hand to their favourite special interest - a Republican to an oil company, a Democrat to the union funds.

In the last presidential election, incidentally, the trade unions just edged ahead of big business in campaign contributions.

By the way some of you may have wondered about Milosevic and his new permanent residence at the Hague.

His defence lawyers want the allegations of ethnic cleansing and the entailed massacres to be treated as three separate wars. This in the hope that he might be found not guilty in one case and that that verdict would override or pre-empt a guilty verdict in the other two.

At any rate the path through to a decisive verdict is going to have to traverse the enormous, murky labyrinth of international law.

It occurs to me that of the 314,000 foreign-born persons now at large in the United States who have committed a crime or overstayed their visas - 160,000 students - many thousands just walked out of a court prescribing their deportation and just got lost on this continent.

Suppose the one in five students who were from the Middle East and are listed as terrorist suspects, let's suppose, say, 20,000 are ever tracked down and charged. Will they go before an international tribunal or an American criminal court?

In either case it would probably take three generations of judges to try them, so I predict that via that legal route, President Bush's ideal of rooting out of this country alone everyone with a suspected link to terrorism, that ideal I predict will be achieved in 3001.

To end up this cheerful journal I must return to President Bush and his unlikely ally Senator Kennedy for anyone, including me, who suspect I dealt with the Education Bill a little too glibly, too lightly.

What is rare, admirable and the way to go about it is not the subject of the Bill but the process of its passage through the House and Senate to the president's desk.

It promotes a wish in and out of Washington after the September trauma, a heartfelt wish that the two parties would look on the Education Bill as a role model.

What I'm talking about is any bill that is dually sponsored, dually, by members of the opposing parties.

I was asked by a European friend to say bluntly three great things that came out of the Clinton presidency.

And after deep thought I discovered three bills:

- Food stamps, first proposed by Senator Aiken of Vermont, a Republican.

- A parental leave bill for both sexes sponsored by flaming liberal Senator Kennedy and his friend Senator Orin Hatch, rigid, right-winged Republican.

- Best feat of all was the Welfare to Workfare Bill, widely regarded as Clinton's masterpiece, which transferred 12 million Americans from Welfare to a paying job. This was the invention and successful prototype of one Tommy Thompson, Republican governor of Wisconsin.

These by now four vital bills exemplify what James Madison, the father of the Constitution, hoped would be the three guiding principles of the new American Republic: Compromise, compromise, compromise, except in matters of conscience.

By reflecting on Madison we can come, in time, I think, to see what John Milton meant when he begged repentance for his strong revolutionary, what we would call today, leftist, cause.

"All the wars and revolutions in history," he wrote, "are caused by the ferocity of both ends."

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