George Bush, the 41st president - 6 January 1989

I don’t think that so early in the New Year – and Happy New Year, by the way, to latecomers – I don’t think we should plunge this time into the shooting-down of the Libyan MiGs.

The connection, if any, with Mr Reagan’s hint of performing what we now call "a surgical strike" and used to call "bombing to bits", the alleged poison gas factory or the embarrassment of the western countries that do a brisk trade with Mr Gaddafi in the – shall we say – adaptable pharmaceutical industry, and the rest of it.

I’m talking now, when the facts are still scrambled and jumping with speculation, rumour and the predictable interpretation of interested parties. A week from now things should be clearer and the Paris conference on chemical weapons will have had its say.

I feel that commentary now would help only the various schools of thought – there are about five of them – who are anxious to confirm their own settled view of Mr Gaddafi, Mr Reagan and the other protagonists who have a position to defend. Until the shoot-down was reported on Wednesday I was going to say, and will say, that in Washington, where the new Congress was assembling and about to be, as the lingo has it, "organised", all was, if not calm and bright, at least extraordinarily bustling and good-natured and free from bile.

It’s the one time that Washington is not bristling with controversy and seething with small feuds and machinations. This is not an accidental condition; it happens once every four years, the first week in January after a presidential election when the old animosities and feuds are put aside, not out of a rush of Christian feeling, but as a practical matter because all the legislation that embodied those feuds and prejudices is dead – it was buried along with the passing of the previous Congress. The old scores are wiped clean from the scoreboard. The new boys and the returning old boys can start all over again.

Incidentally, we ought to notice in passing something that will surely be the topic of a whole talk some time if not several talks: the fact that 98% of the new boys in the house are old boys. In other words, 98% of the new House of Representatives consists of incumbents, Congressmen who ran in November for re-election.

This, too, is not an accident, a freak. It’s come to be built into the system and is due to the ease with which men – overwhelmingly men – who are **** BILLING?? already building favours to constituents, *** BILLING??? building them into legislation, can get money to run again so as to go on with the good work.

We’ll undoubtedly go into that as soon as the new bills start being offered, when something will appear that rears up before Mr Bush as an almost insuperable obstacle, while offering steady consolation to the Democrats for having lost the presidency for they once again have an overwhelming majority in the house and are on their way to having held that majority for 56 of the past 60 years. “But I thought,” you may well say, “that the United States has a two-party system?”

Well yes, as between two of the three branches of government – the executive, the presidency and the legislature, the Congress, but whichever way the voters may go in their choice between the parties of a president, when it comes to picking a Congressman or woman most likely to provide your own neck of the woods with the new computer factory, the wheat subsidy, the housing grant, or whatever – and never mind Gaddafi or the PLO – you pick a Democrat by two to one, because simply he’s been there. It’s the best reason for seeing that he goes on being there. A member of the house is there for only two years as against six for the Senate, so he has to get busy on your behalf, quickly.

Well let’s begin. Last Wednesday I was saying, just after lunch when, by the way, the news of the Libyan shoot-down was hot on the wires, two men sat together in the House of Representatives up there on the rostrum waiting for the official announcement of who had won the November election.

I mentioned, I think, a week or two after the election that we don’t have the official word about the result until the chosen officials from each state, the electors, have registered their vote in their state capitals and until those votes have been sent to Washington to the presiding officer of the Senate.

This procedure is all dictated in the Constitution and who is the man sitting up there as the presiding officer of the Senate? He is called, in the Senate, “Mr President”. He is, in fact, always the Vice President of the United States. He is the one designated by the Constitution on a day in January after the Congress has been organised to – as the Miss Universe MCs do – to open the envelope and, surprise surprise!, read out the result.

Well as you’ve guessed, one of those two men sitting up there was the vice president. His colleague, the man at his elbow, was the presiding officer of the house. This was a joint session of both houses, and he is of course the speaker of the house.

These two were chatting, joking affably together, which would be understandable enough in a parliament where the speaker is a neutral chairman above and beyond party in there anyway, but in this country the speaker, as well as being the presiding office in his own chamber, is also the political leader of the party in power in that chamber. Inevitably, then, he is a Democrat.

For most of the last few Congresses he was the florid, the lumbering, the wily man from Massachusetts, Mr Tip O’Neill and whenever Mr Reagan appeared before Congress to deliver his State of the Union address we always derived a mean pleasure from watching and hearing Speaker O’Neill introduce him with the time-honoured formula “I have the high honour and the distinguished privilege to introduce the President of the United States.”

Why mean? Wherefore pleasure? Well, Mr Reagan had no more determined and unforgiving enemy in Congress than Speaker O’Neill. Time and again Mr O’Neill bemoaned in public that Ronald Reagan was the laziest, the most ignorant president he had ever known quote “in every sphere both domestic and international and, I hate to say it about such an agreeable man, but it was sinful that he ever became president”.

Well sitting beside Vice President Bush on Wednesday was the present speaker, the present leader of the Democrats in the House, Mr Jim Wright. His function in the next year or two is without doubt to be the principal thorn in President Bush’s side, but on Wednesday afternoon, he was a rose.

They sat there as if in the corner of their favourite club – which in a way the house is – nudging and confiding and throwing their heads back in easy laughter. The controlling fact, as the lawyers say, is that they’re both Texan. Rather, as we all know, George Bush is a Yankee-born and bred but he did go off to make his fortune in the oil business in Texas and from time to time claims to be a deep-down, honest-to-God Texan.

He does all his hunting there and hunting in America has nothing to do with chasing an animal on a horse. It means – you’re on the horse – it means simply and always shooting and the National Rifle Association remains on the question of gun control an undefeatable lobby because hunting is the favourite sport of an actual majority of Americans throughout the social scale, the poor much more than the rich. From the mountains of California to the wastes of Alaska, across to the forests of New York state and down all the mountains and forests of the Appalachians to the swamps of Louisiana and Florida.

So what were these two Texans – Mr Wright is the genuine article born in Fort Worth, a Presbyterian now in his seventeenth term, that would make it 34 years in the House – what were they talking about? About the wild game of south Texas, about Mr Bush’s expedition last week to bag some quail, which provoked a brief spasm of protest among vegetarians, anti-vivisectionists, animal protectionists and the like. I don’t know if Mr Bush and Mr Wright got round to happy memories of the white-tailed deer in the big bend of Texas. If they did I’m sure that Mr Bush kept his remarks well away from the microphone. He had the forethought last week when he was shown with a gun and a quail to say "but a deer, I don’t think I could shoot a deer".

So when all the senators and the congressmen and a few women were assembled, Mr Bush as vice president banged the gavel and they broke up from their greeting parties and handshakes and anecdotes and took their places.

We were ready for the big news, the breathtaking announcement of who was elected in November. Of course we all knew, we all knew the numbers, didn’t we? Bush 426 electoral votes, Governor Dukakis 112. No, wrong. The electors are not legally bound by the popular or presumed electoral vote of their state and there was a maverick lady in West Virginia who couldn’t bring herself to vote for Governor Dukakis, though her state had gone for him. She registered a protest vote for Mr Dukakis’s running mate, Senator Bentsen of Texas.

So when all was quiet, Vice President Bush got up and solemnly, only his glasses glinting, proclaimed George Herbert Walker Bush 426 electoral votes, Governor Michael Dukakis 111 votes, and one vote for Senator Lloyd Bentsen. “This announcement shall be deemed as sufficient declaration of the person elected President of the United States.” Of course he also declared ,without any visible emotion, Senator J Danforth Quayle to be Vice President of the United States. A shower of applause and Speaker Wright gave the president elect a heart-warming handshake.

In a few weeks Mr Bush, as President Bush, will be walking alongside the doorkeeper of the house and entering the chamber to deliver his State of the Union address. Speaker Wright will rise, bang the gavel and and say “I have the high honour and distinguished privilege to introduce the President of the United States.”

President Bush will walk to the rostrum and seize the hand of Speaker Wright in a final gesture of goodwill. After that the president will begin to present his programme and Speaker Wright will silently, perhaps invisibly, tap a pocket to see that his stiletto is in place.

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