The return of Ross Perot and US social concerns - 23 August 1996

Between San Diego and Chicago, there was a week's grace or interval, or as today's jargon has it, "a hiatus" between the two party conventions. During which you might guess, the cities and the states could get quickly back to their own business. But I looked over a page of our only national newspaper, a page that summarises briefly the preoccupations of the 50 states and I was surprised to see how many local or state interests were being put on the shelf until after the first week in November.

It shouldn't be a surprise once you reflect that since Mr Dole and the Republicans have promised to make Washington throw many of the problems of the government back to the states. They had better wait and see if Mr Dole will be in a position, namely in the White House, to keep this promise. Then the public opinion polls that came out right after the Republican show made even more people wait and see. The average of four polls gave Mr Dole a lift of about eight points and Mr Clinton a loss of about 10. This leaves the president ahead by about nine points instead of his previous 20. This change has, of course, been played up by the media, although it's absolutely normal. The week after a Republican convention, when a Democrat's in the White House, the rise of the Republicans' popularity and the decline of the president's, are as certain as the rising and setting of the sun. A week from now, the Democrats' shindig in Chicago will be over and it will have to have been a disastrous show if the president, in his turn, does not get a compensating lift.

Meanwhile, we've had one titillating episode, one that the Republicans say leaves them unmoved, but one that leaves the Democrats chortling with joy. The resurrection of the brash, twangy voiced, gabby little Texan, Mr Ross Perot. If the truth be told, Mr Perot is a more original public speaker than either of them. He can dribble the language around with a lot of zest and raciness.

Four years ago, this gift of the gab, and the message he devoted it to, namely the ineptness, insaneness of the two ancient parties, struck a responsive note with all sorts of independents. And in the result, Mr Perot got 19 million votes. More, in proportion to the whole, than any third party candidate has ever done. And third parties, incidentally, go back at least to before the Civil War. The present Republican party founded in 1856 was a new, a third, party protesting the corruption of the regular two parties.

It was no secret in 1992 that Mr Perot took many more votes away from the Republican George Bush than he did from the newcomer, Governor Bill Clinton. And the Democrats are assuming, perhaps a little too glibly, that he will do the same again. What remains in the popular memory from four years ago, is shock still at those 19 million votes and a grudging admiration for a rich man who was willing to spend $65 million of his own money on losing. This time his message is the same. Abolish the North American Free Trade agreement. Drastically reform campaign financing. Set up a new national health system. But mainly he deplores the decay or incompetence of the two regular parties.

But this time Mr Perot ahs decided not to finance his own campaign. He's done what all candidates do, made himself eligible for federal funding. He can get $29 million from the government. This provision allows him to spend, however, only $50,000 of his own money. But he can go ahead and raise contributions. No more than $1,000 for an individual. To make a spending total with a $61 million limit. Which is exactly what Mr Clinton and Mr Dole each hope to raise. You may remember that four years ago, he threw his idolaters into despair, when, in mid summer, he suddenly quit the campaign and fell almost out of sight in the polls. But then, as late as October, only a month before the election, he changed his mind. He was back on the hustings, gabbier, more excitable than ever. And spending money like a drunken gambler, on advertisements, commercials, what he was the first to call, "infomercials." So it was only a month's bombardment of live talk and taped commercials that revived the old interest in him and surpassed it.

Coming back in the plane from California, I was offered a national magazine I don't often see. But I found myself caught up in the letters to the editor which were responses to several pieces that had appeared in previous issues. What kept me absorbed by these letters was that they were about three or four social problems that really do concern the mass of people and that aren't necessarily what the presidential candidates will be debating about. Of course, every candidate learns a long list of what we call "issues" and there isn't any social problem that he says he's ignored. But when both of them do settle on a single topic, abortion, say, they rarely show the intelligence and fair mindedness of these letter writers. To the Republicans, abortion is tantamount to murder. To the Democrats, it's a freedom guaranteed, not in precise language, by the Constitution.

Recently there's been an ugly twist given to this never ending argument. It's about the phenomenon, it happens 500 times out of 1.5 million pregnancies, it's the procedure known as a third trimester abortion, and I'm told by medical sources that it's very rarely done to a woman who, on a whim, simply changes her mind in the seventh or eighth month. It is universally performed when there is strong evidence that the mother's life will be at risk if the pregnancy continues or, more familiar still, when there is evidence of a grossly deformed baby on the way.

In the last days of the last session of Congress, the Republicans put up a bill, which was passed, prohibiting third trimester abortions. President Clinton promptly vetoed it. Republicans and conservatives in general were publicly appalled at the very gruesome procedure they were careful to describe. The destruction of a formed brain. The end, forever, of a foetus already showing signs of palpitating life. Mr Kent, Mr Dole's running mate is being specially graphic and appalled about this.

Now the letters on this topic first question the magazine's definition of the operation as elective. Pointing out quite correctly that elective surgery is for a condition that is not an emergency, not life threatening, but one that is agreed on by doctor and patient. Another letter writer thought it posed an ethical problem that must be decided in each case by the doctor and a patient who has been instructed about the hazards of bringing the pregnancy to term. Yet a third argued that surely the certain prospect of a grotesquely malformed foetus would move the doctor to seek a compassionate end. What, she wrote, of the probably chronic trauma that the mother would face after delivering a grotesque, half human? To prohibit the operation is to inflict, under the law, hideous suffering on hundred of unfortunate mothers.

The Republican overlords of the convention would not allow the word abortion to be mentioned on the podium. However, on the floor, there was a still, small, unreported voice of a Republican expressing this simple, original point of view which apparently had never occurred to anybody since Mark Twain, possibly. Senator Alan Simpson, Republican of Wyoming said: "I don't think men should even be allowed to vote on abortion".

There were two or three competing letters about another undying topic, the proliferation of guns. Here the opposing arguments were familiar. Democrats saying the more guns were licensed, the more violent crimes there would be. An interesting response bore the information that since Texas licensed the carrying of concealed weapons, no single licensee had been arrested for unlawful use. The writer of this one sighed regretfully that criminals will always find guns and thought there were two possible solutions. One, legalise all drugs. Two, have an automatic death sentence for all drug dealers and no appeals.

There were two letters about the environment which argued the conventional case for and against educating schoolchildren in the coming perils of global warming, the ozone layer and so on. A science teacher was deeply concerned that fewer and fewer science pupils come from rural places. Most, he says, sit in front of some technological device most of the day and so, about environmental issues are likely to have shallow perceptions. A second correspondent applauded the discovery that his children were being taught the virtues of forest clear-cutting and of mining and burning coal. And to this letter there was a rather splendid response: "Let us hope that more reforms of the science curriculum will follow. To wit, the earth is flat, the sun revolves around the earth, trees are a source of pollution and smoking improves athletic performance".

I note, incidentally, that all but one of these correspondents came from small towns in the South or the Far West. Only one from sophisticated New York City. Which cheered me with a reminder of the English poet's, Philip Larkin's putdown of a friend who echoed what is still I'm afraid, gospel among the English intelligentsia. Certainly, the friend said, that if Larkin did visit America he must be sure to go only to the eastern cities and then fly at once to the West Coast. Everything in between, the friend said, is a desert full of bigots. And Larkin reflected: "That's what I think I'd like. Where, if you help a girl trim the Christmas tree, you're regarded as engaged. And her brothers start oiling the shotgun if you don't call on the minister".

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