Conventions and opinion polls - 14 August 1992

Ten days after the United Nations ultimatum that expired, that's to say 10 days after the Desert War had begun, the first day of February last year, I came off a plane in southern California – this was the last leg of a little talking trip – and that the four airports I'd been in you'd have thought the bomb, the bomb had dropped. At high noon, the huge echoing stadium of the Dallas airport echoed nothing but a quick patter of a few tiny feet of the few travellers about as audible as mice in a cathedral nave. For some reason never satisfactorily made clear to me, everybody across the 3,000 miles of this country of this continent was terrified of flying.

When I came out into the mechanical sunshine of southern California, if I hadn't known the place before, a place named Irvine, I could have thought I was in some unreported part of heaven, which as the book says, has many mansions. Well this outdoor mansion would be one dedicated to the perpetual glory of American patriots, conservative patriots towering at the entrance to the airport was a gigantic heroic figure after whom the airport was named, it must have been 20ft high, none too towering for the man it commemorated, John Wayne. As our car drove off and once I'd finished goggling at this immense work by I believe Michelangelo, I noticed we were gliding in an American car, don't doubt it, along a smooth divided highway, its name of course MacArthur Boulevard named after the man whose biographer called him American Caesar, the hero of Batan in the Philippines, commander of the United Nations Forces in Korea until he was unceremoniously bumped by President Harry Truman for exceeding his orders. And somewhere along that boulevard, I seem to recall another heroic statute in the imperial likeness of General MacArthur, who was in life a very handsome and commanding figure. Hollywood could not have achieved a better piece of casting for the soldier to overlook the Japanese signing of the surrender on the deck of the Battleship Missouri and pronouncing the four epic words that brought the Second World War to its end. "These proceedings are closed."

I remember remarking to my host as we swept on to the broad and leafy expanses of the campus of the University of California at Irvine. Irvine didn't exist 50 years ago, I remarked that if there were two statues not likely to be found in this county they would be those of Franklin Roosevelt and Adlai Stevenson. I might have uttered a blasphemy, two blasphemies he shuddered and nodded his head. We were in Orange County, south of Los Angeles.

Now there are in California, 58 counties and they have quite a measure of self-government. Incidentally, the vote in national and state elections is always reported county by county. The town of Orange was born 125 years ago in a stretch of country that grew in abundance oranges, olives, lemons and almonds, it was called Richland then, but the man who bought the land in 1868 wanted to change the name. He let a poker game decide it; he sat down with three friends and the four of them impersonating orange, olive, lemon and almond. Orange won. It was then about 30 miles south of the almost wholely Mexican town of Los Angeles.

Only 50 years ago, Orange had a population of a mere 8,000, the whole county no more than twice as many and while I can find no record of how people voted, I'd bet that by Roosevelt's second term 1936 very few Orange men were going for him. From its beginning's, Orange County has been a nursery and haven for thriving white middle-class lifelong Republicans, they were suspicious of the glib Roosevelt even in the year of his ascendancy out of the Depression to the throne. Every since you are never sure of the California vote until Orange County had come swinging in to balance or outweigh the votes of the detested liberal counties around San Francisco Bay.

In 1984, the county went 600,000 to 200,000 votes for Reagan, three to one the largest Reagan majority in the country. In 1988, 550,000 to 250,000 – over two to one for Bush. Now I tell you this story and its impressive statistics because the latest word not to be believed from Orange County as I speak is in a county-wide poll – Bush 32%, Clinton 58%. This is as if the stockbroker belt around Windsor, Wentworth, Swinley Forest mounted a rebellion, marched on Westminster and demanded that John Major resign in favour of John Smith.

Well, this is a poll taken very soon – remember after the Democratic convention, most if not all of the polls around the country, as you know, showed Clinton in a commanding and to the Republicans a staggering lead. However, let's begin by reminding ourselves that shortly after the Democratic convention four years ago, Governor Dukakis – remember him? – was 17 points ahead of the struggling Mr Bush. A party convention, however blousy and theatrical and self-congratulating, always acts as a tonic to public taste, very like alcohol – short-term stimulant but really and after a while a true depressant.

Whatever doubts exist as the Republicans come together at Huston on Monday, and doubts are rampant, I don't think there's much question that once the balloons have burst and the ticker tape has fluttered down and the candidates have stood there, there are two arms mimicking a double eagle, the following poll will show a rise perhaps a swift rise in shall we say the potential or intended vote for Mr Bush. It's always translated into the shorthand of popularity, but many more emotions are involved in looking over the candidates than liking and disliking. Everybody agrees including the Republicans themselves that they are in trouble and our daily and weekly journals are endlessly saying so, I'm talking about the good, the sensible press not the miserable howling tabloids who are more than ever in the hunt for what the president and Governor Clinton rightly condemn as sleaze.

Incidentally, the noun is new, the adjective sleazy is old and was originally used here to describe a fabric, rayon, that was cheap and shabby such as early German immigrants attributed I'm sorry to say, to my favourite part of pre-war Germany, sleaze from Silesia.

In the past month, we've been subjected to a continuous downpour of pieces survey polls and panicky deductions from them all showing as many American conservatives believe that Governor Clinton and Senator Gore will win in a landslide. Mr Bush's own former secretary of education Mr Bennett – chivvied and badgered on a panel programme to talk about what has become known as the damn Quayle problem – said bluntly, "Dan Quayle is not the problem, George Bush is the problem". Mention of Dan Quayle the battling Vice President was of course inevitable. For many months, grave and reverent seniors, pundits and Republicans even some close to Mr Bush have been privately urging the President to take Mr Quayle off the ticket or in the usual way of such humiliations invite the man himself to write a letter asking to be executed for the good of the party.

The people who do this begging always have an alternative choice and excitedly insist that their choice would revitalise the party and galvanise the public. The two people most often mentioned were Mrs Elizabeth Dole, the very able and beautiful former secretary of transportation now head of the American Red Cross, and Mr Jack Kemp, the cabinet officer who has fumed in the outer offices of the White House for two years directing the president's attention to the rotting condition of the inner cities and offering a program called and for long ignored "enterprise zones run by the inhabitants themselves". We all suddenly heard about this plan and Mr Kemp's its author after the shattering Los Angeles riot.

Now Mr Bush you may remember sent a wince-like a whistling wind through his party by arriving then in Los Angeles in the shambles of the aftermath and saying, "Well I'd planned to come out here later anyway, so this worked in nicely". There's nothing like a spontaneous remark as an index of a man's feeling and likeness to Perot's slip into promising blacks help for "your people". Mr Bush's casual aside reflected what so many people find disheartening in him. Of course, he's concerned about poverty, bad education and drugs, crime, but he can't see why the programmes he's initiated aren't good enough. In other words, he doesn't see these things as the core of America's present sickness; he looks on them as nuisances distracting him from his favourite energetic concern – foreign policy.

We'd all expected the coming Republican convention to be as automatic as a hurdy-gurdy, a mechanical coronation, but since the polls have gone on showing the president in a steady decline, there's a feeling in the air, which may on the journalist's part be more wishful than anything else that something dramatic and rebellious is going to take place at Huston.

As I speak, it seems certain that Mr Bush is determined to stay with Vice President Quayle, but I think it likely that Mr Bush and the party have taken heart from the sudden emergence of very serious foreign matters, which will require a sensible and experienced hand. The trade agreements with Mexico, the relief of the starving Somalians, the tension in South Africa, more than anything the spreading disaster of Serbia on the loose. In the two months or more after this convention, the comfort if not the security of America may appear to be threatened seriously enough to make very many of the voters who now reject or have abandoned Mr Bush come back to him laggedly, reluctantly as their tried and true protector.

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