American political underdogs - 16 September 1994

I have in my possession, I have in my hand a $3 bill … Whoa, Dobbin, I hear, there's no such thing. Well there is now. It was handed to me a month or so ago in San Francisco and I've kept it, I've passed it in payment to taxi drivers, to shop assistants and most times I've had to say "hold it" and take it back.

What eventually puts people off after a second glance of course is the figure 3 printed like the figure 1 on the dollar bill four times, once in each corner of the note. An old French lady round the corner, who sells pastries and cheeses took it, marvel at it, and was going to ring up the cash register. I said it's not legal. She then looked at it carefully, something not one person – I include close friends among persons – not one person in 10 does, then they will see that the central figure George Washington on the $1 bill is Bill Clinton with a referee's whistle in his mouth.

And the dollar bill is issued in prominent type by the United States of America. The $3 bill is issued by the Disgruntled States of America, whereas the legitimacy of the dollar bill is guaranteed by a line at the top saying "federal reserve note" the $3 dollar has in the same place "queer reserve note", a rather clumsy parody but one meant to recall the old jock idiom "queer as a $3 bill". In the right-hand corner we see on dollars bills, the signature of Mr Lloyd Bentsen, the secretary of the treasury. On this new bill the signature of Truman Capote, no federal office indicated, which is not surprising since he's no longer with us. On the reverse side, instead of "in God we trust" it says "in $3 bill we trust not", a picture of the White House with a sign on the lawn "for sale" and that's about it, that about completes the jokiness. Oh, the bill has a serial number, possibly the neatest touch, "oh, oh I see you 812".

You can buy these things in packs of 25 from an address in California's Central Valley. This in my experience is the first time anybody's had the wit to issue a fake dollar bill in the likeness of the president you wanted to mock and this bill is the simplest, the most colourful or facetious expression of the national pastime which is likely to replace baseball now that baseball has shutdown and there'll be no world series for the first time in 90 years, the national pastime of knocking the president.

In the past spring and summer, he's taken an awful beating in Congress from the Republicans, of course, from the media most noticeably and perhaps most damaging to the Democratic Party from disillusioned Democrats who turned to Reagan first, wobbled with Bush and in the 1992 election returned to the party and to Clinton. And now, according to a national survey, are about to desert him in droves, not literally since he's not running for re-election but punishing him through the congressional elections in November.

The Republicans are by now gung-ho about the signs of widespread disappointment in Mr Clinton, at his dithering foreign policies, the dumping of his health bill, the continuing investigation of that failed land deal in Arkansas, not to mention in public their secret joy over that young lady's sexual harassment law suit against him.

But it's remarkable now as the summer's waned, so it seems, has the Republican passion for beating up on President Clinton, they seem to feel they no longer have to go up and down the land affecting deep shock and indignation with Mr Clinton. Instead they're busy counting the wonderful gains in November's elections, they don't of course expect to get a majority in the House, that's happened only twice for four years in 61 years. It's by now almost a rule of our two-party system that the House of Representatives shall by run by one party, the Democrats, just like Mexico whose failure to produce a federal democratic system we regularly deplore. But the the Senate and the Democrats themselves privately concede that they could loose the Senate and the Republican leaders are going on the cocky assumption that they've already won it. The last time they did it was for the six gorgeous Reagan years.

And when the president has his own party in control of the Senate, there's every chance for him to get through the laws he wants, except we might add with Bill Clinton. His aides and friends point with pride to the North American Free Trade Agreement, they shouldn't – it was passed only because 150 Republicans came to the presidents aid when 130 of his own party rejected it.

However, let's suppose for a minute that the Republicans do get a majority in the Senate in November. The field commanders of the American legislative system are the chairmen of the Senate committees and of course the majority party takes over the chairmanships.

I've been looking back and trying to rescue from the doldrums of history, a president who performed any legislative magic or even success when the Senate leaders were not of his party, some astute oldster will no doubt recall with a rush of pride the fact that during Eisenhower's second administration several bills that were to become historic having to do with freedom of expression and civil rights went through. Eisenhower had little or nothing to do with them, it was the work, the labour, the ruthless arm twisting and rib bashing of the Senate majority leader Mr Lyndon B Johnson of the opposition party. So successful was Johnson in perversely pushing through social legislation on Eisenhower's behalf that it became a byword among the learned, Eisenhower second administration is called "Johnson's first administration". Anyway that was a freak.

The Republicans today are doing something that their forebears did in 1948 when President Harry Truman standing was as low as any president's in history, his short term from the death of Roosevelt in '45 through to November 1946 was so awful in the view of the voters that both the House and the Senate went to the Republicans, so by the summer of 1948 when he was foolishly going to run again, he was politically impotent.

The Republican candidate – a man who the Washington wit Mrs Longworth said looked like the man on the wedding cake – Mr Thomas Dewey started to pick his incoming cabinet, never formally published but anybody in the news business could have called off most of the main posts by election day. But remember what happened on election day, Harry Truman said he was the only man in the United States who thought he could win except all the others who voted for me, he won and went crowing back into the White House while the staggered Republicans tore up their cabinet appointments and faced the dread prospect of four more years of Truman during which, by the way, he carved out a solid, conspicuous figure in world history.

Most students, even the youngest, have heard of Truman's thundering upset, but they can forget it in the assurances of their fathers that no president except Truman has ever been so lambasted, so discredited as Bill Clinton, before a national election. Well it's not so.

I was persuaded to do a little remembrance of things past when I recalled how years ago when my daughter was repairing an old colonial farmhouse in Vermont and stripped the ceiling of the living room, it was deep and dense with plaster, old wallpapers and right there under the roof as insulation newspapers laid out and horizontally packed, they were of the year Thomas Jefferson ran for president. He didn't take Vermont and no wonder, the despatches picked at him as a radical monster, a chronic adulterer with at least one black mistress and had a general warning about his mental health, he was, in fact throughout the entire east, known universally as Mad Tom. You may recall he won and he won, also a measure of fame.

The whole political history of the 19th century howls with rumours and imprecations against every other man who ran for president and got in. We think our press can be brutal, but in the 19th century there was no limit to comic or ferocious libels. A picture of a president holding the Senators in a money bag over the caption "the best Senators money can buy".

The campaign song of the Republicans against Cleveland who revealed just before the election that for several years he'd been supporting and illegitimate son, "Ma, Ma where's my Pa? Gone to the White House, ha ha ha". And how about the Democrats musical rejoinder, "Blaine, Blaine, James G Blaine the Continental liar from the State of Maine".

Nobody in my time, not Harry Truman, was the target for viler abuse, especially behind-the-hand gossip than Franklin Roosevelt. When I was at Harvard even, only two years after FDR had been elected, the sons of prominent Republicans confided to me they got it from their fathers that Roosevelt had a fatal brain tumour and would not last until 1936. When by the way, he won another four years till 1940, when he won another four, and then 1944 another four, he didn't live out the 16 years to which he'd been elected and true his health and his wits slowed down but only in the last four months. Suppose, I remember naively asking back then, suppose Dr Harvey Cushing – a famous surgeon – removes his brain tumour and he survives and runs again in 1936, what will your father do then? All of them had the same pat reply, "move to New Zealand". I never met or heard of one who did.

The knocking of Bill Clinton has reached an almost monotonous drumbeat, the chuckling distribution of that $3 bill is almost among Republicans, in the Clinton disillusion, a guarantee that his number is up. Remember George Bush, the spring after the 100-hour colossal desert war popularity rating 82%, people said facetiously that the 1992 presidential election should be called off just crowned good King George Bush. Mr Clinton's rating has nowhere to go but up, the Republicans would be wise to read a little history blessed by ignorance of it they repeated.

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