1990 Mid-Term Elections - 9 November 1990

From time to time, I clip or cut out pieces from the newspapers and magazines and put them away in a folder, expecting one day to use them in one of these letters.

They are rarely expressions of opinion. Mostly, they could be filed under some such title as "Things I never new till now", and they span the gamut of interesting items about life in this country. Sometimes, rarely, but sometimes, bizarre items about life in some other country that we're all interested in.

I've just pulled out a news despatch, two months old. A writer's report from Moscow that Mr Gorbachev had dismissed one, it says here, one of his top officials, whom he blames for an acute shortage of cigarettes, that has caused demonstrations in Moscow and other cities.

I suppose I cut this out originally as a possible lead into a talk about the very different view of cigarette smoking in the west and in eastern and Asian countries. There seems to be no official campaign, in either the Soviet Union or China, against smoking as a health hazard, an omission that brings joy and gratitude to the western cigarette manufacturers, who have more than made up the slumping tobacco sales in this country with aggressive and successful advertising campaigns throughout what we used to call the Third World.

But looking over this piece and thinking over that dismissed Soviet official, who had so bungled the distribution of cigarettes as to cause riots among deprived smokers, I'm not sure that it was his incompetence that attracted my attention, or the social implications of Mr Gorbachev's act, as the name of this sacked deputy prime minister.

Believe me, I speak nothing but the truth when I tell you that he is a Mr Nikitin – honest – and that could well be the reason why I kept this hilarious item buried for two months, because, simply, it's frivolous and during the past three months, many another unserious item has crossed my mind and been guiltily sent on its way.

Since the invasion of Kuwait, I've had the feeling, you may have noticed it, that to talk about the lighter side of life would be a form of fiddling while the Middle East burns.

I never felt this way over Vietnam because, I think, the American involvement was so gradual and for so long, so tenuous, that American technicians and advisers had been out there under two presidents before we really came awake to the fact that there were many thousands of soldiers committed to a big and protracted war.

Life went on in the United States very much as before, just as prosperously as before for – we never knew it at the time – Vietnam was one war we didn't have to pay for, at the time. No jump in tax rates. We're paying for it, and many another spending splurge, now.

But this administration's response to the invasion of Kuwait was spontaneous and massive. More so than to any previous provocation in American history. Close to 300,000 Americans have been put in the Gulf in three months, almost twice as many as crossed the Atlantic during the first nine months of America's participation in the First World War.

Those first 175,000 men who sailed for Europe between April 1917 and the end of December, went willingly. They responded to a declaration of war by the Congress and they knew what they were fighting for. This time, there has been no declaration of war and nightly interviews, television interviews, in the desert, a daring and I must say, perilous innovation, tell of men who are confused about the aims of a prospective war or who increasingly grumble, let's go or let's go home.

So what I'm saying is that the situation in the Gulf offers so many prospects of carnage or chaos, that Saddam Hussein casts a long shadow on our daily lives, it seems irresponsible to dwell on lighter matters.

It's a feeling I must get over, and this week we have fair justification for doing so in the general elections of last Tuesday, what's called a mid-term election, being midway between the presidential elections, which are held once every four years.

Reams and reams of speculation went into print and into television gabble before the election, warning us of national trends that would be revealed in the election results. The particular trend you had to watch out for depended, of course, on the particular prophet you were listening to, Republican or Democrat.

Neither of them predicted what their partisans would do, they spoke, as they always do, for the people – that wonderful abstraction, so useful to speechifying politicians and editorial writers. When in doubt about who's thinking what, say the American people.

Well let's then match what the soothsayers said would happen against what happened. The Democratic astrologers said the people were so fed up with the continued pollution of the land and the rivers, that they would rise and thumpingly endorse any new green initiative to discipline or punish the polluters. Result: in the five states that put such a punishing act on the ballot, it was soundly defeated in all of them.

The Republican fortune tellers said that the people were so enraged at the performance over the budget talks of the Democrats, and they've been a large majority there for over 40 years, that they would finally throw out these incumbents in wholesale lots. Result: 96% of all the House incumbents were re-elected.

One point both parties agree on. The incumbents, most of whom have been in the House for three or four or more terms, have accumulated so much campaign money from special interests who want to be catered to that they can almost never be dislodged by a newcomer, a challenger, with little campaign money.

Now this did not seem to be true in the races for governor in Florida. A man who refused to take individual contributions of more than $100 beat a well-financed incumbent. In Texas, a free-wheeling tycoon who campaigned in cowboy costume, a joker who could call on $8,000,000 in campaign contributions, lost to a woman with a third of that supporting money. When Mr Clayton Williams conceded defeat, both his wife and his mother wept copiously. No wonder four million of his campaign chest came from his own pocket.

All right, so what other thundering prophecies? The Democrats said the national swing to their party, which for so long has claimed to be the party of the common man against the heedless rich, the national swing would be revealed in colossal majorities for the two men who, at the moment, head the list of likely presidential contenders in 1992, Senator Bill Bradley of New Jersey and Governor Mario Cuomo in New York, running for a third term.

The result? Senator Bradley squeaked in so narrowly against an under-financed unknown, that several Democratic leaders at once said you could forget him as a presidential possibility. Governor Cuomo, who last time took 65% of the vote, this time took only 53%, and against two opponents that had never been heard of a year ago. So, perhaps Governor Cuomo is no longer the saviour many Democrats had been heralding.

The Democrats said Mr Bush had hurt himself, his political standing, so badly, with his flip-flopping, zig-zagging indecisiveness about the budget that his personal campaigning across the country for Republican candidates might actually hurt them more than it would help. Result: the Democrats were right. Of the 18 candidates that President Bush went out of his way to plead for, 14 lost.

The Democrats went further, they said Mr Bush's prestige, his national popularity, was slumping so fast, that the Republicans would lose six, seven, eight seats in the Senate and lots of seats in the House. Wrong. They lost one Senate seat and eight House seats.

The Republicans said that while the president's popularity has weakened, he is still, in the polls, more popular than any president in living memory at this stage, after two years of his first term and that the Republicans would lose fewer seats than usual in the mid-term election. Result: the Republicans were, embarrassingly for the Democrats, right.

It is a matter of record, over many decades, that the party of the president, in a mid-term election, usually loses 36 seats. Well, the Republicans lost only nine seats, a remarkable result and one they could fairly call a victory.

So, if you want the truth about the American elections, I don't know where you should go to find it. There is no truth, or rather, there are many truths, most of them contradictory.

Just about the only unquestioned conclusions that have come out of them are that to be already in the House of Representatives and therefore the recipient of moneys from the special interests in your constituency, whether it's a building contractor or a steelworkers' local, a baseball team owner, a schoolteachers' union, whatever, to be already a congressman is a big help in staying a congressman.

The other conclusion is that the Democrats will spend their spare time in the next two years looking for a Moses. Neither Governor Cuomo, nor Senator Bill Bradley seems to be he, him, it.

THIS TRANSCRIPT WAS TYPED FROM A RECORDING OF THE ORIGINAL BBC BROADCAST (© BBC) AND NOT COPIED FROM AN ORIGINAL SCRIPT. BECAUSE OF THE RISK OF MISHEARING, THE BBC CANNOT VOUCH FOR ITS COMPLETE ACCURACY.

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