George H W Bush nominated - 29 April 1988

We don’t hear the voice of the turtle in our land, not in Manhattan, anyway, but this is the time of the singing of birds and the crowing of politicians, especially if they’re Republicans.

In simple arithmetic last Tuesday after the Pennsylvania primary Vice President George Bush acquired the pledged support of more than the 1,139 delegates to the New Orleans convention he needs to give him the Republican nomination on the first ballot.

I’ve discovered, from a little boning up on several European newspapers and magazines, a cluster of clichés about Mr Bush which used to be true enough but which I believe have been discarded or weakened by events. It’s still being said in some eminent British and French papers that George Bush is no more than the lucky beneficiary of President Reagan’s great and persisting popularity most conspicuously in the south and west, that he represents a sort of wishful guarantee that the glory days of the Reagan prosperity and free-wheeling optimism will go on and on, that as a person a public personality he still suffers from what even the most earnest American journals six months ago were calling "the wimp factor".

Now "wimp" is a word that has not yet gone into the Oxford dictionary but it’s well established in the lingo of American society and politics. A low-voltage type, a little sleepy, a little weepy. It’s odd, I must say, that of all the – how many? 13, 14? – men who originally started the presidential race the word "wimp" should have been attached to George Bush of all people.

You wouldn’t expect the captain of the Yale baseball team to be considered a wimp, much less and before that the youngest combat flyer in the Second World War. Bush was only seventeen when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor but he jumped to it and was a lucky survivor, having won the Distinguished Flying Cross and three air medals for gallantry.

It also takes some very un-wimpish qualities to found and run successfully an offshore oil company in Texas and set it on its way to becoming one of the leaders of the industry. Bush could have stayed there and grown fat and very rich but like his father before him he gave up the pleasures of tycoonery to run for the United States Senate.

Further unlikely wimpish steps along the way were his jobs as chief American delegate to the United Nations, American diplomatic representative in China, and head of the CIA. When Mr Gorbachev came to the throne we were always being warned or reminded that this surprisingly genial and accommodating man had been the head of the KGB. I wonder if the Soviet media have made a point of reminding the Russians that Mr Bush was once head of the dreaded CIA?

So George, wherefore art thou wimp? Well he has two strikes against him being considered as an all-American politician. He was not born poor, not the son of an immigrant, not as the defeated boy from the prairie Senator Dole kept on saying, not one of us. He was on the contrary very comfortable off at birth, a condition which the usual political opponent will always deride as an actual disadvantage for running a democracy of having been born with a silver spoon – and George Bush compounded the crime of owning a silver spoon – with an education at Andover and Yale.

Andover is one of the half-dozen or so most famous north-eastern prep schools. In American English, a prep school is a private boarding high school, what in England is known as a public school. Americans are at all times hot for education but quietly suspicious of the educated man, especially if the early education was acquired at the swank private schools.

Now you may rightly ask how about Franklin Roosevelt, who really was a patrician, at least a landed Hudson Valley squire educated at the top prep school, Groton, and the sainted university of Harvard. Well there has to be from time to time the freakish exception and in hard times, in the depth of the Depression, American turned with astonishment and gratitude to a patrician who spoke always for "the forgotten man" and the 12 millions of his unemployed companions.

It’s the phenomenon dear from time to time to democracies – the prince who speaks for the people against his own kind. Throughout most of his 13 years in the presidency Roosevelt was steadily hated by the bankers and the industrialists and his old classmates at Groton and Harvard. They called him a traitor to his class. He called them economic royalists.

George Bush has neither the Roosevelt patrician background nor Roosevelt’s confident aristocratic manner and it is his manner, his accent and the slightly whining high-pitched voice that suggested the wimp. His accent is that of the prep school-educated, upper middle-class north-easterner.

This audible social fact baffles visiting Englishmen who tend to share the delusion of the old central European immigrant film producers that cultivated Americans talk very like Englishmen. In every movie I can think of about upper-crust Bostonians the patriarch was always played by an Englishman – C Aubrey Smith, Ralph Richardson. In fact in life nothing could be further from southern English that the speech of the Boston Brahmins.

But George Bush does have this rather choppy nasal speech and he goes to great lengths to obliterate it by campaigning in a windbreak and driving trucks in jeans and a hard hat. He has never, however, been called a traitor to his class and he’s not likely to be and by now the country is used to his voice and is ready to forgive it in the light of his record in government.

That becomes all the more formidable when it’s matched with his likeliest opponents Governor Dukakis and the Reverend Jesse Jackson. Lest the appearance of that record from the Senate to the United Nations to China, CIA, Vice-Presidency will be stressed, I believe more and more against the governor’s lack of experience in foreign affairs and the reverend’s lack of any political experience at all, either in domestic or foreign affairs.

In the years before television this discrepancy between experience and innocence might have been enough to give Mr Bush a commanding advantage, but in this visual day and age the issues, so-called, have only the force the man seen and heard can give them, and here neither Mr Bush nor Governor Dukakis can touch the Reverend Jackson as a magnet, a guru, a demagogue if you like.

That wily observer of réal politique, Richard Nixon, has said the reverend is much the most intelligent and dynamic campaigner thrown up this year by either party and in a prosperous, turbulent and complicated time Jesse Jackson skips the complexity and the prosperity and plunges into the turbulence, stressing at all times in thrusting eloquence the travail of the minorities, not not only of the blacks, the Hispanics, the Asian newcomers, but of the mortgaged farmers, the unemployed steel workers, the child drug pushers, the cocaine addicts, the uncared-for children of two working parents, the one newborn black child in two that is illegitimate, the victim of AIDS.

While other candidates waved at airport crowds or pressed the flesh in supermarkets he was tracking through burnt-out slums sitting by hospital beds talking to jobless miners, preaching about the devastation of drugs to poor children, all the things about American life that the great majority of us, the comfortable employed, find harrowing but would rather sigh about and move on.

Now Roosevelt too in his time used his fine baritone to soar and thunder about the poor, the sick, the old, the jobless but he was doing it at a time when one family in three or four had nothing coming in. Jesse Jackson faces many frightening and despairing sides of American life and paints them truly but he is doing this at a time when the unemployment rate is close to an historic low, when in proportion to the adult population more Americans are at work than at any time in American history.

There is not, in this vast continental country, as there is in Britain a perceptible division between an impoverished north and a prosperous south – or east or west. There are many pockets of despair, but pockets, and obviously most people who will vote will belong to the great working, comfortable majority.

That is, I think, the main the practical reason why the Reverend Jackson is unelectable, but his emotional appeal has been so strong and the votes he’s drawn from white blue-collar workers so impressive, apart from his ability to deliver the black vote wholesale, that the Democratic nominee whoever he’s to be, will have to promise him an important place in his administration.

That nominee, that choice for the Democrats, is by now pretty certain to be the governor of Massachusetts, Michael Dukakis, the son of a great immigrant who prospered, the careful managerial type who is the poles away from Jackson in manner and ability.

Citing the new prosperity of his own state, Dukakis insists that effective reform is undramatic, is made in small steps. Give working people rent controlled homes, improve public transport, guard the school yards from drug pushers, shift some of the fat from the defence budget to day-care centres.

The governor knows as well as anybody that such prescriptions offered by a small earnest man in the tone of a chartered accountant do not carry the emotional force of the Reverend’s appeals for "peace today", "jobs for all tomorrow" and the "end of apartheid next month". The governor, attacking Reagan but also with a glancing blow at Jackson says, “Maybe after seven years of charisma we could do with four years of competence”.

He goes on saying this sort of thing to audiences everywhere in five languages, a unique gift in a presidential candidate and somehow he has piled up the votes in the Democratic primaries and is close to the prize. Somehow, more and more Democrats, whether from fear, common sense or second thoughts, see him as the party’s best manager and most skilful opponent to match with the preppy, the oil man, the Reagan yes man from Andover and Yale and Texas.

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