Clinton and 'Me too' Democrats - 6 January 1995

You would think‚ from the cover pictures on all the weekly magazines‚ you would think America had a new president. It doesn't, it has a new man to preside over the government of the United States and that's not just a figure of speech. You might go so far as to say that the United States has a new prime minister, for the new man has several of a prime minister's powers, chief of which is that it's up to him to bring to the floor of the House and to a vote every piece of legislation he, more than anybody, thinks is important or pressing or both.

The new man, need I say, is named Newton, called Newt Gingrich. Did you notice there how nicely I distinguished between the English and American usage? Americans never say a man called John Major, unless John is his nickname, he was, he is, named John Major. However, the man called Newt Gingrich has represented a district in Georgia for 16 years because that's where he's lived, he wasn't born and brought up there and he doesn't sound like it, he comes from the north from Pennsylvania. Until a few months ago, all that Americans knew about him was that he'd had a poor and rough childhood, a broken home, a bitter divorce, which is said to explain why he cherishes the idea and the fact of a stable and happy marriage and family.

Suddenly, he sprung out of the Republican conservative pack and is third in line of succession to the presidency, he is Speaker of the House and as we've reminded ourselves often before, the job of a speaker as in a parliamentary system is the least of his duties. In fact, he takes the gavel and presides only on ceremonial occasions. He is the political leader of his party and he becomes a speaker when that party is, as now for only the third time in 60 years, in the majority there. He's come leaping to the forefront of American government for two reasons. First, because he has a gift of the gab, racy, vivid, colourful, as good as any since, well I don't know who, he sounds as natural and possessed by a mission as Reagan, but he has no need of cue cards or wraparound autocues telly prompters. Secondly, he's brought into sharper focus and defined more sharply than anyone, not just the Republican case against Mr Clinton and the Democrats, but that national case beyond parties against the way Congress conducts its business, in particular, the way it is in some ways a law unto itself.

There's never been a first day like it. Mr Gingrich started on the Hill at six in the morning and left at two the next morning and he got passed a raft of bills reforming the House rules. One law that got him universal applause: from now on Congress will have no special privileges by way of employment conditions and safety laws and so on, it will be governed by the laws that apply to the rest of the nation.

Mr Gingrich's laundry list is an agenda for reform, is so long and so breathtaking that you could be hearing about hardly anything else in the months to come. So what Jefferson called "domestic tranquillity" and the ways to achieve it are the overwhelming concern of most Americans, but there is a nagging ever-present anxiety, which will affect the world much more than America's domestic reforms and it is called foreign policy.

I can't remember a time when American foreign policy concerned Americans less. In every poll taken before the election, foreign policy came way down the list of what troubled most Americans. I think that we probably, like the populations of Western Europe are living still in the recovery room, resting comfortably after the long nervous breakdown of the Cold War. For a shockingly large number of people, the collapse of the Soviet Union was the collapse of the last threat to the power and interests of the United States and the last thing we expected was more wars. What the experts call "conventional wars", meaning no atomic weapons involved but wars nonetheless, where every day people are bombed, starved, killed, wounded, raped, driven from their homes. And in this country, the wounding thought of ever getting involved in the miseries of these wars is salted by the memory of Vietnam. It's still there and rears its ugly head whenever the question comes up of American intervention anywhere in Somalia, Rwanda, Haiti, North Vietnam, Bosnia. You might say: "Well, the Americans have had more reminders than anybody of the existence of such wars," and after Vietnam, Congress passed an act that required the president to do something no president has done since 1941, which is to remember and abide by the Constitution, which gives the power to declare war to the Congress exclusively.

And so President Bush did go before Congress or asked it for a vote when the desert war came up. After he'd decided that this aggression cannot stand or, I better say, after Mrs Thatcher, who was here at the time, braced a wobbling Bush and told him he could not let it stand.

But the Iraq invasion of Kuwait was a special case and recognised by most people as a special threat. It was a threat to the Persian Gulf and the passageway for Middle Eastern oil. In fact, it was, for all the fancy talk about democracy and tyranny, it was properly about the threat to possession of the oil itself.

In all the later alarms and excursions, it's the consensus of the country, and of course the Republican party, that Mr Clinton is most lamentably weak and indecisive on foreign policy and his part of the Democrats have been in the forefront of the movement to cut back defence spending, closed down great numbers of army and navy bases, except in my congressional district.

In fact, the liberal Democrats have acted until quite recently as if the armed forces existed for one purpose only: to repel any actual invader of American territory. The Democratic record in the House, which, remember, is the bank where the money comes from to pay all bills, including any and all foreign adventures and the means of mounting them, there, record is such that the Pentagon and the members of the Armed Services Committee of the Senate agree that with the present defence establishment, American armed forces could in an emergency fight two limited wars in different places, no more.

Just think back when President Kennedy came to the White House in 1961, the United States had 132 military bases abroad and solemn treaty commitments to come to the aid of 43 nations if they were attacked or disrupted by a civil war. And remember that stirring sentence in his inaugural: "Let every nation know that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe to assure the survival and the success of liberty".

In case you think I'm about to display boastful 20/20 hindsight, let me quote the last three sentences of the talk I did at the time. "This inaugural is fine to read but fatal to act on. It maybe the wish of a strong nation to do this. But, in reality, it is not able to support any friend or fight any foe or support the burden, say, of a civil war in some other land in order to rush to the aid of 43 friends and fight 43 foes."

Well, the United States failed to do it in one country when, like the ancient Romans, they pitied all the technological might of America against an army of guerrillas and peasants who were, as Gibbon put it, inured to fighting in the bogs. Vietnam, you could cruelly say, was the price of the Kennedy inaugural. So in foreign policy at least, the Republicans have a case when they say that cutting defence spending has been too severe, that indecision in Washington only encourages the belligerence of tyrants everywhere. So it's in foreign policy you are likely to see the biggest and steadiest challenge to the administration and the Senate is the place wherefore in policy it's first debated and where it can uphold or override the president.

And there the new leader, now majority leader, is Senator Dole of Kansas, the Second World War veteran who lately chastised Nsto and Western Europe in general for appearing so helpless before the Serbian aggression. He will introduce a bill to flout the United Nations arms embargo on Bosnia to allow the United States to send arms to the Bosnia government, but forbid American ground troops as combatants or trainers, he also wants to put strict limits from now on an American troop serving under United Nations command. And, by way of registering Republican distress not to say disgust over the agreement former President Carter arranged with North Korea, whereby they wouldn't make a nuclear bomb for four years in gratitude for a gift of $4 billion, Senator Dole wants to know whether the $4 billion reward is legal or not. He also wants an accounting on Haiti and he means to press the application of a clause of the War Powers Act, which has been more honoured in the breach, namely that when a president sends any American troops abroad, he must have the Congress's permission to keep them there after 90 days.

So where does all this leave Mr Clinton? At the moment not so much as a lame-duck president as a me-too president. Time was when all the Republicans can do by way of opposition to Roosevelt's New Deal and Truman's Fair Deal was to say, of course, we favour social security and union, bargaining and minimum hours and so on, but we'll do them better. For about 20 melancholy years the Republicans were known as the Me-too Democrats. Now we've turned a 180, Mr Clinton truly believes that the country in November gave a verdict against the liberals of either party, so Mr Clinton can't wait to become more centrist, the final or perhaps only the first grand gesture on behalf of his conversion or his humiliation is his announcement that he wants to urge the Congress, he, the Democratic president, he wants 25 billion more dollars for the armed forces. It's as if he was saying, golly fellows, you had me all wrong, I was never a liberal I'm a middle-class, middle-of-the-road, right-of-centre Democrat almost like one of you guys and if there's anything I'm hot for it's a strong American defence.

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