Bedazzled and Bewildered - 8 December 2000

During the past week I've watched so many uncountable hours of television and read so many scores of legal briefs that courtrooms keep coming into my dreams - courtrooms that entertain some odd witnesses I truly wish had taken the place of the ones in real life in real Florida.

Nancy Reagan popped up once and then there was a kitchen serving as a courtroom and in it Harry Truman.

I woke up and made the instant association with President Truman's memorable advice to any president who complained about the pressure of his office: "If you don't like the heat stay out of the kitchen."

But of all the true images of all the programmes that bore the headline The Florida vote, strangely the most vivid, the most pathetic one to me was a shot, last Wednesday morning, of two middle-aged workmen, hammers held high, banging away at a platform, literally nailing down the platform just built at the Capitol on which the president, whoever he was to be, would, should stand on 20 January, hold up his right hand and swear the ancient oath, the oath first spoken by George Washington: "I do solemnly swear that I will faithfully execute the office of President of the United States and will, to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States."

At nobody's suggestion George Washington ad libbed a coda: "So help me God." An addition which since it was thought up by the sainted George has become customary, if not compulsory.

Those two men banging their hammers, their open mouths exhaling little white puffs, were a touching symbol of the rueful mood of Washington, having to prepare for the inauguration of a president whose identity nobody was absolutely sure of.

And then the camera pulled back and revealed these two robust figures as midgets - little clockwork toy men in the middle of a structure as large as the Parthenon. Which brought us down to earth and the raising anxieties of all sorts of people who plan or build, arrange, see through, what is called the transition.

The rehearsal or preparation for the actual inauguration and its attendant ceremonies - the bands, the high school paraders, the various units of the armed forces, the seating arrangements on the stand of the Supreme Court, the Congress, the wives, the diplomatic corps and so on - they're all well underway.

The people who, this weekend, were beginning to bite their nails were the hotel managers.

They had long ago decorated special suites and offered luxury packages complete with chauffeur and an invitation to the Presidential Ball, but if it was going to be for Gore you couldn't expect the Republicans to start buying into that joyful celebration and vice versa.

But once the presidential hassle is all over, or as Washington likes to put it, once we achieve finality or closure - a new, chic buzz word - you may be sure that the hotel owners, the caterers, the chefs, the orchestras, the white tie and tail renters, the limousine services will perform at the double.

However, questions about the inauguration are the least of the worries of the senators and the old congressmen and women who descended on Capitol Hill this past week for the last, the lame duck session, of this 106th Congress.

The first question for both Houses, more pressing than will there be a president on 20 January, was will the thousands and thousands of government employees - from the secretary of the Treasury to a washer woman in the House, from forest rangers to the secretaries and janitors in every government office in the land, will they be paid by the end of this month?

There is no money in the budget for them because the 2000 AD budget is still being debated.

All the salaries and expenses of all the museums, the offices, the national parks, et cetera are being met, at the moment, by an emergency fund passed by the House.

When the House met this week the government workers were being kept alive by what's called a continuing resolution - the 18th such resolution since October.

Does this plight strike a chord? It ought to in anybody who was present in the glory days of Newt Gingrich, you remember him?

A Republican conservative who six years ago led his party to a majority in the House for the first time in 40 years.

"The conservative revolution" it was called and it collapsed not from any break with his rousing principles but because Mr Gingrich, speaker of the House and the Republican chief, refused to compromise with President Clinton on the budget - to the point where he refused to continue any continuing resolution that would keep government workers paid.

In effect, though not for long, he shut down the government and it seemed, for about 24 hours, a moment of triumph.

After which the workers and the people were heard from in the overnight disappearance of their paychecks.

They were scandalised and adopted the well known attitude of baseball fans disgusted with the performance of the home team - "throw the bums out" - and so in the next election they did and Mr Gingrich's political career was all over. He's gone back to being a history teacher in a small college in Georgia.

If we hadn't been so bedazzled and bewildered by the presidential legal puzzle this threat of another government shutdown would have been the big shocking news.

Whatever else happens before the new Congress assembles in January you may be sure that the huge army of government employees will not go hungry at Christmas time.

This crisis of government has gone practically unreported. I picked it up by simply watching the first debate in the House.

What has, however, been much written about and speculated on is the problem of what is called "the transition", a phrase often as baffling to foreigners as such Americanisms as "inter-state commerce" or "judicial review".

Well the transition is the business of organising a new administration between the November election and the inauguration of the new president on 20 January - an interval of 10 weeks.

Parliamentary countries are always aghast at the time it takes, the sweating, bustling 10 weeks to set up a new administration, especially since in London it takes usually rather less than 24 hours.

Americans, it must be said, have good cause in their own experience to be flabbergasted if ever they're in London and find the new man moved into 10 Downing Street the day after an election and the beaten one on his way in a moving van back to Pine View Gardens, Hampstead.

Well one reason for the astonishing dispatch of the English and the turtle's pace of the Americans is the difference between a parliamentary system and a federal system.

The chief executive here, the president, not only doesn't live and have his being in the legislature - the legislature was set up as his watchdog.

In a parliament the executive - the prime minister - is the leading legislator. He's surrounded by his cronies and advisors, all members of the legislature, all elected.

Hence the useful institution of the shadow cabinet. You know whenever a parliament is dissolved and the opposition party comes in, you know who's going to be the next prime minister, the chancellor of the exchequer, home secretary - they're all parliamentary buddies.

In the American system the president's cabinet is made up of buddies too but practically never elected, never from the Senate or the House.

His favourite banker is likely to be made secretary of the Treasury, an old lawyer pal from his state the attorney general. And not only the cabinet but hundreds and hundreds of jobs which in Britain for instance belong to the civil service.

When Labour defeated Mr Churchill in the 1945 landslide and the Potsdam conference with Stalin and President Truman was resumed it was Mr Atlee who went back there, not Mr Churchill, and both Stalin and President Truman were astonished to see coming down from the airplane and trudging behind Mr Atlee the same 30-odd assistants who had previously accompanied Mr Churchill.

In short a parliamentary system always has the next administration in place and the transition is not much more than the literal transfer of the body of the new prime minister from his old home to his new one.

In the American system even the lowliest jobs in an administration are political.

How about the doorman at the Senate? The lift operator in the House? They go and the new underling of the winning party is appointed.

But then once the new president and his cronies have picked, say, the top hundred new men and women from cabinet officers to press secretaries and ambassadors and judges they have to be vetted, that is to say scrutinised and seen to be sanitised by the FBI.

This process normally takes not 10 weeks but at least a year, even two.

All ambassadors, all judges the president may nominate have to be checked, quizzed, investigated and approved by the Senate.

And in the Senate there is one man, the chairman of the Senate foreign relations committee, who doesn't have to bring before his committee for investigation any nominee he personally dislikes.

The present chairman, Senator Jesse Helms - a Republican, since the Republicans are in the majority in the Senate - Senator Helms still has on hold 10 or 12 diplomatic appointees that President Clinton is waiting to have approved.

Sometimes an overseas ambassador's post is empty for years at the pleasure of the chairman of the foreign relations committee.

I have a friend who boils over every time he thinks of this blip in the system.

He maintains that every four years we should also have to vote for the chairman of the Senate foreign relations committee, never mind who's president.

"After all," my friend says, "in foreign affairs, compared with Jesse Helms the president is pretty powerless."

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