President George W H Bush’s re-election - 2 August 1991

Anyone who has listened to these talks for many years would expect by now to have at least one, if not several talks of a particular seasonal type. Which I've not given. On the other hand, you may not have noticed this gap because it's hard to be struck by what isn't there.

Well, it's now midsummer of the year before a presidential election year. As I speak, it's only 15 months to the next election. And we've never mentioned a candidate, a primary, the words Iowa and New Hampshire have never crossed my lips. And I can almost hear a cry of gratitude from many listeners. I share their unexpressed feelings for if there's one American tradition that requires a fanatic to enjoy it's the preliminary heats tradition of presidential elections. The sudden emergence of unknown egos, or egos, the thumping and whizzing round the land of at least half a dozen men getting more dogged and more exhausted every week from the brutal travel and the mechanical grinding-out of so much manufactured indignation.

All these men, and so far thank God only men, no woman has been witless enough to try it, all these men flying and preaching far and wide, pretending to be either John the Baptist, or the man himself, who with your help, your votes, could become the saviour of the republic. Well this time, fairly obviously, there aren't going to be any more Republican candidates to clutter up the stage. If there's one thing certain about the American political future, and there never is, it is that George Herbert Walker Bush will be the next Republican presidential candidate for re-election, in November 1992.

Of course the certainty of his running again has a lot to do with the extraordinary sluggishness, the almost non-existence of a presidential campaign so close to the day of the election. Maybe I ought to throw in a gross explanation for any startled listeners who don't remember what happened in the summer of 1987 and '83 and '79 and so on back into the womb of time.

Quite simply then, normally, an American presidential campaign starts about two years before the November of the actual election. Candidates from each party declare themselves and begin to pitch headquarters, recruit disciples and an advertising agency, run around corporations and prominent citizens and unions and every sort of civic body for money. They undertake frequent safaris into Iowa and New Hampshire and California which, for reason or another, are thought of as political barometers.

Now there's talk that California may hold its primary in late winter, to be first of all. And if that happens, that could practically neutralise the influence of later primaries. Because California is now well ahead of any other state in population, in representation in Congress and therefore in the numbers of delegates to the party conventions. In a nation of 50 states, it's got to the point where one vote in five of a successful nominee would have to come from California. It does suggest anyway that to lose the California delegation could almost certainly deny you the nomination. To lose the California vote would go a long way towards losing you the election. Still, we're talking about mechanics. Well, given that George Bush is certain to be crowned by acclamation as the next Republican convention next summer.

So where are the Democrats? Where is their Galahad? Where is their Moses? I certainly cannot remember a year in which 15 months before the election there weren't half a dozen men of the opposition party who weren't bawling and weeping from coast to coast, pounding around the highways and skyways, showering bumper stickers as they went. There were two declared candidates. There's no point in naming them. Since they smote their breasts, announced they would campaign to save the people, tried to collect some money, some support and, on second thoughts, decided to serve the people some other way. They withdrew.

There is now one declared Democratic candidate: a former senator, Senator Tsongas from Massachusetts who speechifies here and there but doesn't get reported. Months and months ago, there were one or two of the distinguished Democrats in Congress who after the smashing triumph in the Desert War decided that George Bush is unbeatable. They, the more plausible possibilities are young enough to forget 1992 and think, instead, of running in 1996. "I'll tell you what," said an old wag of a Democratic advisor. "Let's cancel the 1992 election, leave Bush four more years to ignore the home front! Let him flounder in the bog of domestic chaos, then in 1996, we'll come roaring in all around the country!"

The Democrats do have a theme, or rather a complaint, as a party, as a body of complainers, even individually on television, all croon the same lamentation about George Bush: that he loves handling foreign affairs, is enviably good at it, but is totally indifferent to the developing chaos of America at home. The symptoms of that chaos are well-known and endlessly recited: ever rising crime, never enough prisons, choked law courts, the pestilence of drugs which escapes no class, no sex, no generation, no part of the country, and dooms one black baby in four to addiction. By now, one American baby in four, just like one British baby in four, is illegitimate. Among blacks the percentage is 64. There's a crisis of healthcare in a system which spends more than any other developed nation, which offers the best in modern medicine for the rich and the very poor, but which can pretty nearly bankrupt the pocketbook of a middle-class family if struck by what we now define as a catastrophic illness.

There is no doubt about it, an appalling decline in the quality of public education that threatens to keep on disgorging from the schools an alarming percentage of the barely literate and the functionally illiterate. All across the country and just about at the same time, large cities built at the end of last century or the beginning of this, find that their structures, the water pipes, the electrical systems, the sewage systems, the bridges across rivers – and this is a land of several thousand rivers – are rotting, or not very far from collapse. The environment goes on being despoiled, in spite of the brave enforcement of new laws. The banking system of the United States is wobbly. And many people in it believe only firm, visible involvement of the president can restore confidence in it.

I know that many, if not all of these problems are familiar to you, particularly to you in the older European countries. But in America which boasted for so long at having things bigger and better, the crime rate, the drug addiction, the semi-literacy, the government's deficit, are unhappily bigger and worse.

I think if you no more than scan the headlines in Britain, France, Germany, certainly in Eastern Europe, you'd find that the political leaders spend at least half their time in front of their legislative bodies arguing, pleading, debating about these domestic ills. Not in America. Some say that Mr Bush has never been much interested in domestic affairs. Whether that's true or not, it can be convincingly proved that his whole political life has been a training in foreign policy.

Now, of course, the president is not a member of the legislature. He lives and he has his political being as a man, an institution apart. But the Congress debates almost nothing else since the voters dumped the rotted fruit of these issues on the doorstep of Congress. The popular wailings and the anger are heard first by the mayors of the towns and cities, then by the governors of the states, but always, all the time, by the people's representatives in Congress.

Now the Congress is run and has been run for more than 50 years by a majority of Democrats. Somehow the people feel that as distinct from voting in a Republican president or a Democratic president, when it comes to Congress, when it comes to the home ground, the bread and butter and mortgage payments in your own neck of the woods, a great majority trusts the Democrats and keeps sending them back, more than 90 per cent of incumbents, back to Washington.

Mr Bush could say that there's not much he can do to pursue his own domestic policies against such a heavy majority. But he has restraining powers, powers of defiance. He can keep on vetoing domestic bills he doesn't like, and he's been doing it. But when the country is in crisis, either of foreign or domestic origin, it is the president and no one else who can rouse and lead the nation. To put it mildly, in domestic affairs, Mr Bush has not been doing this.

He could rightly claim that since he came into the White House in January of 1989, the whole post-war world has undergone a revolutionary upheaval that none of us dreamed possible, even in the last days of Ronald Reagan. And that since America is now the only super power, no nation has a more urgent duty to help the breakaway republics, to assist the pacifying, the survival of famished Africans, to try and pave the way towards at least the prospect of peace in the Middle East.

But now the Democrats are saying – or saying that they are echoing the majority of the people – that millions of Americans need desperate help here at home, and that George Bush is doing nothing about them.

The Democrats problem is that since the rise and triumph of Franklin Roosevelt's new deal, for 50 years they prospered with the Roosevelt formula: soak the rich, tax and spend, tax and spend! Ronald Reagan made taxes a dirty word. At best, no word on which to run a presidential campaign. The Democrats are scared to use it, and taxing to pay for public needs and social services is the only cause they know. So they have no leader. Because they have no cause.

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