President Bush and Winston Churchill - 6 September 1991

By now, I should think that just about every correspondent, every commentator on American affairs has picked up the theme that President Bush, considered as a politician, is the luckiest president to come along in some time. For the past eight months or so his opponents, the Democrats, have been about to mount a great campaign about the growing turmoil of American life: the banking and building society scandals, the shambles of the cities under the assault of crime and drugs, the really dreadful prospect for the next generation of American professionals that opens up from the latest survey of American schoolchildren and college graduates – in one national test 80 per cent of high school graduates could not read an instruction sheet or compose a sentence with more than one subsidiary clause, they were mercilessly dubbed as functionally illiterate. Homelessness, and so on and so on.

Neither the Democrats nor any other party, needs to invent disturbing issues on which to contest the next election. But just when, as in January, the Congress assembles to begin its new session and the Democrats hold meetings to map out their big 1992 campaign against the forces of President Bush, Saddam Hussein appears on the horizon thumbing his nose and President Bush turns into general Bush, the commander in chief of the armed forces. He manages to do something no president has done in the 45 years of the United Nations' existence: to get through the Security Council a unanimous resolution sanctioning military action against an aggressor. And then into battle, and the whirlwind left hook or football feint of General Norman Schwarzkopf, and in the din of the halleluiahs the president, commander Bush, goes soaring up to an unreal 78 per cent approval in the polls. And the Democrats, even those who voted against war and in favour of United Nations' sanctions alone, they have to stand on the edge of the cheering crowd clapping too. It was no time to say Mr Bush had been wrong or sanctions would have done it. They are, by the way, still not doing it.

So the spring arrives, and the telly and the papers begin to resound with more outrageous details about the savings and loan, the thrifts' scam. Two, three Democrats announce they're running for president, and the party begins its summer chant: George Bush may be very smart at foreign policy but what about the shame of the homeland? Their well-rehearsed indignation is seen to be justified by the enormous scandal of the Bank of Credit and Commerce International, but that turns out to be a very accomplished international fraud cheating 61 countries.

In this country, the only big public figure whose stature was diminished was a man who did not know that the BCCI had run his bank, the bank of which he was president, for eight or nine years. He would have been a fine Republican for the Democrats to pick on. Unfortunately he was not only a Democrat but a towering figure of a Democrat, intimate of and wise advisor to Truman and Johnson, the Democrats' elder statesman in fact, so BCCI didn't give the Democrats any ammunition at all.

By now Congress was off on its summer holiday and nobody in the Democratic Party seemed alarmed that the national election was only 15 months away and they hadn't a serious candidate in sight. By the way, those first two candidates changed their minds and retired. Comes the middle of August, the news magazines start, or continue to step up the pace and the size of their articles on the cities. An old manufacturing city in Connecticut announces that it's going to file for bankruptcy. And the mayor of Chicago, the great second city of America, the mayor of Chicago, no less, surmises half seriously that perhaps for all the cities bankruptcy is the best way to go. The national chairman of the Democrats at this point was surely rubbing his hands.

Two other Democrats hint they are about to come out into the open and into the fray. But they duck back very rapidly and the Democrats recoil in despair, when they wake up on that famous morning of Monday 19th August: Mikhail Gorbachev is under house arrest and the coup and the dictatorship, that the former foreign secretary, Eduard Shevardnadze had warned about, seemed to have arrived. On that day and for many many days thereafter, I don't suppose there was a Democrat senator, congressman, governor or mayor who would have dared utter a peep in criticism of Mr Bush.

Once again, any inclination he had to turn to what they interminably call "the domestic agenda" was cancelled at once by yet another foreign crisis. But this one could be described by even the most temperate onlooker as an unprecedented crisis in world history. And once again it's agreed all round that President Bush acted with quite extraordinary care, knowledge and alertness, and never has to have advisors or press secretaries – as always with President Reagan – rushing on stage after a press conference or an impromptu speech to explain, that the president didn't really mean what he said, might actually have meant the opposite.

To make a rather large comparison, I mean a comparison with a very large figure, Mr Bush enjoys foreign affairs and world crises every bit as much as Winston Churchill did. And he is similarly bored, not bored but unexcited by the domestic front. But the belief that he's no good on domestic affairs and that the republic is likely to go to pot if he stays in the White House, though it's the Democrats big line, it is not widespread. Here again the polls are pretty disheartening to the Democrats. On the question of which party can best take care of the domestic ills, the country's about evenly split. But if the question is put another way: which party is likely to bring prosperity to America? The Republicans win again. And now to wind up most political polls, the question is put – the question with which New York's former Mayor Koch used to greet the dawn and all passing strangers, "How'm I doing?" – how do you think the president is handling his job? The answer is a thundering, very well, from 74 per cent of the people.

So why not, the current joke goes, skip the 1992 election or save money on the conventions by having the Democrats put up a sporting resolution and declare Mr Bush president by acclamation.

Well this view of things has been running for too many months along the smooth grooves of conventional wisdom. Now in the papers and magazines, various historians and even ordinary letter writing citizens are coming up with warnings, reminders, and historical analogies. Here are two of them. Political thinkers say George Bush will be invincible in the next election because of his grasp of foreign policy. The man then goes on to deplore the handful, I mean by now say half a dozen of Democrats who declared their candidacies and have since withdrawn. That, says the man, shows an abdication of responsibility but also a lack of memory. He then recalls that Churchill who led the battle was defeated by the Labour Party almost as soon as Germany was defeated. That's it.

This Churchill analogy is now being quoted almost as often as Munich was mentioned every time the Reagan administration hesitated to bomb Libya or go into Grenada or stop helping the Nicaraguan Contras. The fact, which is not likely to be known to many Americans and is anyway now rather dreary to go into, is that by the spring of 1945 there was, by no means, a general feeling in Britain that the great warrior was going to win the national election. By election day he'd conducted a very tired and testy campaign, warnings of the Labour Party running a Gestapo, and whatnot.

A better and more persuasive analogy anyway for Americans is the American election in the pit of the Depression, November 1932. By now all popular and even unpopular histories concur in the version that with 13 million people out of work and President Hoover bewildered and helpless in the White House, Roosevelt was bound to win. It was not so. Roosevelt's little core of close advisors, what he called his brains trust, just wanted him to get the Democratic nomination in 1932 with the prospect of winning in '36. They knew that Hoover had kept his reputation for the tremendous job he did after the First World War in relieving famine and starvation in Europe. Moreover he had taken several steps, for which Roosevelt later got the credit, like setting up a federal guarantee for a person's bank deposits, like drafting a plan, later adopted, to police the Stock Exchange and the securities business. He also increased the taxes on the wealthy. Nobody remembers that today. Anyway, the point is that the Roosevelt campaign managers thoroughly expected Hoover to follow the example of all incumbents and to be re-elected.

Only about a month before the election, when the Depression deepened and the Democrats began to stress the popular name given to the shanty towns of Kansas and tin roofs that sprouted and housed miserably, the hundreds and hundreds of thousands of the homeless, they were known as "Hoovervilles". Only then did it occur to the Roosevelt camp that they might win. They won. In a landslide.

My own feeling is that the theory of Mr Bush's invulnerability is too strong and too pat. It doesn't allow for any extraordinary movement, crisis on the home ground, the domestic front. Anyway Mr Bush is planning to go this fall, in winter, into 30 states and talk about nothing but the sickness of the society and the cures he's offered. A crime bill, a drug bill, an education bill which, he will say correctly, the democratically controlled Congress rejected. It may be shown that these were not very adequate bills.

But the bogey that haunts me and may come to petrify the present conventional wisdom, is some huge, protesting outburst, populist riots throughout the country, to demonstrate at last that crime, drugs, poverty, illiteracy, are not just political issues on a list, but cancers, eating away at the daily life of Americans.

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