George H W's popularity in 1991 - 29 November 1991

Last week's talk had no sooner gone out than I was already cringing at the thought of a whole sack-full of incoming, protesting mail. It's a little early yet, but I'm braced for it. I expect to hear from the mathematicians any minute.

This is what happened. I was talking about the election for governor in Louisiana or rather about two elections. First a primary election between three candidates and then on 16 November, the final, the run-off between the top two. If I recite over again the offending sentence, I shall only confuse you further. Suffice it to say, I hope, that in adding up the percentage of the vote won by each of the three, I came up with a total of 127%. By skipping a single sentence, I had neatly and fatally transferred the figure 61% from the final winner to his vote in the primary.

Anyway, the true final score on 16 November was for the former governor and present playboy, Mr Edwards, Democrat, 61%. For Mr David Duke, former Nazi and Ku Klux Klan leader, running as a Republican, 39%. That I believe accounts for 100% of the vote. I doubt if even in the heyday of Huey Long, the populist dictator, Louisiana could have faked the votes for Huey to make the whole add up to 127%. Not in Louisiana. Cook County, Illinois, which embraces Chicago, yes, possible at any time. During the long reign of Chicago's Mayor Richard Daley. In his time and most of his time, the huge Chicago vote would dependably weigh in favour of the Democrats, while the Republicans fumed and swore, often correctly, that in a close election, the Democratic edge had been secured by what they called the graveyard vote. Most of the tombstones in Chicago cemeteries, it has been said, recorded the names of Democrats.

I, I well remember in 1960, being out there the weekend after the presidential election and seeing a list of the city returns. There was one tiny election district which showed 80 votes for Kennedy and two votes for Nixon. I found that fascinating because I just happened to know that district. It lay on a rundown edge of town, where there was a small dingy nightclub that had a couple of marvellous jazzmen. Anyway the districts comprehended a vacant lot, waste ground, what in Lancashire they call a croft, with one petrol station adjoining two three-storey houses, which I figured could have housed at most, say 12 adults, 12 qualified voters. At a party that evening I ran into a venerable Chicago politician, an old white-haired sparrow of a man, a judge, so-called, Judge, I said, how come a district with no more than a dozen or so voters could come up with 80 votes for Kennedy and 2 for Nixon? He looked at me in mild disbelief and heaved a tolerant sigh. It's very simple, he said, if there had been 82 votes, there would have been 80 for Kennedy and two for Nixon.

It was that famous 1960 election, of which the late Theodore White wrote that the people, the little people rose up and went for Kennedy. If so, the people didn't rise up with much vigour. Kennedy won by a whisker of a majority, just over 100,000 votes in 68 million. The Nixon people swore that Kennedy had won by fiddling the vote, copying the tombstone names in a couple of states, most outrageously in Cook County, Illinois. When Kennedy heard of it, he said with a chuckle, so, look what they did to us in Ohio. Such memories, such stories are beginning to be recalled fondly these days, for finally, after the longest span of freedom from campaign cant that I can remember, finally the presidential campaign is on and it has not grown on us but it's bust in like a burglar, throwing the White House most noticeably into confusion and dismay. Why?

Because, in the space of three weeks, public pessimism about the economy has gone up 10% and popular approval of Mr Bush has gone down 15%. Today, three Americans in four don't approve of the way he's handling the economy, a lapse in confidence in his presidency that hasn't been equalled since the worst days of the late 1970s, when inflation was around 11-12% and Jimmy Carter, remember, was in the White House.

This is such a violent reversal of the public mood of midsummer, of even the early fall, that it has thrown more significantly than the president, thrown his party into shock. Listen to this: President Bush is dangerously out of touch with the American public. Instead of listening to the elected people in his party, who are most in touch with the average voter, he remains cloistered with aides who avoid action and favour blaming others for the nation's economic and their boss's political woes.

Now that was not written by a pundit, a journalist, a Democrat but by a Republican congressman from Texas, the senior Republican, in fact, on a powerful committee that harmonises House and Senate bills on economic matters. And it is true that until now, President Bush has played two notes: one, don't worry about the recession, it's not serious, it will end by the spring; and, two, our failure to do something serious and good about crime, poverty, the economy, unemployment, is due to the do-nothing Democrat-controlled Congress. That was Harry Truman's strategy and his line in 1948. Somebody I suspect, has put the president on to it. The consensus or a range of Washington observers is that it won't work.

Incidentally, possibly the worst figure that Mr Bush has to confront, when he warms his toes at the Camp David fire these weekends, is a frightening one: 39% of all registered voters say that they would probably vote now for Mr Bush; 37% say they'd probably vote for the Democratic candidate, whoever he may be, just at the moment, a faceless Democrat. As the very eloquent Jack Kerouac used to say, wow.

Well, by way of temporary relief, Congress is breaking up, in the British schoolboy sense and going home to the grass roots, in the American sense. Looking over the most recent record of this Congress, not the most contentious things they've talked and voted on, but to me the most typical of our time. A big wrangle with the president over extending the period for receiving unemployment benefits. A proposal to join the European Community in giving money or huge credits to the Soviet Union, whatever that is. A bill to prohibit cigarette advertising in sports stadiums. A warning from some patriots of the incoming threat of Japanese high technology, which is theoretically prohibited. A protest in the House about the importation of what conservatives call the slave labour, that's prison camp timber products from Communist China. And, of course, always thumping away there like a heartbeat, the deficit.

One blessing for a journalist, of having the Congress wind up its session, is that you don't have to feel guilty when you take a rest from reading about government and politics and turn to a Dick Francis novel or say, a poker game. When I was a, a literal journalist, writing a despatch every day, I set myself a habit of no work in the evenings, short of an assassination or a political party convention and began to choose bed books as far removed as possible from the goings on in Washington. I've kept to this habit ever since.

For several years my bed book was the diary of, I think, the greatest of all diarists in English, the late, but in his diary vibrantly, outrageously alive, James Agate. The work is in nine volumes. By the time I got through the ninth volume, the first was sufficiently forgettable or forgotten, then I went back and started the whole series all over again, several times. However, in time, even turning three thousand pages, I began to know what was coming and just now I'm ploughing through bound volumes of Punch, for my youthful days when I saw it all the time, because I was a tremendous fan, still am, of cartoonists and through the '20s and early '30s, Punch had a stable of them, larger, more various and more brilliantly accomplished than anything that has been remotely seen in Britain since. But of course there was a text and some of the light, funny pieces, very light, not very funny, are interesting as period pieces, going on especially about the dreadful Americanising of everything. The language of course, bobbed hair started it, plus fours, the Charleston, women's dresses, the dreaded but seductive cocktail and, as always, the general cheek of the young. And then there were A P Herbert's parodies of court cases. Trial reports called Misleading Cases. I wish somebody would reprint them.

Well, I'm still hefting one or other of these six-month volumes into bed. They have the added value of wearing you out after a while and causing you to collapse into sleep. But the other evening I found myself back at the old grind. I was reading a report of a debate in, for a change, Parliament, and these were the burning, or at least simmering issues. A bill to extend the period for receiving unemployment insurance. A proposal for a European customs union as a first step towards the idea, strongly resented by some members, of a United States of Europe. A bill to prohibit liquor advertising. A warning from some patriots of the incoming threat of Japanese textiles. A protest debate against the importation of what conservatives called, slave produced, that is prison camp, timber from the Soviet Union. And always tolling away there, week in, week out, were lamentations about the deficit. Why had I deserted my soothing draughts of Punch? I hadn't. These were the topics of debate in the weekly political reports entitled Essence of Parliament in Punch, January to June 1931. The more it changes...

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