Congressional midterms 1998 - 30 October 1998

With John Glenn safely launched and Milosevic appearing to having stopped playing the game he learned from Saddam Hussein (which might well be marketed for home entertainment under the trade name Defiance), there are two conspicuous concerns that came bulking into our consciousness this week.

The first is not so much the fact of the Middle Eastern so-called agreement or the frailty of the terms, but the quite remarkable view of President Clinton, confidentially expressed when the nine days' meetings were over, by two negotiating parties, namely Mr Netanyahu and, entirely unsolicited, the ailing King Hussein. The second and more pressing question facing Americans next Tuesday, is the fate of Mr Clinton in the Congressional elections.

Now it's not, of course, a presidential election year and I'm not going to pretend that I can perform the devilishly clever trick of exciting an overseas audience in the complexities and niceties of the 435 elections for the House of Representatives. All I'll say now is don't forget that the House dissolves and an entirely new House is elected every two years, so every two years the pundits and the politicians try to convince the voters that their view of the issues is the correct one.

This year, to be frank, absolutely nobody, not even inside one party or the other, can agree on the domestic political issues that ought to be voted on. Everybody is agreed, in public or in secret, that the whole question of the president's impeachment will be decisive, or will have no effect at all. The Republican national committee, which is the central operating committee of the party has decided, only ten days before the election, to spend ten million dollars on new television commercials, all about – wait for it – Mr Clinton and Miss Lewinsky.

The Democrats, on the whole, are tickled pink. They came to believe, along with the majority of the country, that the Republicans committed a first-class blunder when they voted to play over on television Mr Clinton's testimony given in the White House to the distant, watching Grand Jury. The Republicans thought the consensus would be an overwhelming popular feeling that the president was revealed as a pathetic, barefaced liar, still wriggling through tiny loopholes in the language, to say that white isn't white or black, black and it all depends on how you define "is". But what happened was, that within the week of that sorrowful exposure, the percentage of Americans saying he ought not to be impeached, soared from 62 or 3% to over 75%. Apparently, to most people who saw it, the president was being mercilessly hounded and turned into a sympathetic figure.

Now, after a brisk argument inside the party, the Republicans have decided that more hounding is better. They believe their best, most wounding weapon to flourish before the voters is the now infamously wagging finger of Mr Clinton last January, the never-to-be-forgotten picture of him looking solemn and red-eyed and lying, slowly declaring he did not have that relationship.

Well, most people, Americans and non-Americans, by now have their own opinion. What I hope may interest you more than an opinion is a remarkable parallel in American history, which sets up an intriguing question. It's this: will the effect on the voters of President Clinton's sin, peccadillo, indiscretion, will it match or ignore the effect that a previous president's much more alarming sin, peccadillo, indiscretion, did have on the national vote and in a presidential election, when the news of that sin was released, only three months before the election? It's quite a story, stay tuned.

First though, I think it's only fair to Mr Clinton to quote the judgement I mentioned about Mr Clinton considered as a negotiator in the recent Maryland meetings on the Middle East. First, Mr Netanyahu. He noticed Mr Clinton's refusal to give up, even in the darkest hours and the most contentious times. "I mean", he said, "I mean he doesn't stop. He can maintain a tireless pace and nudge and prod and suggest, use a nimble and flexible mind, to explore the possibilities of all sides. It's a great gift."

A precious and unique one, and it served us well. We have no private quotable words of Mr Arafat, but his aides remarked afterwards that he was more impressed by the president's knowledge of all the issues and his fairness than he'd felt about any previous president. King Hussein, weak from his serious disease, might have been expected to rouse himself to lip service at best but he said, I believe for publication, that he had known every American president since Eisenhower, but none of them had matched Mr Clinton's dedication, clear-headedness, his focus and determination, tolerance and the patience of Job.

Those compliments are not likely to be distributed as electioneering pamphlets by the Republican national committee, but the flavour of them will pervade the columns of a lot of newspapers, even though we must admit that if you live in New York City you can't fail to recognise all the time that there's more popular interest, partisanship and fervour here about the future of Israel than probably in all the other cities of the United States put together, since, of the six million Jews in the United States, two million live in this city. Still, I don't doubt that Mr Clinton's performance will have strengthened in many people their wobbling belief in his promised determination to work all the harder at his public function after the unending attack on his private life.

Now for that striking analogy. The year is 1884, a presidential year. The two candidates are for the Democrats, the Governor of New York State, Grover Cleveland, a blunt, bulky man with no charisma, opposed by his own party machine, Tammany, in New York City, but admired throughout the state for his courage, his contempt for the party-machine politicians and his demonstrable honesty amidst a jungle of fraud and political trickery. Grover Cleveland, nevertheless, got the nomination at the Democratic convention.

He was opposed by James G Blaine, a New Englander from Maine, a brilliant speaker, skilful politician, a progressive Republican, in theory. He might have been nominated before 1884 but it came out that when he was Speaker of the House he'd been involved in the fraudulent sale of some railroad bonds. He never quite cleared his name but after eight years the scandal was forgotten. Not by the Democrats, it wasn't. Once Blaine was nominated in 1884, the Democrats lost no time dredging the political dirt for the old railroad scandal. Blaine denied all wrongdoing and the Democrats soon issued songs and slogans around the country, "John G, John G Blaine. The monumental liar from the state of Maine".

Now the balance of power, or party prejudice, around the country, had mainly to do with free trade (the Democrats) versus high tariffs (the Republicans). It was a very delicate balance and it became clear by the summer that the race would be a close one and then, in the heat of July, the Republicans struck pay dirt. Somebody dug back into the files of a small, forgotten newspaper and made the wonderful, the awful, discovery that just ten years ago, a lady described as a prepossessing widow, had delivered a son and announced, not from the rooftops, but to a lawyer, that the father was one Grover Cleveland.

This had never come out in the public press and in the election summer of 1884 it soon appeared. Why? The Republicans now hogged the headlines of the country: "Democrats' presidential candidate father of illegitimate child". Now, what would Cleveland do?

Grover Cleveland said at once, "That's right, I never hid it. I immediately made financial arrangements for the boy's upbringing. He went to his mother until she proved too unsuitable a mother and the boy was removed by court order to an orphanage, until I arranged for his adoption by a decent family. I have provided for him ever since".

Much later, a leading Republican said the timing of this scandal came too soon. If they'd waited till the week before the election, if only etc. Well the campaigning was loud and long and hot and heavy through the summer and when all the states' returns but one were in, Governor Cleveland had 183 electoral votes, Blaine 182. New York State in those days could be decisive, as today California, now the most populous state, can be decisive.

The last weekend before the election. Mr Blaine gave his last speech. It was at a quiet little gathering of Protestant ministers. Mr Blaine, by the way, was half-Irish, had a Catholic mother and was only a touch afraid that the Irishman who ran Tammany might carry the heavy New York City Irish vote.

At that private meeting there was unfortunately one reporter present. He heard a minister, one Reverend Burchard, say aloud, "We are Republicans and we don't propose to identify ourselves with the party (the Democrats) whose antecedents have been rum, Romanism and rebellion".

The reporter got it by heart. Next day it rattled the headlines of the newspapers. Whichever side local Irish had thought of voting on now, even ones who'd been singing the Republican chant "Ma, ma, where's my pa? Gone to the White House, ha, ha, ha." They began to chant in rage, "Rum, Romanism and rebellion".

The popular vote, throughout the nation, was just under 10,000,000. Cleveland won by a hair's breadth, 20,000. The Irish New Yorkers had tipped the scale. Asked later which issue lost the election, the reconstruction policy in the South, the high tariff, whatever, James G Blaine said "One asinine sentence by a preacher".

THIS TRANSCRIPT WAS TYPED FROM A RECORDING OF THE ORIGINAL BBC BROADCAST (© BBC) AND NOT COPIED FROM AN ORIGINAL SCRIPT. BECAUSE OF THE RISK OF MISHEARING, THE BBC CANNOT VOUCH FOR ITS COMPLETE ACCURACY.

Letter from America audio recordings of broadcasts ©BBC. Letter from America scripts © Cooke Americas, RLLP. All rights reserved.