Al Gore's Chinese aeroplane deal - 4 April 1997

The announcement that 1 May is the date may not have sent a shockwave through Washington, but the approach of a British national election has already provoked pieces on the way the British parliamentary system works and a fair amount of editorial comment.

Most of which reassures Americans that, in any result, there will be no return to the old, blue-collar, union-dominated, class warfare socialism of Kier Hardie. Or, for that matter, of Aneurin Bevan and Clement Attlee. Surely the American leader writer is correct who commented "the Conservatives appear caught in a paradox. They have so transformed the terms of political debate that Labour now competes with them on proposals for privatisation, welfare reform and tougher law enforcement". Incidentally, you could substitute the word Republican for Conservative and Democrat for Labour and you'd be describing pretty accurately the same paradox in American political debate.

The rush to occupy the political centre seems to be an international urge. I've often wondered, since this flight from the Left and the Right has been going on, whether it will go on for ever. Some of us watch, with fascinated anxiety, Russia. A huge country, at the moment in turmoil, with massive unemployment, most people months' behind with their pay cheques. The dubious gift from democracy of a flourishing mafia, and the vast army, impoverished, officers homeless, millions of weapons outdated.

A correspondent just back from years there was saying the other evening that although the polls are encouraging about the people's wish to keep on plugging away at the democratic experiment, he sensed a great yearning hunger for somebody to take hold, to reinstate some recognisable order. Not having had, ever, any experience of democracy, Russians cannot expect to have the luxury of debating what kind of centre politics would be effective. The subdued, but surging, cry is for discipline. And, of course, many of the old and middle-aged say yes, even at the price of a return to Communism. The name Lebed is chanted by wistful millions.

Well, now, there's one feature of British election campaigns that Americans greatly envy and one they shudder from thinking to copy. The envied practice is a three-week campaign instead of, as here, a one-year – effectively a two-year – campaign.

The other feature, which has been brought up by several listeners who heard my talk on the campaign financing scandal, is free television time for each party, a practice which, if it was adopted by the Republicans and the Democrats would avert at a stroke the need to raise millions to run for Congress, say 70, 80 million dollars if you're running for president. All Americans who are interested in government admit that it is a rotten system, that it demeans every candidate who's forced to practise it and that it is a seed bed of corruption.

"So why don't you", asks the visiting Englishman, "Simply give each party an hour or two free on the telly, as we do?" Believe me, the question has been asked and swiftly repulsed ever since the invention of the cathode tube. The answer is swift and true. Americans are elected, or fail to be elected, by television more than by anything else.

Most of the campaign money raised for a candidate, for anything, used to go to renting meeting halls, speech releases, travel fares, printed banners, portrait blow-ups, balloons, campaign buttons, even something I've just taken out of my desk drawer, would you believe it – a teaspoon, silver-plated. The handle has an embossed decorative American eagle flying over an embossed and remarkably accurate portrait of the Democrats' 1912 candidate, Woodrow Wilson. I'm pretty sure they don't manufacture campaign spoons any more, that must have been a tidy campaign item.

But I should say that today probably 80% more of a candidate's raised money goes for television. Consider, most cities in America have at least 50 television channels, most of them national. A candidate tries to get his message on as many as possible. And as the campaign goes along, the message has to get shorter and neater and snappier and, if it's vivid, nastier. Tap a small group, a dinner party of responsible Americans, and ask them what do they remember most vividly of, say, Mr Bush's campaign in 1988?

I do believe most of them would instantly recall a brief image, they would now be ashamed to admit, had the most powerful effect on millions of voters. It was of a black man coming through a revolving door and going out on to the streets. This was the Republicans' snapshot view of a practice Mr Bush was accusing Governor Dukakis of Massachusetts, the Democrats' candidate, of being dangerously addicted to. In fact, many states had the same law which allowed long-serving convicts of proved good behaviour to go out on a weekend pass, and rape again. Repeating this terrifying 30-second message overwhelmed and drowned the Democratic vote in many states.

Nobody I've talked to sees the faintest possibility that either party will give up the precious, if unsavoury, blessing of a memorable 30-second, 10-second, television image. Mr Clinton and his shining bridge to the 21st Century illustrated, if need be (in case you didn't know what a bridge looks like), stamped on the imagination, thousands of times, must have done more than speeches, to make Mr. Clinton sound like the man of the future.

We talked, a week or two ago, about how the financing of Mr Clinton's last campaign had struck a new and embarrassing note when it was alleged that Chinese Americans, friends of Mr Clinton, had tapped American corporations in China and may have actually involved the Chinese government in financing Mr. Clinton's election. All this has been gone into by a Senate investigation but, true or not, it's had a messy, altogether devastating effect on American policy towards Communist China.

Indeed, responsible men and women in the Congress or in one of the media agree that the administration doesn't seem to have a China policy. It's not just because of the unfortunate intrusion of a money scandal that the administration is seen teetering, circling round the China problem, wondering whether this huge, now flourishing and powerful military country is a juicy foreign market or a time bomb.

The truth is that the United States is caught in a dilemma which has bothered American policy toward foreign nations for most of this century. Some of you, I hope, will recall a talk I did about a year ago, which was prompted by a new book written by President Nixon's former Secretary of State, Mr Henry Kissinger. He has a persuasive theory to explain what to Europeans often looked like timidity, or double dealing, that for just about this century American diplomacy has had two dominant strains: the idealism of Woodrow Wilson, the pragmatism of Theodore Roosevelt.

Put it more bluntly and say that ever since President Wilson, the founding father, don't forget, of the League of Nations, every American administration, Democrat or Republican, has professed anyway to have a double mission to stimulate free trade around the world and to encourage democracy everywhere. In many times and places, this is an impossible demand.

Most democratic nations do not refuse to trade with productive countries that are ruled by a dictator. America's problem is double-edged. It wants more than anybody to be in on, indeed to dominate, the global market. But it cannot stifle its Wilsonian conscience when it comes to looking at a totalitarian country, especially after the bloody history of the Soviet Union, a Communist country.

Just last week, the Vice President of the United States went to China and came back. Mr Gore went over to bless the signing of very big deals with two American giants of big business. It was noticeable in all the television newsreels that Mr Gore was a very uncomfortable man. His is the old liberal party, sworn to doom dictatorships and encourage rebellious Democrats. Until lately, it was the party that had been most open in its condemnation of Dr Li, known here as the Butcher of Beijing, and China's continuing imprisonment of dissenting opinion, its use of slave labour, torture, total repression of free speech, independent unions and so on.

In other nations, other liberals don't like these things to be mentioned. The liberal view of China in Europe has replaced the 1930s and certainly '40s view of Stalin as a, yes, a ruthless leader, but at bottom a stern, progressive school headmaster. It's only in the past 20, less, years, that we, of that time, have realised our almost criminal wilfulness in not believing in Stalin's monstrous crimes, the 20 millions or more of his own people who were liquidated in the great cause. That is to say, murdered.

So now there's a curious situation with respect to America's dealing with China. There's a split in both parties between devotion to $2 billion worth of business with China and condemnation of the existing tyranny. It's now conservatives who tend to stress China's suppression of human rights. It's now a Democratic administration that's anxious to do the big deal and gloss over China's sins against human liberty. Mr Gore said he thought things on that front had greatly improved in China. He was plainly embarrassed to say it.

And who should pop into China and uphold the Wilsonian ideal? Who was the man who faced Dr Li and told him that the memory of Tiananmen Square had not faded, that America wished to be an active trading partner with China but only when basic freedoms, I quote, "speech, religion, assembly, the press" were established.

Just to confuse the picture of party ideology, who was this brave one? The Republican Speaker of the House, Newt Gingrich.

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.