Trouble with the English Language - 15 September 2000

We're now at a certain time of the year in the northeast - which takes in anywhere from the coast of New Jersey, up through New York and New England to the rockiest outcrop of the state of Maine.

It's a time when two strangers, sitting together on a plane, a bus, would be as likely as not to break the ice by saying something like: "Any further news about Florence?" or Gordon or Helene or whichever hurricane is brewing in the Caribbean, and could be a threat to us.

In the spring the hurricane centre at Miami, after labouring all winter over its crystal ball - or the meteorological equivalents - announced to the inhabitants of the northeastern coast that this was likely to be one of the worst hurricane seasons. More of them than usual, of much severity.

The season is usually August and September. I'm happy to say that, so far, their prophesy has not held - the Caribbean islands have taken small beatings, not disastrous, nothing like last September's Floyd which ravaged the Bahamas and flooded and trashed the coastal towns of New Jersey.

So it turns out we had nothing to fear from Alberto, Beryl, Chris, Debby and Ernesto. Florence, as I speak, could be headed our way.

Some of you may remember the good old days, the good old macho days, when hurricanes were traditionally given female names.

All that changed through the gallant efforts of such as Gloria Steinem, Betty Friedan and - I don't believe Germaine Greer was in on the reform movement, for the simple reason she wasn't living here and was therefore not threatened - but it was the feminists who triumphed in compelling the government meteorologists to christen hurricanes henceforth with alternating female and male names.

But you'll notice, also, from this year's listing that another group has effectively made its voice heard: the Latinos or Hispanics.

And why not? By the end of next year the most populous state in the nation - California - for the first time will have more than 50% of its 30 millions non-white. Thus the majority of the population will be Latino, black, Asian.

So this year's hurricanes started with Alberto and from now on go through Florence and Gordon, Isaac comes in and - a brief concession to us Wasps - Keith and Michael, and then on through Nadine, Rafael, Valerie, back to good old William and ending - though we never get so far in the alphabet - with Yolanda and one that surely wherever it makes landfall will be forever memorable: Zeke.

This promised hurricane season is taking place also, you may have heard, in a presidential election year. And if there's one other question more than another that a stranger is likely to greet you with it's: "What do you think is going to happen?"

Which in my experience might as well be: "Who are you for? Gore or Bush." Because most people, I find, love the role of prophet and adopting a tone of earnest objectivity predict what they want to happen.

In shorter words: I haven't yet met any number of people who predict that their man is going to lose, in spite of 50-odd years of statistical polls, whose record of near accuracy is extremely high - not forgetting a famous blip or two.

Politicians, of course, hate the polls and just now it's Governor Bush's camp that's saying: "We're not running for the polls we're running for the presidency."

An impressive sentence which means nothing whatsoever, for an obvious reason - the polls tell better than any individual how people are feeling.

But for centuries that's been the politicians' prerogative - the American people are tired of this and that, the British people are hungry for a change. In truth maybe they are neither tired nor hungry.

During the Second World War there was a bad stretch when the Nazis were sinking our ships like ducks in a pond but the prime minister, while never shrinking to give out the bad news, yet gave his assurance that the British people were united in their trust of his running of the war.

A Gallup poll just then showed it was not so and an opposition member shouted that the prime minister was ignorant of public opinion, that he ought to keep his ear more to the ground.

Which typically gave Churchill his effective escape hatch. One thing, he said, he did know about the British people: they would find it very hard to look up to a leader who was detected in that somewhat ungainly posture.

The laughter drowned out the opponent but not the poll or the warning of its truth.

Well there appeared, this week, the first national opinion polls after the true beginning of the campaign which always starts with Labor Day - the first Monday in September.

There's an historical trend which says that no presidential candidate who is ahead in the polls in early September has ever lost the election. This was great news for Vice President Gore and the Democrats since, at the moment, in all three polls Mr Gore, for the first time, is leading and by not less than seven percentage points.

The Bush's response to historical trends is to say they're made to be broken. True enough.

Indeed if they'd been on their toes they'd have recalled one of the timeless maxims of presidential politics. Until the middle 1930s, so far as human memory could recall, there was only one thing sure about the results of a presidential election: the small New England state of Maine always picked the winner. And this floated the maxim "As Maine goes so goes the Nation".

In 1936 Roosevelt took 46 states against his opponent's two - Maine and Vermont - leading Roosevelt's campaign manager to proclaim: "As Maine goes so goes Vermont."

The reaction of the media gurus to the sudden reversal of Governor Bush's seemingly triumphal ride to the White House has been to question what went wrong with the governor's technique - with his message, with his television commercials.

Most say that his talk is too abstract. He doesn't respond to Vice President Gore's impressive detail on any subject - education, medical insurance, social security, you name it.

Before these polls, when Governor Bush was ahead, the media wiseacres said the trouble with Mr Gore was that he was boring people with all those details - that he ought to practise with a broader brush, to be bold, to chant simple slogans like Governor Bush. Also that Mr Gore was such a bad actor he looked like somebody trying to run for president.

Now we hear from the same gurus that Mr Gore is running a campaign which is: "Thoughtful, focused, with positive goals always in mind." What do you know.

Every serious commentator I've heard steers clear of the thing that sticks out a mile to the ordinary listener and viewer and which has become a precious gift to the nightly stand-up comedians: Governor Bush's awful difficulty with the English language.

When, a month or more ago, he said: "I won't be presumptive enough to say ..." everybody chuckled and forgave him, after all everybody can make a slip.

But then he found something or somebody "preverse" - English "perverse". Last week he didn't want either the United States or her allies to be held hostage to anybody but he said twice "held hostile".

So while the pundits are busy lamenting Governor Bush's advertising technique he goes on fracturing the language.

To Mr Gore's slogan: "We represent the people, they represent the powerful" the governor retorts that the vice president is encouraging class warfare.

Unfortunately Governor Bush can't pronounce class warfare, he calls it class war-fore.

And only a night or two ago the Democrats discovered the word rat - R A T - slipped in a fraction of a second into a Bush television commercial.

This is called subliminal advertising. But not by Governor Bush, he denounced it as "subliminable" - he tried twice more and he gave up. Sorry about it anyway.

The comics have had great fun in pointing out that Governor Bush wants to be known as the education president.

There's a subsidiary poll which may have a lot or nothing to do with the presidential case but it shows that Senator Lieberman - Mr Gore's running mate - has doubled his popularity since the conventions and Governor Bush's man - Mr Dick Cheney - has slumped to a half of his.

No wonder: Mr Cheney campaigns in the language of the Stock Market. He accused Mr Gore of being "ignorant of global options", an unfortunate choice of noun coming from one who spent a month juggling stock options instead of doing what every previous appointee does in 24 hours - putting all his stocks and shares into a blind trust for the duration of his service.

In the meantime it was revealed that Mr Cheney, busy now urging us all to vote Republican, had not voted at all himself in 14 of the past 16 elections. He was, he explained, too busy travelling on business.

"The oil business that is," a newspaper reporter echoed. One man asked him if he'd ever heard of an absentee ballot.

Now surely these things count though the staffs of both candidates stay with their obsession with the man's television image.

"This is not a personality contest," declared Governor Bush the other day.

Is it not? Surely the mass of voters of every class don't sit down and weigh and balance issues, they plump, very soon, for the character they take to.

I had an old friend who had been an election watcher for close to 70 years, a man well grounded in the political issues of half a century but a man with Mark Twain's waggish touch.

He told me at the end: "I honestly think most people vote because they like this guy's eyes and don't like the way the other guy does his hair."

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