SHARED OPINION
There is really no need to be beastly to Mr Bush or Mr Prescott
FRANK JOHNSON
Governor Bush said, amid the uncer- tainty early this week, 'It's an interesting period, where we're all in limbo.' This was disappointing for collectors of those Bushisms that so enlivened and confused his speeches during the campaign. True to them, what he should have said was some- thing like 'we're all in libido'.
If he becomes president, Bushisms could be an important part of his presidency. If Mr Bush is exceptionally unlucky, they like the misfortunes associated with Vice- President Quayle — will become that with which he is most associated. Unless his presidency has compensating qualities, it would doom him, as it doomed Mr Quayle. But what should we truly think about them? In a way, what we truly think will be irrelevant. As with most things about poli- tics and government, what we think about a Bush presidency will be decided by parti- sanship; that is, by partisans convincing the non-partisan majority among voters in the United States and the citizenry of other countries, including our own.
All candidates and office-holders have failings. Those failings are then described as unimportant by their partisans. Vice- President Gore was generally assumed to be charmless, dull, a know-all and over- bearing. None of that matters, said his par- tisans; what matter are a candidate's beliefs and abilities. Mr Gore had the correct beliefs and was abler than Mr Bush.
Mr Bush was generally assumed to be an amiable slacker, who would never have become governor of Texas had it not been for 'name recognition' derived from his father, and who was none too bright. None of that matters, said his partisans; what matters is his ability to pick good people. In picking Mr Cheney for vice-president, and Mr Powell for secretary of state, he has already shown that ability. His very lack of detail is an asset. Mr Gore is full of detail and will thus try to run everything: be his own national security adviser, his own secretary of state.
Had the Democrat been the slacker and the Republican the industrious bore, we can be certain that Democrat and Republi- can partisans would have argued the other way round. That is politics. More particu- larly, that is partisanship. Partisanship seems to be in the natures of those of us who are gripped by politics; a minority in any Anglo-Saxon polity, admittedly, but an important one, since even apolitical Anglo- Saxon polities have to be governed by something or someone.
Thus we Conservatives had to explain away President Reagan's idleness and cavalier way with a detail. They did not matter, we said. What mattered was whether he was right about the big things; and he was, by which we meant that we agreed with him about the big things. Likewise, President Clinton's parti- sans had to argue that it did not matter what a president got up to in the Oval Office when he was not using the premises for gover- nance. What mattered was what he got up to there when government was on his mind rather than Miss Lewinsky on his . . . but I will abandon that subject there, the requisite imagery being best left to my able colleague in such matters, Mr Mark Steyn.
I have rather departed from my original purpose in mentioning Mr Bush's difficulties with words. That purpose was to argue that it would be best if mentioning them were soon regarded, as Americans say, as off-limits. This is not necessarily out of partisanship or because I have a soft spot for Mr Bush, though I do. (I think that he is more like Mr Reagan than he is like his father, in that he has charm and gives off an air of not knowing most of what is going on, but of knowing whether what is going on is at all important.) It is because it may soon become too easy to discuss a president solely, or mainly, in terms of Bushisms, just as it soon became too easy to discuss Mr Reagan solely in terms of his long hours abed.
It is a question of the ethics of journalism or, better still, of war. It is also because I am haunted by my conscience in this mat- ter. In writing from the Labour conference for the Daily Telegraph this autumn, I mocked Mr Prescott's syntax. Or rather, I tried to. Whether I succeeded is a matter for others to decide. I can imagine many people thinking that it was an unsuccessful mock, and that the only person deserving of mockery in the matter was myself.
I now realise that Mr Prescott's syntax is a soft target. Mockery of it requires no `Hey, great cheekbones.' bravery or personal risk. At the Labour conference in Bournemouth, it was the equivalent of Nato's bombing during the Kosovo hostilities of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade, or of a school or hospital. Mr Prescott's conference speech was a civilian target. Within the speech's maze of sen- tences, there were — so to speak — women and children; or perhaps innocent diplo- mats, or at least an innocent security guard or nightwatchman.
When conscience struck me, I confess that I considered claiming that Mr Prescott's speech was bombed in error. I was using an out-of-date street map. Or I could have claimed that, within those sentences, Mr Prescott was concealing weapons to use against Tories and the middle classes, partic- ularly those with access to unearned income. He is, after all, a class warrior. But no; the court at The Hague would undoubtedly rule that the syntax was harmless.
But I regret that, later this autumn, I was party to another incident. My forces partici- pated in a mass parliamentary sketchwriters' raid on the Scottish accent of the new Speaker, Mr Michael Martin. In mitigation, I could argue that I was not the worst. In fact, I was the least aggressive. In this opera- tion I was, so to speak, the Italians. Mr Hog- gart, in the Guardian, carpet-bombed that accent. Mr Parris, in the Times, was quite aggressive. Mr Carr, in the Independent, was ferocious. Mr Letts, in the Mail, called the new Speaker `Gorbals Mick', an undoubted war crime which could justify his extradition to face a Scottish court sitting on neutral soil. I tried to be affectionate about it, for I strongly believe in the Union. I would do nothing to encourage Scottish separatism; I dislike English nationalism. I would support the Union, even if it meant a permanent Labour majority at Westminster.
Nonetheless, however half-heartedly, I took part in the raid. All I can say is that journalism is hell: terrible things happen in it. What I intended to hit was the means by which the Speaker was elected. Mr Martin's accent was collateral damage. The most important point, however, is that to dwell on Mr Bush's slips of the tongue, Mr Prescott's grammar and Mr Martin's com- mand of Glaswegian is simply to join the mob. Everybody else is doing it. None of it is relevant to their fitness to hold office. Indeed, as Mr Bush would say, they are completely irreverent to it.
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