Bush popularity ensures party sweeps to electoral gains
For more than 55 years the late broadcaster filed a weekly radio talk from the United States for the BBC.
Cooke once explained how in August 1974 he had to record one of these weekly radio talks in San Francisco. That was the week when, after months of media and congressional investigation into the Watergate scandal, President Nixon was under intense pressure to resign or face likely impeachment.
In those days there was no satellite technology so, when on the west coast of the United States, Cooke had to record his radio talk on a Wednesday so it could be flown to New York on Thursday in order to be flown on to London in time to be broadcast on Friday night.
The logistics of getting his recording to London meant that Cooke had to try and establish whether by Friday night Nixon would have resigned or whether he would brazen it out. Cooke rang a range of contacts in the White House, on Capital Hill and in American media and academic circles seeking to ascertain what Nixon would do. Unfortunately, the opinions he gathered were equally divided. As a result he had to draft his radio column carefully, watching tenses, not conceding anything about what would happen, but commenting instead on events which had occurred. He then conceived of the notion of ending the talk with the phrase “and the rest you know...”. He later described it as the best sentence he had ever written. Nixon resigned on the Friday afternoon.
Cooke’s predicament came to my mind, and to the mind of many columnists and sub-editors this week, as we prepared to write about Tuesday’s American Presidential election. Advances in technology now enable us to be more up-to-date than that which was available to Cooke in the 1970s.
However, on the basis of the exit polls prediction it appeared that even as the deadlines for today’s paper got closer we might not be in a position to be sure whether we should be writing about a Bush victory or a Kerry victory.
Thankfully, we have in fact been saved the need to apply Cooke-like ingenuity.
George W Bush’s tenure in the White House is going to last for another four years. Bush is likely to have a decisive victory in the electoral college. Unlike 2000, Bush has also won the popular vote, and by a significant margin of more than three and a half million votes. His power as president will be strengthened by this renewed mandate, and also by the fact that the Republicans have tightened their control of both houses of the United States Congress. His capacity to advance the Republican’s agenda is also strengthened by that fact that he is likely to get the opportunity to fill at least two, and possibly as many as four vacancies on the United States Supreme Court over the course of his second term.
One wonders what Alistair Cooke would have had to say about this election result? One suspects that Cooke would have at least avoided the trap that much of the European media fell into in the last couple of weeks. While the polls accurately predicted that the election would be close, most of the European media, because of their anti-Bush bias, ignored the fact that nearly all the pollsters predicting the election as close were also predicting that Bush would shade it. The extent to which the media on this side of the Atlantic were allowing their hearts to overrule their heads was most striking in the first hours of election coverage on Tuesday night and early Wednesday morning, when nearly every pundit seemed only too anxious to find and exaggerate every nugget of information which implied a Kerry victory. As the night got longer the prospect of such a victory got further and further away.
Cooke, too, is likely to have waxed in bemused tones about some of the absurdity that is the electoral process in the world’s most technologically advanced nation. The United States has a very peculiar, diverse and unstable electoral set-up. Although the presidential election involves the filling of the highest federal office it is left to each and every state to decide the rules under which the election will be fought in their own areas. Some of the states even leave it to each county to determine what machines or mechanism are to be used to vote, or the manner in which voters can be registered or challenged. It is peculiar, too, that in the United States most elections are run by partisan holders of elected offices rather than by independent public servants or electoral commissions. Ironically, this super power which seeks to bring democracy to many parts of the world fails at home to apply some of the basic principles of best practice in electoral regulation which international organisations recommend to emerging democracies namely a uniformity of electoral rules across the country and independent oversight of the vote counting.
One wonders, too, what Alistair Cooke would have had to say on the implications in the international context of another four years of the Bush presidency?
Some commentators in Europe have in the last 24 hours claimed that a re-elected Bush might actually adopt a softer foreign policy line and, in particular, that, freed of the focus on re-election, he will take a more balanced approach to the Middle East.
Cooke is likely to have seen that all of the signs from the history of George W Bush’s first term are to the contrary.
During the 2000 election, the achievement of the Republican campaign was to present George W as a “Compassionate Conservative” whose primary focus would be on domestic issues. After the election, although the neo-conservative’s philosophical father figure Dick Cheney was elected Vice President, the moderate Colin Powell was appointed to the State Department.
For the first nine months the neo-con voices were peripheral in the new Bush administration in which foreign affairs itself would be peripheral.
Then on September 11, 2001, that all changed. Suddenly foreign affairs was catapulted to the top of the agenda. Bush initially mobilised the international outpouring of support for United States in the aftermath of the attack on the World Trade Centre.
He enjoyed overwhelming international support in invading Afghanistan, taking on the Taliban and destabilising Al Qaida.
Then the neo-conservative worldview came into dominance and their unhealthy obsession with Iraq took control. Persuaded by them, Bush squandered the international goodwill by deciding next to invade Iraq and to do so without United Nations endorsement.
Now it is Colin Powell who is peripheral and he is likely to step down.
We may not like it but there is every reason to believe that with a stronger mandate (albeit only slightly stronger), and again with a Republican majority on Capital Hill, the second term of the George W Bush presidency will be more neo-conservative not less.
Over the next four years we will miss Alistair Cooke’s skills at analysing, interpreting and explaining the large, strange and divided country that is George W Bush’s United States.
