VOICE FROM AMERICA
The uses of the big chicken from Oxford, England
At every stop on a recent campaign trip President Bush came confidently out from his private car on to the rear platform of his train only to be unnerved by a dis- tressing sight. Every time he found himself facing, somewhere in the crowd, a giant chicken. Chicken George — as the bird introduced itself — tailed Bush for several days to remind the President and everyone else that he was avoiding his scheduled debates with Governor Clinton. A stronger politician would have used the chicken profitably. A weaker politician would have ignored it. Bush could do neither. As he moved from one stage to the next he stared into the round plastic eyes of the six-foot chicken and delivered increasingly hysteri- cal attacks on Clinton. In Ohio the Presi- dent finally cracked, as people sometimes do in Ohio. To the horror of his handlers, he pointed directly at the bird, now flap- ping its arms at the back of the crowd, and announced, 'I'm not sure if that chicken is from Oxford, England, or if he's the one that dumps that faecal coliform bacteria into the Arkansas river.'
Of course this was exactly the wrong move. For the chicken it was the sort of big career break that most chickens never get. The next day, the giant bird appeared on the front page of the nation's newspaper and at the head of the evening news. A fast food franchise called Chicken George will no doubt soon be selling grilled replicas of the President. But just because the Presi- dent's remark was stupid does not mean that it was not carefully considered. Clearly it was, as it came at the end of a long list of similar attempts to remind the electorate of one of the more damning facts about Bill Clinton — that he lived for two years in England.
There is space here for only a partial list of similarly indirect slanders of England by Bush. On a bus tour of Georgia he referred often and disparagingly to 'my opponent and his Oxford cronies'. In Ohio he excused himself from the debates by saying, with evident pride, 'I'm not a professional debater. I'm not an Oxford man.' In Okla- homa he said, 'My opponent is drawn to socialistic views. He and a number of his advisers studied them at Oxford in the 1960s.' In California a Republican con- gressman who introduced Bush to a crowd, after praising the American effort in Viet- nam, asked the audience, 'Where was Bill? He was in a British pub, eating compulsive- ly and drinking ale.' And in Washington a loyal Republican named Floyd Brown, who was responsible for the infamous Willie Horton commercial the last time around, has created another, saying that Bill Clinton passed his time in England 'under the aegis and support of one of the most notorious communist front organisations in Europe'.
In fairness it must be said that the Presi- dent has no certain knowledge of the place he speaks of. Like many American ruling- class Anglo-Saxons, he seems to feel noth- ing for the old country. The one mention of England in Bush's autobiography is of a vice-presidential trip, when 'Barbara and I met with Prime Minister Margaret Thatch- er and her husband, Norman.' But conjur- ing up images of the Governor of Arkansas engaged in animated discussions of how to nationalise General Motors with fey Oxford dons is very likely only one of President Bush's several intentions.
By raising Clinton's Rhodes scholarship, Bush probably also hopes to pre-empt the inevitable suggestion that he is himself a child of privilege, which of course he is. The Bush campaign should well be con- cerned that Bill Clinton will capture the people's attention with tales of the Great Depression, when the little George Bush's boyhood chauffeur — name of Alec raced merrily each day to beat the chauf- feurs of the other rich children to the front door of the Greenwich Country Day School.
There is also the possibility that Bush hopes that a steady stream of references to England will cause ordinary Americans to believe Clinton to be guilty of a pattern of behaviour loosely characterised as un- American. Anyone who doubts this should recall that the chairman of the Republican Party, Mr Rich Bond, recently pointed across the aisle to the Democrats and said `Those people aren't America.' Anyone who thinks this tactic trivial need only con- suit the record of the last presidential cam- paign. Then, as now, Bush trailed in the opinion polls. Then, as now, he groped for ways to do a 'paint job' on his opponent, to use the phrase preferred by the President's strategists. Eventually the Bush campaign settled on patriotism. So it was that in 1988, after the disgusting Mr Lee Atwater presented Mr Bush with a palette containing every shade of pinko, the Vice-President exploited Michael Dukakis's unwillingness to require the schoolchildren of Massachusetts to pledge allegiance to the American flag each morning. That the pledge of allegiance was written as a socialist credo at the end of the 19th century was widely overlooked. 'What is it about the pledge of allegiance that bothers him so much?' Bush would ask rhetorically about Dukakis, as the mob cheered. He worked in the manner of Rubens, sketching the broad outlines of a traitor and letting his assistants fill in the details. A Republican senator campaigning for Bush, for example, spread the word `that there are pictures around that will sur- face before the elections are over of Mrs Dukakis burning the American flag while she was an anti-war demonstrator during the 1960s.'
The main difference between then and now is that the attack on Bill Clinton s patriotic credentials does not seem to be playing well in the American heartland. About his time in England the only thing Bill Clinton has needed to say is thatI, studied at Oxford but I never debated,' which in its cautious absurdity ranks along- side his 'I smoked marijuana but I never inhaled.'
Perhaps the patriotism card has failed this time around because Americans can now imagine England only as a jolly bastion of conservatism. Or perhaps the meaning of patriotism in America has slightly shifted as a result of the collapse of the Soviet Union' in the absence of an imminent threat the public is no longer as concerned with shades of difference in the candidate's hos- tility towards foreigners.
Whatever the reason may be for its fail- ure, it is reassuring in a way that the Presi- dent has been forced to raise the pernicious consequences of living in England. That Bush must reach across the Atlantic to find a link between Clinton and socialist policies shows how far the Democratic Party has travelled away from them.
The Wasp
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