THE BUSTED FLUSH

Mark Steyn explains why

Al Gore can't beat the cistern

New Hampshire ON this stage,' roared the announcer at the Iowa State University basketball arena, `is the next president of the United States!'

And frankly, last weekend, that suited us just fine. Here in New Hampshire we could sit on the porch, look at the mountains and know that, aside from the odd coyote howl, our peace would be undisturbed. The Republican candidates had hurried off halfway across the continent to Ames, Iowa, for the state's straw poll, and not all of them would be coming back.

Twenty-five-thousand Iowans voted, which is twice as many as the 'non-binding' just-a-bit-of-fun straw poll usually attracts. Those 25,000 proved more binding than ever, consigning one former vice-president and one successful governor to the trashcan of history, and possibly prompting another candidate to bolt from the party. George W. Bush won the vote, though not as deci- sively as some had expected. His father, giv- ing a speech in New Hampshire seven years ago, accidentally read out his minders' helpful précis in the margin and declared to Granite State voters: 'Message: I care.' If Junior's got anything written in the margins of his speech, it seems most likely to be: `Message: I don't care.' He spent hardly any time in Iowa and sloughed 'em off with his standard stump speech. His interview to Tina Brown's talk magazine was so pep- pered with f-words they might as well have renamed it fuck. On the subject of policy, he boasted about how he couldn't be both- ered reading books. On the subject of capi- tal punishment, he did a hilarious routine, complete with whining trailer-park accent, mimicking the way Karla Faye Tucker pleaded with the Governor to spare her life. The punchline? He fried her anyway.

Al Gore can only marvel. The Vice-Pres- ident mentions en passant that he's the inspiration for Love Story or that Courtney Love's Hole is his favourite band and the thing sticks to his shoe like dog turd: he can't shake it off for weeks. But Dubya lets rip with more 'fucks' than the average gangsta rapper, says books are for losers, does gags about people he's executed, calls the Greeks 'Grecians', confuses Slovenia with Slovakia — and nobody minds! He's already wearing that Clintonian ultra- strength gaffe-repellent that enables you, in the event that you turn out to have given all our nuke secrets to the Commies, to shrug off the ensuing scandal in an after- noon.

Governor Bush was helped by the fact that his talk interview was overshadowed by Hillary Clinton's. But, even without Hillary's cover, it wouldn't have mattered. The other day, the New York Times asked all 12 Republican candidates if they'd ever done cocaine: 11 said no, George said, 'No comment.' He does make reference to a time in his life 'when I was young and fool- ish', a term that now covers anything that may or may not have happened before his 40th birthday. Dan Quayle, in a mild swipe at the son of the man who made him vice- president, pointed out that by that age he'd been elected twice to the House of Repre- sentatives and twice to the Senate. Actual- ly, that's Dan's problem: like William Hague, he got into the game too early. Given the choice between some creepy suck-up who wants to spend his twenties sitting around in Congressional commit- tees, or some guy who's out of his head on coke, dancing nude in a bar in Mexico, Mr and Mrs America say, 'Hey, let's make the coke fiend president!'

At the North Haverhill Fair the other day, someone tied a George W. balloon to my infant's stroller. I would have felt a lit- tle embarrassed about it, except that every- one seemed to have them: they were bobbing from babies, gran'mas, heifers, oxen. . . . A Pat Buchanan or a John McCain sticker is a political statement, but I've started getting hot flushes.' a George W. Bush balloon is just part of the landscape.

Meanwhile, the Vice-President is not wav- ing but drowning. My neighbour, Adair, is director of the Connecticut River Joint Commission and, when Mr Gore and New Hampshire Governor Jeanne Shaheen, dec- ided to stage a canoeing photo-op on the river, Adair and her pals at the CRJC mulled it over and thought they'd do their guests a favour. The water looked a little low — much of America is undergoing a severe drought at the moment — so they asked the electric company to open the floodgates of the Wilder dam, to make sure Al's canoe didn't run aground. As usual, the photo-op lasted just long enough for the press to get their photos, at which point Al stopped pretending to be a canoeist and got out of the river. It then emerged that 4 bil- lion gallons of water had been released in order to ensure that Mr Environmentalist could float his boat. Vermont's natural resources director, a Democrat, grumbled, `They won't release water for the fish when we ask them to, but somehow they find themselves able to release it for a politician.'

The Gore office then did their usual trick of keeping the story alive by quib- bling. It wasn't 4 billion gallons, or 180,000 gallons per second, they said. It was 'only' 97 million gallons, or 'just' 27,000 per sec- ond. The electric company, whose state- ments have been almost as unreliable as Mr Gore's, countered with their own fig- ure: half a billion gallons. While the Vice- President, his obliging dam owners and the press were arguing about precisely how much water he'd wasted, Bill Clinton declared drought emergencies in five mid- Atlantic states.

Most other politicians could have got away with it, but Mr Gore is not a man who can afford to blow even a mere 97 million gallons. He's been the most enthusiastic proponent, for example, of Federal toilet regulations, which restrict the amount of water you can use to flush and which has led to a roaring trade in toilet smuggling from Canada. Big Brother is watching your big cistern because on the environment, we were told, the Vice-President knew best. It wasn't long before the American press were producing statistics, in this parched summer, showing that an average home- owner would have to water his lawn 24 hours a day, seven days a week, for 75 years to use as much water as Mr Gore did on the Connecticut. It would certainly seem to be at odds with his book Earth in the Balance in which he quotes approvingly the 12th-century Sri Lankan king, Parakra- ma Bahu: 'Let not a single drop of water that falls on the land go into the sea with- out serving the people.'

Unlike Mr Gore's earlier stumbles claiming to be a dirt-poor Tennessee farmer and inventor of the Internet — 'Floodgate' (as it's known) would also seem to be illegal: `It would have cost New Englanders up to $7 million to use the same amount of water that was used to float Vice-President Gore's boat,' said Steve Duprey, chairman of New Hampshire's Republican party, announcing that he was asking the Federal Elections Commission to investigate this 'illegal cam- paign contribution'.

This week, he tossed them a second case, too. The New Hampshire Community Technical College spent $5,000 to air-cond- ition a cafeteria in which Mr Gore was due to speak. You begin to understand why the Vice-President believes in global warming: he's always the one feeling the heat.

Incidentally, a friend of mine is thinking of running for Congress on the Democratic ticket. He was advised by Bill Shaheen, husband of Governor (and co-canoeist) Jeanne Shaheen, that it would not be a good idea to endorse Al Gore. That wouldn't be so surprising if it weren't for the fact that Bill Shaheen is head of the Gore campaign in New Hampshire. Some- times the Vice-President must wish he'd just been like party boy George W. and hadn't bothered trying to save the planet.

Dubya didn't really win big on Saturday, but that may work to his advantage, keep- ing the Republican nomination just enough of a race to prevent the press and public getting bored with him. He won 31.3 per cent, ahead of billionaire Steve Forbes in second place with 20.8 per cent. Forbes's campaign says, 'Message: I spend.' He's the only candidate in the entire history of the Iowa straw poll to have paid to have his tent air-conditioned. He brought in an amusement park to divert the kids while their parents were voting. He had more balloons than Dubya and the seven other Republicans combined. During his speech, they fell from the ceiling in such numbers that, in order not to be buried, his audi- ence started popping them: all you could hear during the latter half of his address was the sound of balloons bursting. For 5,000 Iowan votes, Steve spent $2 million. That's 400 dollars per voter. Why doesn't he just say, 'Vote for me and 1'11 drywall your basement'?

Lamar Alexander, the former governor of Tennessee, put in less money but more hours. He's been running for president for a solid four years now and he's spent much of that time in Iowa, getting to know peo- ple, building an organisation, shoring up his base. And what did it get him? 1,428 votes. Lamar gave every loser in the state all the face time he wanted, and guys he had breakfast with, went to their mother- in-law's birthday with, played horseshoes behind the barn with, whose crummy guest bedrooms he stayed in — the lousy bas- tards all voted for Bush in the end. On Monday, the governor became the first for- mal casualty of Iowa, and quit the race.

Dan Quayle, who did even worse and came in eighth after the bloodcurdling speechifier Alan Keyes, vowed to soldier oh. He immediately flew back to New Hampshire to make an appearance at San- bornton's Old Home Day festivities. Old Home Day is a Granite State tradition in which on one day a year folks who used to live in town come back to see old friends, march in the parade, enjoy an ice-cream social or a chicken cook-out, etc. Having made the fatal error of skipping a critical meeting at which the key positions were filled, I happened to wind up being made co-chairman of my own town's Old Home Day committee this year, and I can tell you I turned down a proposed Quayle appear- ance because I thought it would depress turnout and lower the tone of the greased pig race.

But the reality is that the Republican race is already over. Americans are not going to elect to the presidency a man who has never served in any other public office, and it's time Steve Forbes realised that and went off to pay his dues as Governor of New Jersey. Presidential candidates divide into potential presidents and potential issues. Gary Bauer and Pat Buchanan are never going to be sitting in the Oval Office, but a strong showing by them in the prim- aries forces the eventual candidate to take on their issues — in Bauer's case, family values; in Buchanan's, economic national- ism. Elizabeth Dole is an issues candidate, too: she's never going to be president, but, if her supporters turn out as they did last week, she could wind up forcing George W. to put a woman on the ticket with him.

If it's Bush versus Gore, Bush wins. Gore's only chance now is a third-party candidate splitting the conservative vote, as Ross Perot did in 1996 and 1992. And, right now, Al might just get lucky: Senator Bob Smith is running as a third-party candidate on the US Taxpayers' party ticket, and Pat Buchanan is thinking of junking the GOP and running as a fourth-party candidate on the Reform party ticket. On the other hand, the benefits of vote-splitting on the Right might be offset on the Left by ageing Holly- wood stud Warren Beatty, who's so disen- chanted by the Vice-President that he's thinking of putting himself forward as a fifth-party candidate. Poor old Al Gore: it will take more than the Connecticut River floodgates to stop him running aground.