INTERPRETING BUSH TELEGRAPHESE
James Bowman on the signals
that hint at the intentions of the US President
Washington TIME was when self-styled `Kremlinolog- ists' used to pore over photographs of the reviewing stand at a May Day parade and, like palaeontologists with the jawbone of a triceratops, reconstruct the entire Polit- buro dinosaur by inference from who stood where. Now the Politburo speaks for itself, and demonstrators heckle Mr Gorbachev at the May Day parade; now Gorbachev himself publicly criticises the failures of perestroika, and Mr Shevardnadze says openly that 'by praying unduly assiduously to the idols of pseudo-ideology we made our people, the whole country, destitute'. Such alarming frankness has sent old- fashioned Kremlinologists the way of the alchemists, but perhaps they are out there `Porridge? No we just have coffee and a cigarette. somewhere, retraining as Bushologists in advance of the summit meeting with Gor- bachev here next week.
For Bush would seem to be something less than 'the Great Communicator' that Ronald Reagan was said to be. Above all, he has confounded his most loyal suppor- ters on the Right by his overtures to China, by refusing to press the Soviets harder over Lithuanian independence, by backing the National Endowment for the Arts when it was criticised for sponsoring obscenity, by inviting gay rights activists to the White House for the ceremonial signing of anti- hate crime legislation, and now by offering the Democrats in Congress a conference on the budget deficit at which, in spite of his most solemn promise, tax increases will be under consideration.
`Read my lips,' he said in 1988: 'no new taxes!' Now, instead of reading lips we are attempting to read omens and entrails. Did the chief of staff, John Sununu, speak for the President when he said that the Demo- crats were free to propose new taxes and Bush was free to veto them, as he surely would do? Or were we to believe his `spokesman', Marlin Fitzwater — who said that he had no spokesman? We should listen only to the President himself, said Fitzwater, and the President had said, most recently, that there were no preconditions to the budget talks.
Similarly, Sununu is supposed to have introduced a note of scepticism into Bush's approach to the issue of global warming over the objections of William Reilly, head of the Environmental Protection Agency. So is Sununu in favour and Reilly out? The director of the CIA, William Webster, said that the changes in the Soviet Union were irreversible and the Secretary of Defence, Richard Cheney, said that they were not. Insiders say that Webster is in and Cheney is out. The Attorney General, Richard Thornburgh, advised the President to veto a new civil rights Bill which would provide for racial quotas in private sector hiring. Bush last week called together civil rights leaders and the chairman of his Civil Rights Commission, Arthur Fletcher, to work out a compromise. But then the President made a strong anti-quota state- ment and now no one has any idea what he will do.
Such inscrutability, which some would say comes of trying to be all things to all people, has been a hallmark of this admi- nistration. Last December, Vice-President Quayle sounded a dissenting note after the love-feast of the Malta summit and his comments were said to be 'a sop to the conservatives'. Bush's only response was to say that Quayle would be on the ticket in 1992. Even Barbara Bush, according to the New York Times's Bush-watcher, Maureen Dowd, is thought by women's and gay rights proponents to be tilting in their direction and acting as a moderating influ- ence upon her husband's social conservat- ism. One Democratic consultant sees this as a deliberate strategy on the part of the Republicans `to co-opt issues of interest mostly to women' — especially abortion, towards which she is said not to share George's opposition. Her only public dis- agreement with him, however, has been on the subject of broccoli.
If Bush were a less obviously canny politician, the readers of the entrails would assume that his government, if not his marriage, was riven by acrimonious dissen- sion. But, as it is, they are inclined to see a Machiavellian purpose in this multiplicity of voices — not only within the administra- tion but even in Congress. Senator Dole, his erstwhile political enemy, is widely supposed to have spoken for the President in his proposal for the reform of foreign aid; Congressman Rostenkowski (a Demo- crat!) is said to have been his catspaw on tax increases. His allowing others to lead on such issues is, according to your point of view, timidity or cleverness; and now there is a gathering consensus that he is more • clever than timid.
After eight years of Ronald Reagan's relative forthrightness, commentators are discovering the delights of what they have learned to call 'the subtext' but which is also by way of being a full-employment scheme for commentators. A word or two, a nuance, buried in a press conference reply or a State Department briefing, for example, is enough to persuade a New York Times editorialist that Bush is 'send- ing signals' to the Lithuanians to be more flexible on independence, to the Israelis to reject Mr Shamir's rejection of the Baker peace plan. Emphatic statements of either point of view would not have been in the Bush style and could have roiled the political waters on which he is now coasting along with 70 per cent approval ratings.
Well, he must be doing something right. But if he is really clever he will be careful not to send too many confusing signals. Already the President's telegraphic style of 'Bushspeak', which he seems to have learned from Mr Jingle of The Pickwick Papers, is widely caricatured. Americans like a certain inarticulacy in their politi- cians because it bespeaks sincerity. But they also like a certain simplicity for the same reason, and that Bush seems to be lacking. Gorbachev at the summit, like Khrushchev before him, may seem re- freshingly direct by comparison.
On these occasions, I'm told, the Rus- sians stick with one interpreter, the estim- able Pavel Palashchenko, as the English voice of Gorbachev while the top three or four American interpreters will take it in turns to be Bush to him. They say that Bushspeak is not a problem for them. They always know, one of them told me, 'the direction his thought is taking'. But the State Department likes to rotate them anyway — to 'keep them fresh'. Like the rest of us, it appears, they have their work cut out for them interpreting Mr Bush's words.
Previous page
