The US election
Peking primary
Christopher Hitchens
Washington
As designed and scripted by his White House advisers, Ronald Reagan's China jaunt was a well calculated political gambit. In the first place, it was to have made him appear presidential and statesmanlike at a time when the Democratic candidates were rolling and gouging in the swamp of their petty primaries. And later trips — notably to the Normandy beachheads in June — were planned to reinforce this impression throughout the summer. In the second place, a successful appearance in Peking could have been the answer to all those who accuse Reagan of intemperate and automatic anti-communism. Since he As designed and scripted by his White House advisers, Ronald Reagan's China jaunt was a well calculated political gambit. In the first place, it was to have made him appear presidential and statesmanlike at a time when the Democratic candidates were rolling and gouging in the swamp of their petty primaries. And later trips — notably to the Normandy beachheads in June — were planned to reinforce this impression throughout the summer. In the second place, a successful appearance in Peking could have been the answer to all those who accuse Reagan of intemperate and automatic anti-communism. Since he
declared himself a candidate for a second term, the President has concentrated almost exclusively on preserving and reassuring his conservative support. On school prayer, on arms control, on Central America, he has sounded like the consecrated right-winger that he is. By paying a call on the Chinese, the sort of call that he once anathematised, he could earn grudging praise from the cen- tre and the liberals. This tactic, hallowed by Richard Nixon, is known to cynics as the `the Peking primary'. Republicans are much better at winning it.
Or they usually are. In fact, Reagan left Washington to a storm of criticism from his allies, and a drizzle of jibes from his op- ponents. The Right accused him of selling out Taiwan, and of credulity about Chinese communism in general. The mainstream media and the Democrats implied that he was taking an ostentatious holiday from the chronic impasse in the Central American isthmus. Both factions derived sardonic pleasure from the Chinese censorship of his two major speeches — censorship which left the normally glib White House press spokesman with little or nothing to say. Standing photogenically on the Great Wall, the President was asked his opinion of this breach of faith by his hosts, and replied in his usual wisecracking style that 'You fellows [the networks]do it all the time.' It came out sounding rather sheepish.
As a special, anguished, issue of Conser- vative Digest puts it, all this is the mirror opposite of Reagan in 1980. In that year he announced that his ambition was no less than to 'try and perhaps lead Communist China away from communism'. Since that time, the Chinese leaders have supported the Russians over Poland, remained mute about the Korean airliner incident and criticised American policy in Central America and the Caribbean. Yet Reagan has not found it in his heart to denounce this godless crew.
The Right are in a bind here. Their treasured allies, the Kuomintang regime on Taiwan, still insist on recognition of their claim to be the legitimate government of China. This would be like having the American ambassador to Britain accredited to the Dame of Sark. Faced with what he considers the overwhelming necessity of counterbalancing and isolating the Soviet Union, Reagan has no choice but to swallow a lifetime of pro-Taiwanese rhetoric. And he knows that the conser- vatives have nowhere else to go in November. The unfortunate thing, from his point of view, is that he has offended his own supporters without gratifying the liberals. This is the first time I can remember his having made this mistake.
Before he left for Peking, the President described China as America's third largest trading partner. It is, in fact, America's twentieth largest trading partner. Reagan's grasp of fact, especially in inter- national matters, is so tenuous that cor- respondents have stopped making jokes about it. The reason that people are so in- clined to forgive him is, I think, that they recognise their own dilemma in his. For a country so involved in global commitments, the United States has a very inward-looking and poorly informed electorate. Language teaching in the foreign service is execrable — as was shown by a recent State Depart- ment report commissioned after a Russian solider walked into the American mission in Kabul and could find nobody who spoke his language. And, though it may not feel like it to the inhabitants of European cities in summer, most Americans take their holidays in the United States.
Recently, a televised station in Boston made one of my dreams come true. It inter- viewed senatorial candidates and, instead of asking them what they thought, asked them what they knew. They were asked to iden- tify the Prime Minister of Israel and the President of Syria. Few of them could do both and one of them (President of a Boston Community College) could do neither. None of them knew the amount of the current defence budget ($258 billion), or the names of the European countries in which the United States has recently deployed its missiles. It should be said that one of the Democratic candidates for the post is already a member of the House of Representatives, and that one of the Republicans, Elliot Richardson, is a former Secretary of Defence. He was asked what proportion of the United States budget went to the military and answered 7.5 per cent when the answer is 28.
There's a very simple trick question for candidates these days. All you have to know is — which side are we on? In El Salvador and Nicaragua respectively, do we
support the government or the rebels? Several of the candidates did not know the answer here, though one of them, Wh° answered 'Who knows?', may not be as dumb as he sounds. Public opinion polls show that the voters are no better informed than the contending parties. The confusion between putting rebels in country A and sponsoring them in country B seems to run very cleeP. The Administration can, as a result, neither pose as defender of law and order nor as champion of liberty. The finding that wore ries the White House most is that thhe a respondent knows about the area, .les5, he or she is inclined to support the officia; line. It was ignorance about whether or n°, there were Russians in Poland which helliCf to lose the 1976 election for Gerald Rir.u: There may be a limit to the extent of ig norance which the voters will tolerate, however much they realise that, most of the time, they are flying blind themselves.
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