VOICE FROM AMERICA
The future trials of the talk-show President
Faced with the job of appearing upbeat during the last few days of their dreadful campaign the men around George Bush clung, like sailors to flotsam, to the hoary American proverb, 'It ain't over until the fat lady sings.' I do not know whether the repeated use of the phrase was part of some larger master plan or merely a conse- quence of the dearth of metaphors in the American language to reassure a losing cause. In a nation of overweight extroverts it sounded to me far less enticing than was intended; who could say when one of the pant-suited behemoths one sees waddling down the streets of America might break into a Whitmanesque song?
Sure enough, at noon on the day before election day, a lady of a certain weight appeared in the park in front of the White House and began to sing. Describing her- self as 'built for comfort, not for speed', Ms Peggy Haine of Ithica, New York, belted out her tunes while a coterie of less sub- stantial activists passed around her mani- festo. 'The fat lady is a woman,' it said. 'She has a voice of her own. But for 12 years she has had nothing to sing about.' The fat lady's programme for reform called for health care for all, tax credits for house- wives and 'legislation that will eliminate inequities in pay and promotions'.
There are two reasons why fashionable people here are already saying that Clin- ton's presidency is doomed, and one of them is that so much of his support comes from people such as these who see them- selves as long oppressed minorities. And it is true that feminists, union officials, public school teachers, blacks, homosexuals and other highly organised pressure groups who have nursed bitter grievances for the last 12 years now expect them to be redressed at the public expense. They view any new Democratic administration as a kind of automatic bank teller machine. To receive hard cash they must only insert sufficient pathos. But I wonder whether their expec- tations are not as misplaced as those hard line anti-communists who once boasted of their man that, no matter what else he might do, Richard Nixon would never go to China.
If Clinton resists the usual forms of blackmail practiced by the professional vic- tims upon a Democrat it will be precisely because he is expected to be so sympathet- ic. I have no idea what schemes are now racing through the mind of the President- elect, for I have not had the time to take his calls. No doubt he is mostly busy being overwhelmed by the improbability of his victory. But at least a large part of the Clin- ton brain must now be occupied with the image the President-elect will have to cre- ate. He finds himself in an especially deli- cate position because the various forms of investments in human beings — which he has sold as the new American economic panacea — cannot possibly show results before the next general election; they are investments with long tails. So he must rely, for his success, on creating a mood.
What will this be? It is clear that Clinton intends to foster at least the appearance of a new kind of egalitarianism, even after he dons the imperial purple. Already he has suggested a number of new ways he might shed the majesty of his office and prostrate himself before the people, the most unusu- al of which is what he calls the 'town hall meeting'. The town hall meeting resembles the popular afternoon television talk-shows on which America's more exotic oppressed minorities have long met to discuss their problems. It is as close as we have to a model on which the Clinton presidency might be based, with Clinton playing the role of host. Some will think it undignified for a president continually to abandon his office for the talk-show circuit; others will see in it a new style well suited to the leader of a nation at peace for the first time in 50 years. But the real question will be whether it works.
The success of a host depends first on his ability to feign sympathy with the various 'Be careful, life is sexually transmitted.' child molesters, axe murderers and food addicts who appear before him, and to per- suade the people in the audience that he actually respects their views. Clinton is in many ways ideally suited to the task, which requires the sales skill of a professional car- dealer. It also requires a vague sense of personal vulnerability, which Clinton also possesses. One of the consequences of the sordid tone of the campaign is that the pub- lic knows more than ever before the details of their President-elect's private affairs. It knows that as a child Clinton was abused by his alcoholic stepfather. It knows that his mother's gross negligence as an anaesthesi- ologist caused the death of at least one man on the operating table. It knows how Clin- ton behaved during his formative years as a student. It knows — rather than merely sus- pects — that he is an eager adulterer. It knows the painful conversation he had with his daughter as they sat together watching a television show in which he and his wife dis- cussed their marital problems. As of last week it even knows how long he spent engaged in oral sex with Gennifer Flowers. Whether the President-elect will come to enjoy this unpleasant public knowledge remains to be seen. The only thing he can- not do is pretend it does not exist. There is little doubt that the American public wants to pretend that it is helping to solve the problems of government. That the same public shows little signs of being Pre- pared for any real responsibility is the sec- ond reason it is fashionable to argue that President Clinton is destined to fail. There was a great deal of wild talk on Wall Street in the weeks leading up to the election that a Clinton victory meant a stock-market crash. 'If Clinton wins,' the famous corpo- rate pillager Carl Icahn told a reporter from the Wall Street Journal, 'and he does something wrong. . . something is going to happen; and you're going to see chaos and panic that will be worse than 1929 . • • you'll see another crash that might make 1987 seem like kindergarten.' And it is true that although he will inherit a national debt of $4 trillion and an annual deficit of nearly $300 billion, Clinton has been elected with a mandate to increase government spending. In the whole of his campaign he never once asked the peopie for any kind of sacrifice — he knew that if he did he'd lose — and it is difficult to see just how he might start now. Perhaps he shall make this the subject of his first show.
The Wasp
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