The AUDACITY of HYPE

If, like me, you’re only really familiar with the sophisticated cities of the east and west coasts, you doubtless find that it’s very easy to underestimate the depth of conservatism in the United States. Across great swathes of the mid-west and the deep south, attitudes that to you and me would seem absurdly primitive, grotesquely xenophobic and profoundly ignorant are seemingly the common currency of the day.

Much of this philosophy – if philosophy is not indeed too weighty a term for what is hardly above an animal instinct – must stem from the Puritan ancestry of rural and small-town white folks. Those non-conformist Anglican sects who would have no truck with any accommodation with “popery” – Anabaptists, Unitarians, Quakers, Congregationalists, Calvinists, Ranters, Muggletonians and all – constituted the Pilgrim Fathers who landed at Plymouth Rock, Massachusetts in 1620 and began the second successful settlement of the New World, following that at Jamestown, Virginia. These were clearly “enough is enough” people.

The precipitate decline in support for Barack Obama by the end of his first year in office is hard to understand unless you accept that his very election in November 2008 was even harder to fathom. Americans elect Democrat presidents rather less often than they elect Republican ones, and liberal Democrats almost never at all. When the Democrats nominated their previously most liberal candidate since World War II, George McGovern in 1972, he won only two states against Richard Nixon: those havens of the east coast intelligentsia, Massachusetts and the District of Columbia. McGovern – evidently hale and hearty at 87 as I write – couldn’t even take his home state of South Dakota. In the electoral college votes, the ones that actually secure the presidency, McGovern won just 17 to Nixon’s 520. In the modern era, only Ronald Reagan twelve years later gained more (525 to the not very liberal Walter Mondale’s 13) but, by a statistical quirk, the popular vote (ballots counted as totals rather than reckoned by distribution) was then very much closer than the electoral college difference suggests.


Presidential authority sealed

Moreover, once elections are done, support for Democrat incumbents usually falls away much more quickly than that for Republicans. Just as Obama has experienced, so support for Bill Clinton and for Jimmy Carter dropped below 50 percent by the end of each man’s first year in office. Obama’s current approval rating is lower than the lowest ever recorded during the administrations of either Dwight D Eisenhower or Franklin D Roosevelt, the latter of whom was elected to as many as four terms of office.

The astounding Senate win ten days ago for the Republicans in the same Massachusetts that voted for McGovern nearly four decades ago has rewritten the balance of power. In the curious Washington system, a party needs not merely a plurality but a twenty-seat majority in the Senate in order to carry its legislation. Below that dominance and the minority is allowed to filibuster – that is to say, to delay, harass and obstruct with impunity – until the administration either offers a compromise that the minority can accept or admits defeat and withdraws the measure. This is now the position on Capitol Hill. The joke is headlined thus: “Republicans win 41-59 majority in Senate”.

That the Republicans took this particular seat is a measure of how penetratingly the opposition to Obama has got its act together. This was Teddy Kennedy’s old fiefdom, and had been held by Democrats since Jack Kennedy took it from Henry Cabot Lodge Jr in 1952. The new senator, Scott Brown, is no box-checking party creature. He is pro-choice on abortion and even supports universal healthcare (though only for his home state where it is hardly needed), but he will not support Obama’s health insurance reform bill that was within a whisker of being passed into law and now is imperilled. On the other hand, he advocates waterboarding of terrorism suspects and opposes legislation to reduce carbon emissions. (I was sorry that the Democrat lost; although she was reportedly very uninspiring politically, she does apparently possess an encyclopaedic knowledge of Broadway musicals).


Logo of Fox News

Despite at least one headline about the senate result that will have gladdened hearts in Downing Street (“Big Win for Brown”), Barack Obama remains the hope of the whole world beyond the boundaries of the United States. This is a mirror image of the status of his predecessor. George W Bush was considered a bozo from the get-go right across the planet (especially in Europe) but remained hugely popular in the States, certainly until his response to Hurricane Katrina and the devastation it caused in and around New Orleans, a domestic miscalculation that began the erosion of his authority.

For the foreseeable future, Republicans are likely to continue to benefit electorally from any significant level of disenchantment with the Obama administration. But it is certainly not the GOP that has marshalled the opposition. The party is still in disarray and no one can guess which of its several strands will prevail in time to lead the campaign for the mid-term elections in November.


Dissenting version of the logo

Rather, the opposition has been sharpened by vested interests, particularly those in the media. Whatever their particular political inclination, media outlets continue to be fascinated by Sarah Palin and afford her endless free publicity. Palin is at best a semi-detached representative of the Republicans and, were she to begin seriously positioning herself for a presidential run in 2012, you can bet your boots that the Grand Old Party would be looking hard for a rather more mainstream alternative. Meanwhile, she acts as a lightning rod for inarticulate, ill-informed rage (always a potent ingredient in politics).

In another part of the forest, the phenomenon of The Tea Party has galvanised populist reaction – though doubtless quietly funded by vested interests – against the present administration. Naming itself after the legendary revolt against the British tax on exports of tea that broke out in Boston harbour (Massachusetts again) in 1773 and became the pivotal event in the campaign for American independence, the modern Tea Party was launched in 2006, originally as an independent libertarian movement. In the last year, the incidence of Tea Party gatherings has gathered pace, concentrating its attack on what it characterises as the “Socialist” and “big government” policies of Obama.


A billboard rewrites the tagline

The Tea Party is a natural for a media looking for colourful images of disaffection from government. The lately crowned leader of such media outlets is the satellite and cable channel Fox News. Founded as recently as 1996, Fox News has made remarkable advances in influence by rewriting the rulebook of broadcasting’s coverage of news, current affairs and politics. Fox’s owner Rupert Murdoch has noted the popular appeal of radio’s “shock jocks” – Rush Limbaugh and his kind – and gradually unleashed a similar approach on a television station that purports to report the events of the day. (By the by, a measure of the success of such approaches may be that my spellchecker always questions ‘Obama’ but has no problem with ‘Limbaugh’, and that’s not because ‘limbaugh’ has any separate meaning as a noun – the OED does not recognise it).

Traditionally, western media has carefully positioned itself in a non-partisan stance, at least in party terms. (Only utterly blinkered media apologists would suggest that even the most diligent media outlets are wholly agnostic on every issue. One only has to recall the occasion in the polarised 1970s when BBC newsreader Angela Rippon read out the phrase “trade unionists and other extremists”). Republicans and other extremists have always chastised this even-handed stance as “liberal bias” because, to them, straight reporting can only be the kind that reinforces all their prejudices. This is the kind of reporting that Fox News gives them by the bucketload. Straightfaced, the two slogans most used by Fox are “Fair & Balanced” and “We Report. You Decide”. You don’t need to watch much of the Fox output to be able to decide.

Once more the essential conservatism of middle America was dramatically illustrated in a survey of attitudes to news coverage conducted last September by Sacred Heart University of Connecticut (New England yet again). Since the first such research in 2003, Fox News has decisively overtaken CNN as the US’s “most trusted” television news channel, garnering a rating of 30 percent. The context, though, was a “significant decline” of general belief in news reporting to 24.3 percent. One of the survey’s most revealing findings was that 59 percent of respondents reckon to choose their news source for its “objective reporting” against 19 percent because that source reflected the viewer’s own outlook. If ever there was poll evidence that depended on the respondent’s subjective rather than objective view, this was it.


Fox promotes The Tea Party

What should we make of all this? The Sacred Heart survey was conducted by telephone with 800 individuals. The Guardian’s report of the poll (January 28th, but written as if the findings were new) differed in many details from the information that I found on Sacred Heart’s website, including its report of the number of respondents: 1,151, described by the paper, but not by the website, as “registered voters”. Either way, it is a vanishingly minuscule sample in a voting-age population above 231million. How much weight can we possibly give such a poll?

That disenchantment with Obama is widely felt in the States is, however, clear. My gut feeling is that it will pass, that Obama is very shrewd and understands exactly what is at stake and how to play it. At this point in the electoral cycle, it only matters insofar as the Massachusetts aberration shifts the balance of power. But the new balance could well prove to be a bear-trap into which the Republicans easily fall. If the electorate feels that the recession is not ending quickly enough but also sees that the President cannot get his programme through, it may well take out its frustration on the obstructive senators. Obama is playing a long game and he still holds a strong hand. November in the US – even more than May 6th in the UK – is still a long way off.


Another survey of news channels

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Yesterday will surely have been the last occasion on which anyone can have hoped to call Tony Blair to account for throwing in his lot with George W Bush and invading Iraq in 2003. Facing the Chilcot Enquiry, the former Prime Minister and (let’s not forget) barrister was masterly after a tense start; this was clearly a dry run for the definitive account that will furnish the centrepiece of his forthcoming autobiography.

More significantly for the present purpose, he was allowed to be masterly. Even though the enquiry members must be well played in by now, they seemed greatly overawed by this political superstar. On two crucial aspects of his perception of the choices that faced him, they failed to press Blair: the matter of the legality of invading a sovereign state (much explored in previous sessions with Lord Goldsmith and other members of the Blair cabinet) and the notion of a connection between the regime in Baghdad and the operations of al-Qaida.

On the second of those issues, Blair was allowed to get away with the smart retort that “the crucial thing after September 11th was that the calculus of risk changed”. In other words, anyone whom we didn’t trust was capable of committing unimaginable outrages against our citizens (noting that Blair also said “I never regarded September 11th as an attack on America. I regarded it as an attack on us” and his definition of “us” might have been usefully challenged). This begs the question: why did we/do we not invade Iran, North Korea, Saudi Arabia, China, the Yemen and, if regime change is itself a legitimate objective, why exclude Myanmar, Zimbabwe or Kyrgyzstan? While we are at it, Russia is clearly embarked on a systematic elimination of dissident and irritating journalists. As Ronald Reagan once proposed when he thought mics were off, “let’s bomb Russia”. The world, Mr Blair, is your lobster. As it happens, it seems from his testimony that, were he still PM, we would have attacked Iran by now. And you thought you were worse off under Gordon Brown.


Coat of arms of the British government

But the key to Blair’s self-justification lies in his brilliantly simple formula that, I have no doubt, will go down in the lexicon of all-time political sayings: “This is not about a lie or a conspiracy or a deceit or a deception. It’s a decision”. Oh, that’s deathless. That’s worthy of Richard III, Macbeth, Milton’s Satan. With that one bound, he is free. He made a decision. You can of course debate whether it was a correct decision. But whatever you decide, it is intrinsically legitimate. It is what politicians are elected to do. You cannot now impugn his morality. He did his job.

The closing question – as to whether Blair would proffer anyone any kind of apology – seems to me to be fruitless and infantile. In all humanity, I cannot comprehend the grounds upon which the families of service personnel who died imagine they are entitled to some kind of mea culpa. Blair clearly believes with all the fibre of his being that he did the right thing. So did Churchill in leading the nation against Nazi Germany for most of the duration of World War II. So did Thatcher in sending the fleet to the Falklands. That military people lost their lives is what happens in war. At perfectly comprehensible levels of perception, that’s what they’re for. Of course the families of people sent to the front line hope that they will return alive and unmaimed but they can ask for no more succour than that. (Care of invalided service personnel is an altogether separate and historically shaming issue that I have addressed before).

If Blair is content that the invasion of Iraq was morally and politically defensible, he has nothing to apologise for. If any apologising is to be done, I would rather it be offered to the civilians who were injured and the families of those civilians who perished. They had none of the advantages that the invading military took for granted. If Blair has blood on his hands it is that of innocent Iraqis.