The aide is beginning to sweat. Bulging file in hand, he is pacing relentlessly, surveying the group that has assembled before breakfast on a fine, crisp Pennsylvania morning. They have been shepherded on to a makeshift platform: the human backdrop behind today’s guest of honour.
The ”advance man” – whose job it is to choreograph the best possible image for the television pictures of this event that will run, over and over again, on the local news – takes another look. High-school kids, local worthies and a smattering of army veterans in their trademark hats shaped like paper boats. Behind them, a mammoth US flag.”Women!” the advance guy hisses to an assistant. ”Women, young people, just get me …” his voice drops to a low whisper, as he adds another, more discreet demand. Sure enough, a few minutes later, our man is seen ushering a black woman towards a spot right behind the podium. She will be over the speaker’s shoulder; television viewers will see her, not the overwhelmingly white, male crowd that fills the stage.
The picture is almost complete. In the crowd, hundreds of pom-pom waving and flag-clasping Republican true believers, all of them bussed into a hangar at Harrisburg International Airport. To one side, a high school band, kitted out in spangly gold sashes, strikes up a medley of patriotic standards. They are waiting for the big guy.
It’s the latest stop in a frantic tour of more than a dozen states crammed into the final hours before today’s midterm elections. The campaigner in question is not, strictly speaking, a candidate. He is not on the ballot for another two years, but today’s midterm elections – where control of the House, Senate and governors’ mansions in 36 states are up for grabs – will be seen as a referendum on the presidency of George W Bush.
He has certainly been playing it that way, throwing his weight behind Republicans in the most hotly fought contests, often making repeat visits in the tightest fights. If those battles – senate races in South Dakota, Missouri, and a congressional one here in Pennsylvania – go against Republicans tonight, it will suggest a limit to Bush’s vote-pulling power and maybe even a shallowness to his popularity.
But a respectable performance by Republicans tonight – maintaining, say, their narrow hold over the House of Representatives even when the economy is sputtering – would be seen as an enormous vindication of a man who won fewer votes in the 2000 election than his Democratic opponent and was only installed in the White House thanks to five members of the US Supreme Court. From fending off questions about the legitimacy of his presidency, Bush would have become one of only three presidents not to lose House seats in a midterm election.
So the stakes are certainly high. But even before a vote has been counted, a campaign swing like this one invites a verdict. The midterm moment allows Americans to see how their president is doing, how he’s changed – and what kind of relationship he has developed with his people.
On the evidence of Campaign 2002, Bush’s critics need to brace themselves. What follows may not be comfortable reading.
The first sign comes in Harrisburg even before Bush has walked into the room. The warm-up speaker is the local congressman for whose sake this whole event has been organised: he’s in a tough race and he needs some major-league help. His name is George Gekas, except in this campaign he has renamed himself George W Gekas. In 1998, there were Democrats who would have preferred an endorsement from Saddam Hussein than one from Bill Clinton. This time round, Republicans think Bush does them so much good that they’re morphing themselves into him.
The response when Gekas finally introduces his star visitor is ecstatic. That’s no big deal: this is a handpicked crowd. But Bush’s 35-minute address, a tweaked variation on the standard stump speech he’s been giving across the country, gives a clue as to why Dubya is still enjoying approval ratings healthily above 60%.
For one thing, he delivers it well. It’s a surprise, given the satirists’ depiction of him as a linguistically challenged dunce, to see him speak fluently and without so much as a glance at any notes. And hearing him at length is different from seeing a soundbite on the news. It will break liberal hearts to admit it, but he’s good.
In marked contrast to his dad, who always came across as an East Coast aristocrat, Junior has mastered the common touch. The case for tax cuts, for example, is that ”the best economic stimulus is to let people keep more of their own money.” And when explaining the need for educational standards and new exams, he has the wit to turn to the high-school band and say: ”I see some of the seniors here, glazing over, saying, ‘Oh, no, I hate tests.’ Well, too bad.”
The language is folksy and accessible throughout – even on the most grave, international questions. The war on terror is explained like this: ”See, it’s a different kind of war we face. In the old days, you could destroy tanks or aeroplanes or boats and know you’re making progress. [But] these are the kind of people who hide in caves and send youngsters to their suicidal deaths. They don’t care.”
Europeans may baulk at the simplicity of that, but it’s potent and effective. Here he is on Iraq, explaining why he urged the UN to enforce existing resolutions. ”I went because I want the United Nations to be a strong body, not the League of Nations. I went to remind them that if their word is not kept, they will become nothing but a debating society, unable to keep the peace.”
Keeping your own money; caves; a debating society. Every abstract idea has a visual image, making sure that when Bush speaks, as he might put it, no audience member is left behind. ”I personally really like him,” says Lisa Taglamg, who describes herself as a middle-class working mother. ”I’d invite him over to my house for a cup of coffee. Despite his family background, he seems like a common man.” There’s not a politician who doesn’t dream of a rating like that.
It helps that Bush appears so relaxed. He did in 2000, too, but now he looks even more comfortable, visibly at ease with himself – even down to the loose way he stands, one hand on each side of the podium. When Tony Blair visited the White House shortly after September 11 2001, he was amazed to find the president calmly hanging out, an hour or so before he was due to address a joint session of both houses of Congress. By common consent, this was the most important speech Bush had ever had to give. (Clinton would have been frenziedly rewriting and scribbling in the margin, even in the last-minute car ride down Pennsylvania Avenue.) Yet Bush was doing nothing. According to one account, Blair asked the president how come he was so relaxed. ”I’ve been told this is the speech of my life so many times, it kind of loses its impact a little,” he said. ”I’ve read it, I’ve rehearsed it,” he added. ”I’m ready.”
What emerges is a picture of a president with a deep inner confidence. He’s no intellectual; on that everyone agrees. (One senior Democrat laments that the office of presidency is wasted on a person so lacking in the ”curiosity” to really enjoy it.) But once he has ”internalised” a subject, says one close-up observer, he can speak from the heart about it. Education was that topic in the 2000 campaign. And after 9/11, the war on terror is the other. Suddenly there was a subject of which no one had greater knowledge than him; it was a brand-new, unforeseen event in which there could be no experts or veterans. There was no sage elite ready to condescend to the president. Bush felt as qualified as anyone else to address it.
The terror attacks also gave Bush something every leader needs: a moment when an emotional bond is sealed with his people. Clinton had his at the memorial service following the Oklahoma City bomb of 1995; Blair had his when he mourned Diana, the ”people’s princess”. Bush had an appalling first 36 hours after the Twin Towers were hit – appearing to run for cover rather than lead the nation – but things turned when he finally visited Ground Zero. Standing amid the rubble, he began to address the assembled emergency workers. With no PA system, he was inaudible. ”We can’t hear you,” one firefighter shouted, before a megaphone was passed to the president. ”Well, I can hear you,” he replied. ”And pretty soon the people who did this are gonna hear from all of us.” From that moment on, Bush’s numbers headed skyward.
Painful as it is for Democrats to admit, they face a president who has many of the qualities the job demands. He inspires loyalty: the Washington press corps complain that this is the least leaky White House anyone can remember. He is resolute, in a way that makes his lack of curiosity an asset: he is not tortured by seeing all sides of an argument. His back-slapping, frat-boy image does not convey it, but he also has some steel: not for nothing was he his father’s ”enforcer”, on one occasion breaking the news to his dad’s scandal-plagued chief-of-staff that his time had run out.
Some of that comes through in his stump speech. A veteran New York political operative once told me: ”Never underestimate the subtext of male violence that runs through American politics.” Voters need to believe their president is a tough guy, able to throw a punch if he has to. That’s why Michael Dukakis could never have been president and why candidate Clinton took off once he ”confessed” to having struck his abusive stepfather.
Bush feeds that gladiatorial appetite skilfully. ”Slowly but surely we’re going to hunt them down,” he warns the ”bunch of cold-blooded killers” of al-Qaida. There will be no limp-wristed attempt to understand terrorism’s root causes. ”See, therapy isn’t going to work,” he says to laughter. And, in a moment of pure Mafia-speak, he mentions an al-Qaida suspect caught by the US: ”This guy is no longer a problem for America,” he says, with an implicit wink. You could be watching the Sopranos.
Even as he taps into this need for a tough guy, Bush also understands Americans’ desire to see themselves as foot soldiers marching towards a higher, even religious, purpose. As he did in 2000, he preaches like the born-again Christian he is. He tells his audience that the terrorists believed America’s ”national religion was materialism.” They were wrong.
”So my call to America, if you want to join in the fight against evil, is to do some good, is to love your neighbour just like you’d like to be loved yourself. We’ve got to remember that government can help and government can hand out money, but it can’t put love in people’s hearts, it can’t put a sense of purpose in people’s lives.” No better example of that, he offers, than the passengers of Flight 93, who fought the hijackers and deliberately crashed their plane into the ground right here in Pennsylvania, rather than let it be used as a missile. ”They embodied the greatness of the American spirit.”
As he ends his speech predicting that incredible good will come from the evil of 9/11, asking, of course, that God Bless America, your thoughts can’t help but turn to Ronald Reagan. Many Brits and Europeans thought him a clown, a bozo too dumb to lead a dog, let alone the free world. Yet somehow he was re-elected in a landslide and is still loved and revered by his countrymen.
By now Bush has worked his way through the crowd, shaking a few hands when the giant doors of the hangar open to reveal a blue sky, and a wonderful horizon of Pennsylvania forest, its leaves turning all shades of russet, amber and gold. Slowly, the sleek shape of Air Force One is revealed, and suddenly there’s the president, ascending the steps, reaching the top and turning for a final wave. The whole picture is framed perfectly: the lone leader and the silver bird, all bathed in morning sunlight. It’s a Spielberg moment. And as the pom-poms shake, and the crowd cheers, a sharp, hard thought strikes. As Bush himself might put it, we misunderestimate this man at our peril.
Guardian Unlimited (c) Guardian Newspapers Limited 2001