Ascent to the White House

At the end of an unexpected tortuous process which has left behind thousands of uncounted votes, George W. Bush, as President-elect, is ready to assume what some Americans call, without irony, the 'leadership of the free world'. His career has never failed to illustrate the meaning of that old tune, 'Oh, I get by with a little help from my friends'. The most hopeful part of the election has been the long drawn-out denouement. More than half of the electorate signalled its rejection of the system this year by not bothering to vote. It is only now - after all the legal skulduggery, the distracting talk of recounts and chads, pregnant or not - that a real possibility emerges: of disgust and outrage giving way to a small awareness of how a hollow system has managed to perpetuate itself for so long. An exclusive analysis by PANKAJ MISHRA, who observed the U.S. elections first hand.

ONE of the many good lines in Gore Vidal's play "The Best Man" (1960), which has been enjoying a mini-revival in New York, is this: "Men without faces tend to get elected president, and power or responsibility of honour fill in the features pretty well". This was the view that the giant money-making machines behind the Republican party took when they chose Ronald Reagon, known until then as a mediocre Governor of California and an even more mediocre actor, as their candidate in 1980. As it turned out, Reagan managed to pull off the greatest role of his life, even as he left many Americans uncertain about his basic reading and thinking faculties. He was barely coherent towards the end of his tenure; the cruellest joke about his Alzhemier's I heard was: "How did they know?" But he appeared - and appeared was all - positively presidential as Soviet communism collapsed ("Mr. Gorbachev, Tear down that wall!") and America was left standing tall and unbowed as the only superpower.

Early this year, George W. Bush - emerging blank-faced from the back rooms where his own important deals with corporate America had been struck - did not even seem up to the dissimulation and twinkly-eyed charm that Reagan was capable of. On the hundreds of podiums he appeared, he never looked less than uneasy. His face assumed a startled expression whenever he spoke; and he uttered nothing but the dreariest cliches ("I'am a unifier, not a divider"), when he was not lapsing into malapropism and solecism. Walking through a crowd, he appeared no more than a bundle of winks and smirks and grins and robust handshakes: the small- college fund-raiser: the man essentially without a centre, I would often think, watching him each night, and then come up again against the question many Americans were asking each other and themselves: "How did this guy get to be where he is?"

Certainly, as the son of a former President, Bush had gone though all the right motions: posh boarding school (Andover), Ivy League universities (Yale and Harvard business school). At none of these places did he excel, except as a host of parties and prankster. You would expect that someone so privileged might at some point try to distinguish himself in some way unconnected with his father's influence; might perhaps attempt, as many do, a bit of defiant slumming in the Third World.

But, no, curiosity, individuality, achievement - that is not George W. Bush (It is worth remarking here that in an age of mass tourism, when a plumber from Texas is likely to have an impressive frequent-flier record, Bush's only forays outside America have been to China and Mexico). His father's oil-baron friends and lackeys helped him set up his oil businesses; they rescued him each time the business failed, and gave him more money to lose. They helped him indulge an adolescent passion for sports by making him the front man for the purchase of a baseball team. Such tenacious supporters backed him all the way to the Governor's mansion in Texas. Occasionally there were whispers of drinking and drug-taking; but the best way to end such rumours in the American South is to embrace, publicly and fervently, the man from Nazareth: at some point Bush was "born again" as a Christian.

The meaninglessness of this conversion is revealed by the fact that as Governor of Texas, he sent more than 100 people to the electric chair - more than any governor in the United States. While holding one of the least taxing gubernatorial jobs in America - according to a recent biography, Bush was often to be found playing solitaire on his computer - he also presided over Texas's descent to some of the lowest country-wise rankings in public health and environment. It would take some courage to even stand on such an abysmal record; and Bush's chances in the primaries looked bleak at first against the highly articulate Republican Senator John McCain, Vietnam veteran and advocate of campaign finance reform. But then you saw the money his friends gave him - $100 million, the largest primaries campaign kitty of all times - and there was no question about who was going to be the Republican candidate for President.

His opponent, Albert Gore, "with his wooden Clark Kent good looks", inspired other doubts. Power and responsibility of honour may fill in the features on the President's face; but the vice- president remains necessarily faceless. Gore had served eight years in office as Bill Clinton's deputy, during which time America reached a new summit of prosperity, a glorious stage in the pursuit of private happiness. It was a great platform for Gore except that no one was quite sure if he had a role to play in this prosperity; and his claims, that he had invented the Intenet and had inspired Eric Segal's Love Story, revealed an eagerness for a place in the sun that could never be his as long as Clinton was around. Then, after the Lewinsky fiasco, when Clinton lost his honour, and lost with it his dignity, Gore, standing beside him, looked even more faceless. For much of the campaigning, he struggled to prove that not only was he a man but he was, as he put it, "his own man".

There was pathos in Gore's attempt. His father might have been a Senator, but he had worked hard to make his own way. He had gone to Vietnam while Bush, like many rich kids, had managed to stay out of the war. Gore had served as a professional politician for over two decades in Washington D.C.. He had published a not badly written book - and, after all, how many men running for high public office in the West had ever dared to call Western civilisation "dysfunctional"? His favourite novel, as he told a plainly bemused Oprah Winfrey, was the rather highbrow The Red and the Black (even the New York Times could not help underlining the risks Gore was taking by identifying the author of the novel as one Robert Stendhal).

An intellectual was not what anyone seemed to want in the Oval Office. Indeed, Gore's problem lay in assuring the vast American public that he was not a nerd, but a "regular guy", someone that they could feel comfortable with. The most commonplace remark one heard about him until the Democratic convention was that he had failed to define himself to his audience. This was put down to Gore's stiffness in public; a kind of personality flaw, which some behind-the-scenes makeover might deal with.

But there was more to Gore's fuzzy image than what the great image-makers of American politics - seen recently at work on Clinton - could deal with. For it was partly a result of the ideological blurring his party had indulged in to great effect in the 1990s by abandoning its traditional roots in the working classes and the minorities and moving to the right - or, to what in America is known as "the centre": the spacious place where the majority of the middle-class electorate now lives. Bill Clinton had shown the way here, with his many smooth deceptions and about-turns, his ability to make surrenders to conservative free- market pressures look like a dire necessity, while slackening government control all the time - a journey imitated to great success in the United Kingdom by Tony Blair and even theorised as the "Third Way".

THAT imaginary centre was what Bush sought to occupy from the beginning of his campaign. His slogans were of compassionate conservatism, and the ideological baggage he had to jettison on the way was of the Christian right and its various fanaticisms about abortion, and the minorities - the kinds of extremism that alienated the new middle class voter from the Republican party. At the same time he preached a higher form of selfishness, dressed up in populist homilies. Biggest budget surplus in years? Let us use it to give tax breaks to the American people (never mind that the wealthiest one per cent of the population saved more money on tax than the Government spent on education and health). Deteriorating public health and education? Trust the people, not the government. Trouble in the Balkans? Let the Europeans take care of it. Oil crisis? Let us dig up Alaska, where there is bound to be more oil. Crime? Tougher sentences and more executions.

But in those early days most of that public seemed too apathetic - less than half of the electorate bothered to vote in 1996 - and its occasional bored glance at the presidential candidates came to quickly rest on Al Gore's tie or George W. Bush's struggles with the English language ("We cannot let terrorists or rogue nations hold this nation hostile, hold our allies hostile") and general knowledge ("Nigeria is an important continent").

According to a poll, less than 17 per cent of the electorate were following the long-drawn out presidential campaign, until the Republican and Democratic Conventions in July. The conventions - over staged TV-ops - managed to get some more people interested. Bush began to look plausible in the way he had not while running the primaries against McCain, when, as a journalist put it, the more you looked at him, the less you saw. At the convention, Bush read out a long speech, his small features distorted by the intensity of his concentration. He spoke of restoring dignity and honour to the White House; he said the obligatory things about loving his Mom and Dad, both of whom were in the audience, a little aged since they were last seen in public, but beaming brightly. He appeared with a few Hispanics and Black people on stage, and steered clear of the right-wing Christian fanatics who threatened to spoil his chances with the Americans in the centre. The Economist said, with more hope than conviction, that Bush managed to look Presidential.

And suddenly, then, Bush raced ahead in the opinion polls. It shocked many people who had never taken him seriously, and who had expected the election to be a doddle for Gore, assuming that the electorate would not want to rock the boat at a time of peace and prosperity, with crime and unemployment at their lowest levels, and median income at its highest. Clearly, something else was going on; but it was hard to figure out what.

That prosperity breeds isolation and political indifference had never been truer than it was in America last year. In the days before America acquired an empire, and became a superpower, Gertrude Stein once said that America was the oldest country since it was the first to be modern. It seems older now, despite the ever-shiny gloss of consumerism; and like, all old empires, provincial and complacent at its very heart, turning away from the world, satiated, and returning to itself. During the last year in America I have found middle-class people I have known for some years busy moving up in the world, acquiring bigger houses, a Jacuzzi for the bath, another, more upmarket, car, a new baby seat; it was hard to get them to talk about the Presidential candidates. Early in the morning, I would go down to their hall- like kitchens and find the TV screens dumbly scrolling the disappointments of Nasdaq, falling steadily since March. The economy was cooling, everyone said, preparing for a "soft landing" after the astonishing growth rates of previous years. In the meantime, the shopping had to go on. The malls in Los Angeles and Santa Barbara were slicker than I remembered them to be from just two years before: small groups of heavily made up middle-aged women, clumsily lipsticked teenaged girls, revolving around vast Taj Mahals of steel-bright shop windows, shoes, and jeans and TVs from China, India, El Salvador and Thailand. Even the shopping bags looked expensive.

Never have so many people anywhere in the world had it so good; and the more widely the wealth spread - more than 50 per cent of American households now have investments on Wall Street - the greater appeared the indifference towards politics. The only signs of dissent came from what Americans were calling the radical left: from liberal conservatives like Ralph Nader, the consumer rights campaigner, who has emerged as a major critic of globalisation, and who was the Green Party candidate for President.

I had watched Nader at work in Seattle, during the demonstrations against the World Trade Organisation meeting in November 1999. He was the unchallenged superstar of the event - among the partisans of the 1960s, the eager-eyed grey-haired baby-boomers, whose babies strapped to their ageing, but exercise-toned, bodies proclaimed their late, and somewhat anxious, membership of the bourgeois world; among the committed young people in their twenties and thirties - part of the small, but always impressive, culture of alternative politics in America - who had travelled from far-off places in order to join the protests in Seattle; and among the very young, barely out of their Nikes, who followed Nader in excited little loyal groups as he strode from one forum to another, denouncing corporate greed and power.

We were to witness a demonstration of just how ruthless that power could be after a few masked anarchists ransacked a few retail outlets of multinational chains: the Gap, Starbucks, Macdonald's. It was only some small and quite containable unruliness - students at Lucknow University are much more highspirited. But the news incited hysterical outbursts from the local TV anchors - anorexic, blow-dried blondes - about barbaric Mongol hordes ransacking the city of Bill Gates and Paul Allen. The Mayor urgently asked for the National Guard to be flown into Seattle; and soldiers filled the avenues of downtown, malevolent figures in their black armour and Darth Vader gas masks and various kinds of guns: mostly young, hormonally disturbed men, looking for a bit of "action". They were quick to use their gizmos; and after some unprovoked tear-gassing and pepper- spraying of demonstrators, rumours spread across Seattle of a 1968-Berkeley-like crackdown when the National Guard, sent in by Ronald Reagan and Richard Nixon to break up a dharna at the university, had shot a few students. (Great men not only think but also act alike. In a recent memoir, I find the near- pathological Nixon boasting to some visiting Chinese diplomats of his "firmness" during the protest while complimenting his visitors on their handling of Tiananmen Square.)

By the time of the Democratic National Convention in Los Angeles, the big trade unions, so visible in Seattle, had decided to support Gore, despite his advocacy of the free trade treaties. The more important environmental groups soon followed suit, not out of any belief in Gore's loudly expressed environmentalism - the perverse policies of the Clinton-Gore administration, after all, led to the failure of the recent Kyoto summit on global warming - but because the alternative, Bush and his oil-company pals digging up Alaska for four years, could not even be contemplated. And some of the energy and momentum had gone out of the few protesters who refused to endorse Gore and arrived in Los Angeles to express their dissatisfaction with the rightward swing of the Democratic party.

Los Angeles, with its suburban sprawl, is ill-suited for demonstrations; and the Government, embarrassed by the failure and chaos of Seattle, did its best to intimidate the few demonstrators into fearful passivity. In the process it tried to demonise the protests as a violent and unprecedented assault on civilisation as we know it. About 100 trees were uprooted in front of the big Staple Centre where the convention was being held. Reason? They might be used, said the organisers, as weapons by the protesters. Rows of heavily-armed police with steel and concrete barricades barred the way in every direction; mounted police charged a demonstration, trampling upon dozens of people, as the storm troopers behind them opened fire with rubber bullets. It seemed apt that in the midst of all this, at one of the "shadow" conventions organised by some well-connected American publicists, Gore Vidal should explain why he thought of America as the biggest "terrorist state" in the world.

I had heard Vidal give more or less the same speech at the Royal Geographic Society in London the previous year. He had raised a few over-eager laughs among the English audience, which, liberal upper middle class and traditionally anti-American, was reverential before Vidal, the Great American Novelist. But not everyone among his audience in Los Angeles, or among the protesters, knew who the big corpulent man with the old-fashioned drawl and twitchy smile was.

You could have blamed the ignorance on Los Angeles, where bit actors and starlets tend to be better known than writers. You could also have blamed it on America's educational system, whose law standards are now so widely and deeply felt - 60 per cent of American high-school graduates tested for reading skills recently failed to summarise a New York Times editorial - that it has at last become a major electoral issue.

THE issues, however, came later for Al Gore; the doubts about his "personality" had to be addressed first, and that meant getting out of the shadow of the Clintons, both of whom had come and gone by the time Gore arrived in Los Angeles. The choice of the notoriously pious Jewish Senator, Joseph Lieberman, as his running mate, was part of Gore's strategy of moving, sans Clinton, to the political and cultural centre of the nation. Lieberman was a bitter critic of Clinton over the Monica Lewinsky issue. He also shares some of the lamer ideas of the American right on education, and is close to such conservative "intellectuals" as William Bennett in his determination to curb excessive violence and sex in Hollywood films.

Sentimental liberals in Hollywood are among the few members of the American plutocracy that donate generously to the Democrats; they are much sought after. After a semi-inspiring speech at the convention, Bill Clinton had slunk off to ask his Hollywood friends - Barbara Streisand, Steven Spielberg, Tom Hanks - for contributions to his presidential library in Arkansas and to his wife's campaign in New York for the Senate. Lieberman realised that he may have deprived his campaign of a few million dollars; and just before his confirmation in Los Angeles as the official vice-presidential candidate, he promptly toned down his criticism of Hollywood studios.

However, the most widely discussed moment of the Democratic convention came when after a slide show of family photographs Gore grabbed his depressive blonde wife, Tipper, on stage and kissed her for what seemed like a long, passionate and very well- scripted television moment. "Give me a break, Larry" Gore drawled when teased about the kiss on "Larry King Live". The upsurge of passion was entirely spontaneous, he said, not really expecting anyone to believe him. For, well before the convention, both Mr. and Mrs. Gore had seen it fit to coyly drop hints that all was going well in the vice-presidential bedroom. The kiss was a clearer message to the American public that opinion pollsters said had been put off by Clinton's philandering: not only was Gore his own man; he was also Tipper's man; and no over-sexed White House intern was likely to disturb his domestic arrangements.

The kiss worked for Gore. He suddenly seemed to possess "personality"; and he shot ahead of Bush in the opinion polls; a marginal lead, but significant nevertheless. Meanwhile, Bush made some more gaffes; he had trouble with the word, "subliminal" and eventually got it out as "subliminable". He also used a juicy American expletive for a New York journalist, not realising that the microphones before him were still turned on.

The jokes on the popular late night shows - David Letterman and Jay Leno - about Bush's abilities mounted. Only Al Gore can defeat Al Gore, Nader predicted correctly; and it did seem easy for Gore just before the beginning of the debates. It accounted for the way he, supremely confident of his intellectual superiority over Bush, smirked and sighed his way through the first debate.

Nothing very substantial was discussed. Nader had been kept out of the presidential debates and was prevented from even joining the audience. It meant that no profounder questions about the way the candidates were financed by American corporations could be asked. There was no mention of the dangerously deluded American war on drugs in Columbia; America's large prison population; the dangers of nuclear proliferation; the absurd folly of Missile Defense that the Pentagon has embraced again. There was nothing about globalisation or global warming.

An Indian-American newspaper I saw the week after the debate lamented the fact that neither candidate thought India important enough to mention even once in the debates. The lack of reference to India looks less criminal when you consider the shallow discussion of foreign policy. Bush struck an old American isolationist posture, going on about how America should not get involved in "nation-building" - fancy word he repeated again and again, which to his constituency was code for: why should we bother ourselves with these strange people in Europe and Africa? Gore went on about an equally platitudinous and self-serving American commitment to democracy and human rights. Neither thought it fit to mention even once the role of the United Nations. But then this might be because the U.N. increasingly acts like a U.S. Government agency, despite being owed millions of dollars in annual contributions by the American Government.

I WATCHED the debate at a small Democratic club in Los Angeles. Rich, middle-aged professionals holding mini cannons of beer huddled around two big TV screens, erupting into loud boos whenever Bush's syntax unspooled - and Bush did at times look, as that excellent columnist, Maureen Dowd, said the next day, like Cary Grant in "North by NorthWest", hanging from a cliff as his fingertips are stamped on.

At the Democratic club, I noticed a tall, attractive, heavily made-up woman. She moved briskly through the crowd; she never said much, but flashed broad brilliant smiles at anyone who caught her eye. She turned out to be the local Democratic candidate for the U.S. Congress, and she won her election thereby demonstrating that she knew better than Gore what was expected of her: a pleasingly vague and unchallenging personality, not abstract, menacingly difficult ideas.

Admittedly, Bush performed well about expectations, which were absurdly low. But there was no doubt in my mind that Gore looked more convincing, certainly appeared more well-informed as he caught out his opponent more than once on matters of fact. So much was also clear to the network pundits, most of whom thought Gore had won the debate. But then as the opinion pollsters fanned out, the American people turned out to have different views on the subject. A majority thought, astoundingly, that Bush had come across as amiable and good-hearted. Gore, on the other hand, appeared too overbearingly bureaucratic and robot-like in his command of facts and figures.

THE opinion polls now put Bush and Gore on level; and then Gore made his crucial mistake in the second debate. Instead of attacking Bush's record as Governor of Texas, he tried to be a "regular guy"; he tried to play the game by Bush's rules. Gone were the smirks and long deep sighs over the more egregious instances of Bush's stupidity; he looked mellow, even conciliatory: "I agree with Governor Bush" was a line he used often.

However, the polls still showed no improvement in Gore's position as the debates went on; and his switch to a more confrontational tone in the third debate only confused voters more. There was no let up in the overall inanity of the discussion. Minor points were scored; the important issues and questions stayed off the table. Gore promised to spend twice as much as Bush on the military, and no one of course asked why in times of peace should this allocation - already 51 per cent of the budget - be increased. Bush joined Gore in blaming the violence in the Occupied Territories, then just beginning to intensify, on Yasser Arafat. "We stand with Israel, and we want Arafat to pull back," Gore said, offering the same old blindly partisan American view of the Middle-East.

But that was predictable. What struck me as odd was that someone with so legitimate a claim as Gore about his contribution to America's well-being should be so defensive; should keep playing down the role of the Government while trading with Bush those stereotypical accusations that Democrats and Republicans first patented more than 100 years ago. Bush accused him repeatedly of not trusting the people and conspiring to extend the role of the Government, and all he could say was that he was in fact an opponent of big government.

It could be puzzling to the outsider but Bush was working up some old American anti-government and anti-intellectual suspicions when he portrayed Gore as the evil insider, part of the Washington D.C. technocratic elite that was going to extend the role of the Federal Government to all areas of American life. Bush, it seemed, had triumphed in precisely that area of the political unconscious the pundits had disregarded: the American distrust of bureaucracy.

There was also some truth in the allegation that Gore is an insider. He had not concealed the fact that he had been brought up by his ambitious political family to be President. He has worked all his life towards that end in Washington D.C.. His mentor is Martin Peretz, who taught Gore at Harvard and now, as the owner of the influential magazine, the New Republic, is part of the intellectual establishment of Washington D.C..

But it is also true that Bush himself, with a father as former President and a brother as Governor, is as much a scion of a political dynasty as Gore, as much a fully paid up member of the oligarchy as Gore. What Bush portrayed as a kind of class struggle - the Texan outsider versus the East Coast sophisticate - was in fact a struggle within the same class: two men from established political families fighting for the same political space - the centre - that the exigencies of post-affluence politics had brought them. What mattered then were appearances: despite his Ivy-league education, Bush was a "regular guy", spoke the kind of English you spoke, someone you could go fishing with, and Gore, speaking in long correct sentences and perennially spouting statistics about arcane aspects of public health, was a "policy wonk".

SUCH were public perceptions of the two candidates; and one never ceased to be surprised by what they contained and what they left out. For me, the strangest, and perhaps most truthful, moment of the debates came when Bush exulted, during a discussion of crime, over the executions of two Black men in Texas. In the days before he ran for President, he had once publicly mocked the clemency appeal of Carla Faye Tucker, a woman convict in Texas who was later executed. "Please," he had mimicked her plea before a journalist, "Please don't kill me." "Guess what?!," he blurted out during the debate, his eyes sparkling in the way they do when occasionally he forgets all the diligent briefings given to him and speaks his own mind, "Guess what?! They are being put to death!."

He was questioned about the show of glee by a Black member of the audience in the next debate. Bush then denied that he could be made happy by the prospect of putting someone to death. But there was no mistaking the lapse from the posture of compassionate conservatism. It was the kind of accidental self-betrayal that would have ended the career of a politician in any democratic country in the West. Except America, which is full of surprises in this regard, where you still come up against the harshness and rawness of the old frontier world. This is particularly obvious in the way that guns are regulated, or are not regulated, in the United States. The National Rifle Association, which prevents strict laws from coming into being, is a well-funded and politically significant lobby. A man I knew well in Virginia turned out to be member; and he had good reasons. In the wild open countryside in which he lived, the police were unreliable, even corrupt. He could not feel safe without guns in his house. He was not being paranoid either: the biggest scandal in Los Angeles for some time involves the members of an elite police squad who sold seized drugs and killed and maimed several innocent people. He said he would vote against any candidate who attempts to enact gun-control laws; and there were many more people like him, people with their own private reasons to be against the even very conservative agenda tentatively proposed by the Democratic party.

As a visitor, you do not really get to see them; you tend to meet educated liberal Americans who vote for the Democratic party. The existence of a Republican constituency in the big empty country becomes clearer only as you travel thorough the small states of the South and the Mid-West, or through the ranches of California, the country clubs of Los Angeles and Dallas. In Oklahoma, a professor of English Literature shook his head and said, "We are outnumbered here. The place is full of Republican voters and right wring Christian fanatics who will have no truck with anyone wanting to make marriage legal for homosexuals. Gore has not even bothered to campaign here." The businessman in an Armani suit in Salt Lake City, Utah, was blunt: "I'll vote for Bush because he gives tax cuts to wealthy people like me."

Bush did look stronger with each passing day. Nader, who seemed set to take away a lot of the politically conscious voters that might have gone to Gore, contemptuously rejected suggestion that he step down in favour of the Democratic candidate. There were signs of desperation from Gore, as he barnstormed the "swing states" - the states with the majority of undecided voters. He appeared on an MTV show, where Bill Clinton had previously answered questions about his underwear, and confessed to wearing a leather jacket as a teenage motorcyclist; then tried to appear like a "regular" American teenager by sprinkling his responses with Hull-loh and Puh-leeze. He looked too keen to oblige as audiences demanded that he repeat his LA Convention kiss with Tipper.

Frivolity; but the mood in New York was sombre. Hillary Clinton was all set to win the Senate seat; and New York was expected to vote for Gore. But the news from the rest of America - which seems far way in New York - was bad. It was now clear that Gore had run a confused and confusing campaign; he had rushed to occupy the centre; he had failed to mobilise the minority votes; he had invented a new personality for himself each week in response to the opinion polls. Journalists and magazine editors were already anxious about the team of advisors and lackeys Bush would assemble around himself: the cabinet members and backroom boys who would manufacture the same cue-cards they held out to Reagan and his father. ("I am a delegator, I believe in team- work" was one of the lines he used to shoot down questions about his shaky hold on domestic and foreign policy issues). Already, Bush was invoking some old names, mostly of the vaguely right wing mediocrities that had worked for his father, Condoleezza Rice and Colin Powell among them. There were worries that a Bush victory that would put the country back, both economically and culturally; would destroy the gains of the Clinton presidency.

At dinner one night at my publisher's home, five days before polling day, a Black writer began to reminisce about Clinton, who, while still in office, was already inspiring nostalgia. "He is our first Black President," she told me. Less than a week later, thousands of Black voters were to be illegally disenfranchised in Florida, in a manner reminiscent of the cruel old days in the American South. The exaggeration, from someone who ought to have known better, was disturbing. But it spoke of the small change liberal American voters had to scramble for in the absence of any real political capital. It told one about how it is not only possible but also sometimes necessary to be very naive about the American political system, even when you have the essential information, even when you know about the crude ways in which candidates are made and unmade, the back room deals with and sell-outs to business lobbies.

SIX weeks later, at the end of an unexpectedly tortuous process which has left thousands of votes still uncounted, we find George W. Bush as President-elect, ready to assume what some Americans call, without irony, the "leadership of the free world". Bush's career has never failed to illustrate the meaning of that old tune, "Oh, I get by with a little help from my friends". The manner of his ascent to the White House, has opened up an altogether new dimension to the word, "cronyism". In the process, we have been provided clearer answers to the question, "How did this guy get to be where he is?"

The Governor of Florida, who happens to be Bush's brother, did his bit by disenfranchising thousands of Black voters and sending out old and unreliable voting machines to Democratic-dominated counties. The Florida Secretary of State, who also only happened to be Bush's campaign chairman in the state, could not wait to certify Bush's "victory". When things did not look good, the Supreme Court judges appointed by his father and Ronald Reagan stepped in to bring about the necessary closure. It of course only so happened - to round off the circle of cosy venality - that the son of the most conservative and sanctimonious judge works for the law firm that represented Bush. All this time, Bush hid himself in his Texan ranch, while the loyal courtiers of the Bush family, the patrician figure of James Baker III leading the army of filibustering lawyers, worked hard to reassert his dynastic right.

A rather blatant sort of corruption has always existed in American politics, right from the beginning - Huey Long of Louisiania could have taught Sadhu Yadav a few lessons about booth-capturing. If it is not very apparent, it is because the illusion of national wholeness and moral superiority is stronger in America than anywhere else in the modern world. Henry Adams, himself a member of one of American's most distinguished political families, had no doubts: "We have a single system, and in that system the only question is the price at which the proletariat is to be bought and sold, the bread and circuses. From top to bottom the whole system is a fraud, all of us know it, labourers and capitalists alike, and all of us are consenting parties to it."

That is why the most hopeful part of the election has been the long drawn-out denouement. More than half of the electorate signalled their rejection of the system this year by not bothering to vote. Gore's refusal to accept that he had been outmanoeuvred by a cannier rival brought more of its infirmities into welcome light. It is only now - after all the legal skulduggery, the distracting talk of recounts and chads, pregnant or not - that a real possibility emerges: of disgust and outrage giving way to a small awareness of how a hollow system has managed to perpetuate itself for so long.

No wonder the voices calling for unity and reconciliation are currently very loud - and they come from not the people whose votes were not counted, but from the men who run America, the big corporations, the jittery investors on Wall Street, and their employees, the mainstream press and networks, and the professional politicians in Washington D.C.. Instability of the kind we have seen in the last few weeks can only be bad for the country; and a President crippled by a hung Senate and Congress, and pursued by questions about his legitimacy (A Miami newspaper has just been given permission to count the votes in that state) promises more instability. So: time to lend the President a hand. Clearly, a system that has served so many people well cannot be undermined for too long and so radically; and, after all, four years later, the same farcical show needs to go on the road again. So it may; but there will be more sceptics next time, and one can only hope that their number will increase, as the economy slows down and a hapless George W. Bush drinks from the poisoned chalice handed to him by the real leaders of the free world.

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