Warts and All, by Matt Ridley
Bowman, James
gip r. Tocqueville," as some cretin of a proofreader has dignified him in this book, has a lot to answer for. Since his time (a century and a half ago, for those who may be in danger of...
...rr he author, that is, has got rather 1 carried away by his analogy...
...Where he stands a little further back from his partisanship he is more interesting...
...The reader, in the real world, is influenced by it...
...But the horror that Ridley feels at such incestuous goings-on suggests that he takes them to be somehow typical of America rather than just of politicians and the media, more or less throughout the world...
...The important thing to him was that Li'l Mike, like Jimmy Carter before him, stood for the demythologizing of American leadership (as well he might...
...And the people believed him...
...It is true that there is always some value in looking at one's own world through the eyes of an outsider, and Ridley for most of the book makes an effort not to let the more boring of his prejudices show...
...Here, for example, is the author's discussion of the relationship between news, analysis, and spin-doctoring in "the game" of reporting the candidates' debates: It starts in a fake environment that is supposed to be a sample of the real world: the focus group...
...As the race comes down to the wire, however, he allows himself to relive some of the anguish that he no doubt felt at the time—letting slip, for example, that the second debate went badly instead of "badly for Dukakis" or approving John Sasso's view that Bush's responsibility for the bombing of the Marine barracks in Beirut was the "moral equivalent" of Dukakis's for Willie Horton's crime...
...Ridley uses him rather than the lovable old Lama, however, in order the better to make his own Roundhead sympathies clear...
...Of course, there is never any shortage of Americans ready to feel guilty because their country is governed according to principles that do not come up to the standards of modern, enlightened Europe...
...Well, we mustn't blame him too much for that...
...Nobody is (including Tocqueville...
...And then they believed Bush when he equated the word with permissiveness—which Ridley acknowledges as one of its meanings...
...comment: "Matt Ridley, you're no Dr...
...And that is fun, as games should be...
...Perhaps by way of compensation, the press corps gets something of a bashing...
...But we cling perversely to our mythologies, and Ridley, like so many Englishmen before him, can't for all his love of America see why it should be so unless some sort of hoodoo is at work out there in the countryside where the press bus never penetrates...
...He has written Warts and All, a book about the 1988 election campaign that invites the inevitable James Bowman is American correspondent for the Spectator of London...
...Nor should it be held against him that that formulation now seems like a very bad joke in Massachusetts...
...And that is news...
...Since his time (a century and a half ago, for those who may be in danger of thinking him the product of one of our contemporary Ph.D...
...If the word "liberal" has become a pejorative, it is because Ronald Reagan made it so...
...Fancy that...
...WARTS AND ALL: THE MEN WHO WOULD BE BUSH Matt Ridley/Viking/281 pp...
...Indeed, his credulity about the American electorate is surpassed only by the credulity he attributes to the electorate itself...
...And here is an excuse for the world-weary modern European, who is so much more enlightened nowadays, to set a few dollars against his overdraft by telling the colonials how much behind the times they are...
...In the words that he uses to express his outrage at the inauthenticity of "Win one for the Gipper" (the real George Gipp never said that...
...here, apparently, the allusion points to his admirer's willingness to daub in everybody else's warts—and maybe to add some by way of artistic license...
...He "equated it in people's minds with statism, with big, bossy, greedy, central government, taking more than it gives...
...But, on the whole, for those who followed the election closely and who already know something about America, this is at best an unnecessary book...
...If the voters refuse to pay more in taxes to bail the politicians out of their budget deficit, it can only be because the Public is, in William Hazlitt's words, a "mean, stupid, dastardly, pitiful, selfish, spiteful, envious, ungrateful animal...
...something that Ridley sees as a prerequisite for the rest of the program as recommended by European-style social democracy...
...The focus group produces a result, which is treated as news by the television, where it is seen by an alert campaign staffer, who launders the information by passing it through a real politician (reporters quote politicians), who passes it on to a reporter, who passes it on to his reader in the guise of analysis...
...Is humanity not an ingenious thing...
...Accordingly, Ridley seems to have bought into the idea that the election was (or should have been) about competence rather than ideology...
...But his big insight here, that the American President is really more like a pre-Cromwellian British monarch than a democratic leader, was expressed earlier and better by his fellow countryman, Wyndham Lewis, who was an observer of the country in the Roosevelt/Truman years: "The American presidency is a magistracy comparable with that of the Dalai Lama and with nothing else on earth...
...What did the poor liberals ever do to be so calumniated among the simple peasantry...
...Well said, Wyndham...
...Michael Dukakis for one...
...mills), the idea of coming to America and telling the inhabitants what queer fish the rest of the world thinks them has struck far too many foreigners as the means to fame and riches...
...Now, for those who may be interested, it has so struck Matt Ridley, an Englishman, Oxonian, and Washington correspondent for the Economist...
...For the paradox of a book like this one is that, while purporting to be a gander at America from the outside, with all the freshness and originality that that promises, it is in fact written out of such a superficial knowledge of the country that it relies for its insights almost entirely on the conventional wisdom of the press corps, which seems to comprise the majority of Ridley's American acquaintances...
...Cromwell'sasking to be painted "warts and all" is usually taken to be an example of his own humility...
...The scandal of it...
...Or, rather, the folkways of the American media do...
...Hence, I presume, the title...
...If the people are prosperous and vote to continue in that state, it can only be because some clever Republicans have created an "illusion of prosperity...
...19.95 James Bowman 44 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JULY 1990...
...Charles I is a feeble analogy by comparison...
...If the President is a divine-right monarch, a throwback to the days "when people fell for ideas like that," then his subjects must be dupes atavistically—strange survivors of that curious breed of suckers which populated medieval Europe...
Vol. 23 • July 1990 • No. 7
