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Listening to this again, through the prism of Bush’s later speeches, gave it a peculiar, mounting horror. Could he really have been that lost for words? One commentator suggested, ‘Something has happened to Bush’s mind. The aphasia, the stammering, his inability to present coherent thoughts.’ But this thought was never followed up. Instead we heard a lot from Michael Gerson, part of the team who coined phrases such as ‘axis of evil’ and ‘the Forces of Light and the Forces of Darkness’, who believes passionately that such stumbles are proof of Bush’s kinship with the common man, his authenticity. Most of us have done the same on occasion. It’s how we speak. In any case, he argues, Bush has also been remarkably eloquent.
Bremner did pull out of the archives some of the speeches where Bush was indeed extraordinarily fluent and persuasive. In fact, the programme concluded, if Bush had not been such an effective user of rhetoric, he would never have been elected. He might even come to be regarded as the best rhetorical president of all time. If only we had been given more archive footage, we would surely have come to a different conclusion.
On the World Service also on Saturday night, Owen Bennett-Jones co-hosted a live debate on what the President-Elect will inherit on Tuesday, with Kojo Nnamdi and broadcast in association with WAMU 88.5, the National Public Radio station in Washington DC. An audience of 200 seated in a mock courtroom at the Washington College of Law, along with listeners from around the world, were invited to question a panel of five Republican and Democrat experts on Obama’s audacious bid to dispel the cynicism by which the political process is now regarded. What can governments do to change things? The scale of his task was indicated not so much by what was said as by the gales of laughter from the audience when someone asked the question, ‘Will Obama still have the 82 per cent approval rating he is supposed to have now in four years’ time?’
It makes one wish we could leap back in time to the world of the original Spectator magazine, founded in 1711 by Joseph Addison and Richard Steele. This week’s Woman’s Hour Drama was inspired by the coffee-house culture of the capital in the early 18th century, when tradesmen, politicians, gentlemen of leisure congregated in temples of talk and tobacco, fuelled by copious amounts of caffeine. Dear Mr Spectator, dramatised by Elizabeth Kuti and starring a wonderfully droll Benjamin Whitrow as ‘Mr Spectator’, reminded us of the healthy scepticism, rather than defeatist cynicism, of the time. ‘I flatter myself,’ says Mr Spectator, who spends his days and much of the night sitting in the coffee house, watching and listening but never himself taking part, ‘that I can make a shrewd guess at the inmost thoughts and reflections of all whom I behold…’ It’s as good advice now as it was then, to be a spectator rather than a speculator.
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