The Intranational President

GYUMRI, ARMENIA, November 7, 2000-As I sit before my keyboard on election morning I cannot help wondering how my kids know what I do not. Yesterday, my seventh formers learned about the current American presidential election. We talked about the issues (in 13-year-old-English-as-a-second-foreign-language terms): about Bush's tax cuts for the über-rich, about his commitment to keeping guns on the streets; about Gore's pledge to protect the environment and his desire to spread American prosperity the world over. After spending an hour coming to neutral terms about the race--the cigar-chomping fat cat versus the man of the people--I asked my students to vote. By an overwhelming margin, they chose Bush.

Insulated as I am from American media, culture and, well, Republicans, I must be forgiven for not getting it. As a Peace Corps volunteer in Armenia, I can't get Oprah, I can't get Drudge and BBC, the supposed World Service, is busy covering cricket matches in Sri Lanka. Limited to sobering Newsweek reports on war in the Middle East and earnest Voice of America commentaries on such scintillating topics as Nebraska's unicameral legislature, I am deprived of the images and soundbites that compose the fulcrum of the modern American presidential campaign.

I haven't seen the pedantic sighs or the "subliminable" messages or the kiss that gave Gore his August bounce. I don't get focus-grouped, Gallup never calls and, as far as I know, nary a candidate has appealed for the PCV vote. Stripped of the anecdotes, I vote on substance. So if George W. Bush makes his ascent to the White House this winter, as my children predict, this antipodean American will be left scratching his head.

The reason I put so much faith in children (even ones who met the candidates just twenty-four hours ago) is track record. Since 1956, Weekly Reader has polled American students prior to each election. And for 44 straight years the kids have been right. Yesterday, the venerable publication released its results for--as Comedy Central has dubbed it--Indecision 2000. It's Bush in a landside by 32 points.

If Bush wins today, as the children expect, it will be because he out-campaigned his opponent. In a year in which most voters stayed home, he will have articulated his positions well enough to mobilize his Republican troops and made few enough mistakes to gather up the undecideds that were never captivated by Al Gore. In the end, an American public with record-low expectations of their president will have elected Bush because he was the one they could abide on television every day.

If so, it will be a shame. Because the man best able to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States will have gone home to Tennessee. And the sunny, laid-back governor of Texas will be leader of the free world. If America were the United Kingdom, we woudn't be in such a quandary. Bush could be the figurehead and Gore, the policy wonk. This would have worked well in 1980, too. But in America, we ask one man to be all things and Bush is the one less capable of pulling it off.

After his ballyhooed failure to correctly name important foreign leaders last Spring, the governor was hardly challenged on foreign affairs during the balance of the campaign. When Jim Lehrer asked him during the second debate whether he agreed with American intervention in El Salvador, Nicaragua, Grenada, Lebanon, Libya and so on, Bush answered yes, no, yes, yes and yes. Americans can only wonder what his answer would have been to the follow-up: So what exactly did you like about the intervention in Lebanon?

Certainly Bush's knowledge will grow as he journeys through his tenure. I wasn't all that up on foreign affairs either until I began reading Newsweek regularly. But one must wonder about a public figure who had traveled abroad only three times in his life--though presented with ample opportunities--prior to the 2000 campaign. Not particularly fond of reading policy briefs, or literature for that matter, Bush doesn't strike you as someone who understands deeply what he is talking about.

Limited in his ability to discuss volatile happenings in other parts of the world, Bush falls back on well-worn Republican mantras. Most obtusely, that it's time to get big government out of the lives of the American people. Mr. Bush, I live in Armenia and can tell you what it's like when government stays out of the lives of the people.

Casting a shadow over my primary school in Gyumri, there stands a ten-story building that was ravaged by the 1988 earthquake and subsequent looting. When I arrived here last month, I pitied the people living near such a massive eyesore. Then two weeks ago, a bulldozer began the task of razing it and the site became an imminent deathtrap. Impossibly, somebody decided to take it down from the bottom up. Concrete blocks the size of sedans were left in a crumbled mess for days, littering the adjacent streets and inviting children to play in the wreckage.

Three days ago a child from School #15 was killed when a live load tumbled down upon him. When his body was brought to the school today, he was barely recognizable. As his classmates and the surrounding community mourned, there was a kind of resignation in the air. For most of the past century, the people were subject to a Soviet culture that showed little regard for life. They do not expect to be protected from hazardous construction sites because that is not what the government here is about.

George W. Bush puts great faith in businesses to act responsibly. But given voluntary regulatory compliance (as oil companies in Texas were given regarding environmental laws during the Bush regime) would American companies invest in fences to keep children out of harm's way? I'm not ready to live in an America that takes that chance. It's not likely that Bush will dismantle OSHA or the FDA or any of a number of regulatory agencies that make our nation great. But it is certain that he will not take steps to strengthen them.

So if the kids are right, I'll wake up tomorrow morning to another Bush administration. I don't get it, but then, I don't have the perspective of my compatriots at home. Ralph Nader and others say that the Republican and Democrat candidates are one in the same. That talk, though, is coming from home. Americans observers from overseas--whose ballots will not be counted until long after the nation has made its decision--tend to think otherwise. Maybe we can't see the entire picture from here, but we've got a pretty good view of the big picture.