IN THE SUMMER of 1995, Bill Clinton’s political fortunes were at their lowest ebb. His Democratic Party had recently ceded control of the US Congress to Republicans for the first time in more than three decades.
His ambitious plan to reform the nation’s healthcare system had foundered. His foreign policy excursions had included a disastrous retreat from Somalia and he was in an escalating battle with European allies reluctant to stop mass slaughter in the Balkans. Suffocating in the heat, he did what anyone would do in the circumstances. He went on holiday.
But being President Clinton, he didn’t do what the rest of us would have done — sling a bag in the back of a car and head for the beach. Instead of calling his travel agent, he called his pollster. Dick Morris, a man whose cynicism would make Machiavelli wince, was tasked with finding the President the perfect American vacation, the sort of trip that, when played out on the evening news, would play well with voters in swing states.
The Clintons were minded to do what they had done the past couple of years — enjoy the lavishly upholstered sympathy of their wealthy Democratic friends on Martha’s Vineyard, an island off the coast of Massachusetts that is about as close to Europe, geographically and culturally, as you can get in America.
Not a good idea, Morris’s cross-tabulations concluded. Too effete, too East Coast, too elite. A focus group or two later, Morris had hit on the perfect vacation. Head west. Camp out in a tent. Near mountains.
And so Bill, Hillary and Chelsea, and a couple of hundred of their faithful staff, dutifully flew to Wyoming. What followed was the near-perfect cameo of the miserable family holiday:Bill and Hillary barely speaking to each other, poor Chelsea bitten horribly by bugs the size of hub caps.
But the aesthetics are unimportant. It worked. Eighteen months later, after another carefully polled summer spent hiking and rafting in the West, Clinton became the first Democrat in 60 years to win two presidential elections.
Clinton, to be fair, wasn’t the first American President to exploit the innocent business of recreation for his political ends. Indeed the biggest difference from his predecessors was that he was impecunious then, in the days before rock-star book deals and $100,000 after-dinner speeches. He didn’t have a ranch or an oceanside compound or a peanut farm to call second home and so he could be choosy, even if, as with almost everything else about President Clinton, he took this liberty to extremes.
President Bush has never been impecunious and so his holiday retreats are familiar from year to year. He would in any case be as at home in Martha’s Vineyard as the patrician John Kerry would be in Biloxi, Mississippi, where the necks are redder than a Maine lobster.
But he finds himself under fire again this month for taking another long retreat from the White House to clear brush and barbecue steers at the ranch in Crawford, Texas. As the Iraq war looks steadily bleaker, as his poll ratings sink to their lowest yet, even some Republicans are a bit vexed that the President has gone away for what someone has calculated will be his ninth month at the ranch in less than five years.
But the political costs may be overstated. The politics of American presidential holidays are much scrutinised but their effects are complex.
It is true that the puritanical American spirit rebels slightly at the idea of seeing a man away from the office for so long. Since most Americans still take only a couple of weeks’ holiday a year, an element of personal indignation creeps in too.
And yet the presidential vacation is also perhaps the best opportunity the incumbent gets to put the stamp of his own character on the public images of his presidency. In the American system the popularity and indeed the effectiveness of the office-holder depends much more on the character of the man than is the case in European parliamentary systems. Feeling comfortable with their leader is almost as important to Americans as what he proposes on taxes or healthcare.
In stuffy, stiff-collared Washington, the dark-suited procession from speech to press conference to dinner leaves little room for the intrusion of presidential character in the public eye. But out there in Massachusetts or California or Texas, what a president chooses to do in the great hinterland is a rare insight into the man himself.
Our images of presidents are wrapped up in these carefully framed glimpses into their leisure: John Kennedy playing football on the lawns of the vast family compound in Hyannisport on Cape Cod; Lyndon Johnson on the ranch by the Pedernales River in Texas, taking reluctant reporters and guests on long tours: “Frank, how would you like to be hung like that?” he once asked a startled reporter to whom he showed off an especially favoured bull.
And they do of course get some serious work done on these trips. George Bush Snr constructed his “new world order” while catching bluefish with Brent Scowcroft in his boat off the family estate at Kennebunkport, Maine. He too took heat from the press for leaving Washington even as American troops were readying to oust Saddam Hussein’s forces from Kuwait in August 1991.
Richard Nixon was photographed smiling, taking walks along the Pacific Ocean at San Clemente before heading quickly inside to plot the destruction of his enemies. And the vacation retreat is often the scene of some critically important diplomacy. Leonid Brezhnev once insisted on staying in the Nixon villa, and since there was no guest room, had to sleep in daughter Tricia’s room, while the KGB crowded in next door in Julie’s room.
President Bush, famously, uses the invitation to Crawford as the most telling sign of his regard for other leaders. Tony Blair is there all the time. Jacques Chirac, naturally, has never been.
gerard.baker@thetimes.co.uk
