AMERICA/Conor O'Clery: On the receiving line at the Christmas party in the White House, Congressman Peter King from Long Island remarked to George Bush: "Mr President, they still love you in New York." Then, recalled King, as he went to walk away, "the President pulls me back and says in a stage whisper, 'You're going to be seeing a lot of me in New York' and gives me this big nod and a wink, like, 'You dope, I'm trying to tell you something'."
King said he nodded back "like I understood, but I had no idea what he meant. It didn't hit me until the next day when I heard some stuff about the convention coming to New York that I realised what he was trying to tell me."
This week it became official. The Republican Party will hold its convention in New York next year for the first time. The decision is a triumph for Mayor Michael Bloomberg. He ferried members of the Republican site selection committee by horse-drawn carriage to his upper East Side townhouse for dinner and got local union leaders to assure them there would be no labour problems.
A dinner last month with Bush's political adviser Karl Rove closed the deal, which is worth $150 million to New York and will fill 22,000 hotel rooms for a week.
It was a smart move by the White House. A festival of Republicans in Madison Square Gardens may not deliver New York on a plate - no Republican presidential candidate has won the state since Ronald Reagan in 1984 - but it will give the impression that the Grand Old Party is willing to rise above partisan politics to honour the city wounded by the September 11th attacks.
Broadening its base was not uppermost in the minds of the Democrats when they decided on Boston - the heartland of liberal America - for its convention. The deeply divided Democrats can do little right these days. They were made to look petulant when Bloomberg refused to give them exclusive rights to New York and then departed in a huff when he continued to woo the Republicans.
Peter King, well known in Ireland for his support for Sinn Féin, also tells me that he is intending to run as the Republican challenger to incumbent Democrat Senator Charles Schumer in the 2004 election. That is, unless Republican leaders first persuade former New York mayor Rudolph Giuliani to run for the seat which would likely be his for the taking, given his popularity after September 11th.
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THIS week President Bush stunned the nation by announcing $674 billion in tax cuts, double the amount he had been contemplating a week before. Was this the action of a bold leader prepared to go for broke (which America may well be when the tax cuts take effect) or of a president who has a problem with figures?
Obviously not the latter, but it is somewhat disconcerting to read from a White House insider that "Bush has a poor memory for facts and figures" and "sometimes forgot whether his tax plan's last rate reduction went into effect in 2005 or 2006."
This comes from David Frum, a former conservative writer for the Weekly Standard, who was brought in as a speech-writer after Bush's inauguration and has now published the first insider book to emerge from the Bush White House, The Right Man: The Surprise Presidency of George W. Bush.
Frum describes a White House of morning Bible study meetings, conservative dress, fastidious punctuality and zero tolerance for even mild swear words like "damn". In this intellectual bleak house, "conspicuous intelligence seemed actively unwelcome".
Apart from Karl Rove and budget director Mitch Daniels, "one seldom heard an unexpected thought . . . or met someone who possessed unusual knowledge".
The president's vision was clear, Frum writes, but words often fail him and his memory betrays him. He is "is impatient and quick to anger; sometimes glib, even dogmatic; often incurious and as a result ill-informed; more conventional in his thinking than a leader probably should be."
In Oval Office meetings, Bush is a sharp exception to the White House code of niceness, "tart, not sweet, impatient and quick to anger". In private he is in fact not the "easy genial man he was in public". Close up "one saw a man keeping a tight grip on himself", a former drinker who woke up every morning knowing one thing for certain, that "today was a day he would not have a drink".
Ideologically Frum is a hawk and much of the book is a shrill polemic against the Palestinian authority and its "thuggish" leader Yasser Arafat. He gives a revealing insight into the White House take on the Middle East after September 11th.
"Could we really suppose that we could begin the war against terror by creating an Arafatistan on the West Bank?" he writes. "That would be like Churchill starting the war against Nazism by ceding Northern Ireland to the British Union of Fascists."
It is not surprising to learn that Frum was responsible for "Axis of Evil", the phrase used by Bush in his State of the Union address last year to link Iraq, Iran and North Korea and which has come back to haunt the White House. Just yesterday, North Korea's UN ambassador Pak Gil Yon said it singled out his country as a target of pre-emptive nuclear attack and helped to precipitate the current crisis.
The phrase started out as "axis of hatred" to describe "terrorist states and terrorist organisations" and became "axis of evil" to synchronise more with Bush-speak. North Korea was added as an afterthought.
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HAVING accumulated political capital among African Americans by seeing off Trent Lott as Senate Majority leader, President Bush is in danger of squandering it by renominating Judge Charles Pickering of Mississippi to the appellate court, the second-highest in the land.
Once again the administration finds itself embroiled in an ugly national debate over accusations of a Republican race-baiting "southern strategy."
Pickering, a friend of Senator Lott, was blocked by Senate Democrats last year after civil rights groups lobbied against him. Some Democrats like Senator Charles Schumer are threatening a filibuster in the Senate which the Republicans now control by one vote, a tactic that would require a nomination to get 60 of the 100 votes instead of a simple majority.
Critics say Pickering showed glaring racial insensitivity in his handling of a 1994 cross-burning case when the judge sought a lighter sentence for a defendant who burned a cross on the lawn of an interracial couple.
Pickering's defenders say he got the five-year sentence reduced because it was disproportionate and that he has a long record of helping civil rights causes in Mississippi.
In his book on Bush, David Frum describes a joke cut from a presidential speech at Yale which had the president saying: "It's great to return to New Haven. My car was followed all the way from the airport by a long line of police cars with slowly-rotating lights. It was just like being an undergraduate again." This referred to police pulling Bush over when he was a student and before he swore off drink in the 1980s.
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IN FAIRFAX County, Virginia, police have now gone one better to stop drunken-driving.
They have started raiding bars and breathalysing anyone who looks the worse for wear. Undercover agents went to 20 bars over the holiday period and police raided three, arresting nine people for drunkenness.
At Champps Bar in Reston, general manager Kevin O'Hare said the cops pulled people from their chairs who were making no commotion. One man who spent a night in jail acknowledged having several drinks, but said he was not driving or acting unruly, just singing Jingle Bell Rock on the karaoke machine.
Some people might say that that was an arrestable offence in itself.