Nineteen-eighty was a great vintage, at least for American politics. I was fortunate enough to spend many months of that year in Washington, anticipating the election of President Reagan. The outgoing Jimmy Carter was a misery-gutted mediocrity: the man who put the mean into mean-spirited. I am prejudiced, in that I have never finished one chapter of a William Faulkner novel. Once — I think it was The Sound and the Fury — I was floundering and about to despair. Someone said: ‘The principal character is mentally defective.’ I replied: ‘Thank you. How does that differentiate him from all the others?’
Carter was Faulkner on a bad day. Most American presidents, however morally or politically inadequate — Clinton, Obama — will respond to the royal jelly of high office and try to look the part. Carter brought to the White House all the presence of a starvelling cur. He gave the impression that he was only at ease with his fellow Americans when they were sufficiently depressed to agree with him.
In the other corner, fortunately, was Ronald Reagan. Even in those early days, he was endowed with grace. This was a man who loved his country and its people, who had enjoyed life and good fortune, and who wanted to spread those joys. As long as one believed in the ultimate good sense of the American voters, the eventual result was never long in doubt.
That is, the electoral result. Even after many bottles in the incomparable Chez Maria, a Georgetown restaurant which was an haut-lieu of American conservatism circa 1980, I do not remember anyone predicting that Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher might form a partnership which would transform the world, at least for a season. For once, encrusted Tory pessimism was confounded.
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