Lloyd Evans reports on the latest Spectator / Intelligence Squared event
No debate this month at Intelligence Squared. Instead Gore Vidal is interviewed by Melvyn Bragg. The 800-strong crowd start to applaud even before Vidal reaches the rostrum. White-haired, frail and wheelchair-bound, he is modestly dressed in a dark suit but he exudes a dangerous alertness and grins hungrily as the questions begin.
Bragg moves, scalpel-like, to the meatiest issue of the day. ‘Are you surprised by Obama’s success? Because you thought Hillary would win.’ ‘I wanted her to win,’ Vidal says, subtly re-aligning the question like a chess grand-master. He tells an anecdote about Hillary’s early campaign. She identified a group of voters, ‘white middle-aged men of property’, who consistently refused to support her. After several months she discovered the problem. ‘I remind them of their first wife.’
Vidal ascribes Obama’s success to ‘the Republic’s unfinished business – slavery,’ and he foresees an Obama presidency as a ‘general expiation.’
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