Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Gore Vidal at Intelligence Squared

Lloyd Evans reports on the latest Spectator / Intelligence Squared event<br type="_moz" />

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.’  Yet he has no relish for the contest. ‘I’ve never seen an uglier election.’ Whispering campaigns have labelled Obama ‘an apostate’, a coded message intended to persuade voters that he converted to Christianity from Islam. Vidal recalls similar dirty tricks from 2004 when the Bush campaign seemed to take a lead from Machievelli. ‘Find your opponent’s strong point. And strike them there.’ The decorated war hero John Kerry was smeared as a coward. ‘This from a president who dared not join the boy scouts.’ His derision for Bush is intense but leavened with mockery. ‘Bush keeps telling us he’s a wartime president and he claims wartime powers so that he can subvert the constitution,’ – ironic pause – ‘a document he hasn’t read.’

When Bragg asks if John McCain will prove a tough opponent, Vidal slips into a faultless Mr McGoo impersonation.

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