A runaway success

There are very few laughs of any kind in George W Bush's Washington. There were some unusual political diversions last week, however. One was the emergence of a lady now in her sixties who worked in the Kennedy White House as a young typist, even though she couldn't actually type. This further encouraged the thought that the world was a better and (outside the Oval Office itself) a safer place when presidents relieved the frustrations of their job by sexual rather than imperial conquest.

Another was the hilarious adventure in Texas, where 53 Democratic members of the state House of Representatives skipped across the state line into Oklahoma and holed up in a Holiday Inn to prevent passage of a bill that would have gerrymandered the state's congressional boundaries in the interests of the Republican party. Their absence ensured the house was not quorate and so the bill died. Had they stayed in Texas, state troopers could have arrested them and forced them back to the state capitol to continue the people's business.

This was a rather undignified display of the impotence of the modern Democratic party, which ran Texas for generations: their opponents called them childish and cowardly. But as a legislative ploy it was successful and first indications are that it was an effective piece of political theatre as well. It drew attention to a particularly scabby piece of political knavery, dreamed up by the leader of the House of Representatives in Washington, Tom DeLay, a rightwing extremist even by prevailing standards. And he was not helped by the revelation that the Republicans had made a call to a branch of the Department of Homeland Security, which thought it had an emergency on its hands, to track down the fugitives. Though the Republicans are saying they will get their way, the reaction of the Texan media suggests it may no longer be so easy.

Nationally, this was picked up mainly as an example of Texan eccentricity. It was, for instance, a fine opportunity to recall the story from 1971 when a Texas legislator decided to draw attention to his colleagues' doziness by introducing a resolution, commending one Albert DeSalvo for his "unconventional techniques involving population control". DeSalvo was the Boston Strangler. The resolution was nodded through.

In Texas itself, interestingly, there was much moaning about the ill-feeling that has developed in what was considered a notably harmonious legislature back in the good old days, for instance, of the former governor, George W Bush. (These days "bipartisan" is just an instruction to one's stockbroker.) Maybe more significant are the lengths to which state politicians now have to go to get attention for their activities.

As in Britain, public interest in American local politics is negligible. Only a third of the electorate vote in non-presidential elections, and the more trivial the offices involved, the more pathetic the turnout. Under-thirties, of course, hardly vote at all. Yet state governments have immense influence over Americans' lives. There are issues of commerce, for instance, where they have authority which Westminster has ceded to Brussels. They also have power of life and death, because states execute people. And the figures involved are amazing: California now has a budget deficit equalling the entire income of the governments of Finland or Israel.

Yet under normal circumstances - barring sexy stuff such as the Texan fun or budget cuts or smoking bans - no one takes any interest. Press scrutiny is very limited and declining, as monopolist local papers cut back; and TV news, the dominant source of local information, is far more interested in blood and gore. Thus it is very hard to know what goes on, day-to-day, in these state legislatures.

The anecdotal evidence one gets travelling round the country is gruesome: stories of lobbyists dominating incompetent and corrupt legislatures. The handful of academics who specialise in this unpopular area of political science insist things are not universally terrible, and that the pattern varies hugely from state to state. "It's much, much improved in the last generation," says Gary Moncrief of Boise State University. "In the 1950s and 1960s state legislators as a group were just abysmal."

But it is very hard to get a sense of what is going on. Only yesterday USA Today published an analysis showing that, contrary to all conventional wisdom, legislatures controlled by the Republicans were increasing spending faster than those controlled by Democrats. Where does it all go? Maybe the Texans are stockpiling missiles, so that next time Oklahoma harbours their dissident, they can deal with the situation properly.