Out of America

Rupert Cornwell

Bush and Tony Soprano: two capi in big trouble

Published: 08 April 2007

This is twilight time in the United States: not of the gods but of two mafias. One family is in the White House, headed by the most unpopular President of modern times, beset by dissent and desertions. The other is the make-believe mob family headed by Tony Soprano, in what may be the best TV drama of modern times.

Tonight the first episode of the final series of The Sopranos goes on the air in the States. By the time it ends in mid-June, the show will have been around for eight years, which happens to equal two presidential terms. Nor do the similarities between politics and art end there. Just as Bush and his brand of conservative Republicans are an increasingly endangered species, so is the once legendary American Mafia. Likewise on the small screen, Tony Soprano - for all his authority and ruthlessness - can feel the net closing on his criminal kingdom in northern New Jersey.

"Is this it?" Carmela Soprano screams in the first minutes of tonight's show, as a pre-dawn knock on the door awakens her and her husband, Yes, it is indeed the feds. But on this occasion Tony will only spend a night in jail, on an FBI firearms charge. Nevertheless, the stage has been set, just as the real life stage is set for the final lame-duck episode of the Bush presidency, in a bunker-like White House, consumed by crumbling loyalties and waning power.

The betrayals and desertions are multiplying. The veteran conservative columnist Robert Novak wrote the other day that no President, not even Richard Nixon in his Watergate agonies, was as isolated in his own party as Bush is now. Then came Matthew Dowd, once a believer, as rough a political operator as they come and an important consigliere in Bush's winning campaigns of 2000, 2002 and 2004.

Last weekend Dowd broke publicly with his former boss, telling The New York Times that Bush was "secluded and bubbled-in" and generally "not the person I'd thought." He'd even drafted an editorial headed "Kerry was Right", he said, arguing that the Democratic White House contender whom Dowd helped to defeat in 2004 had been correct in urging a pullout from Iraq.

And that wasn't the end of it. Just 24 hours later Vic Gold, an old family friend of the Bushes and Cheneys, was announcing his apostasy in The Washington Post. Contrary to his assiduously cultivated image of toughness and decisiveness, Gold declared, Bush was "the weakest, most out-of-touch President in modern times".

Bush must grin and bear it, damning the errant Dowd with pity and faint praise, pretending that all is well. The TV boss has no need for such niceties. But somehow you feel sorrier for the vicious and unforgiving fictional criminal who has wrecked so many lives than for the real-life politician.

Therein lies the genius of The Sopranos. Only incidentally is it about the Mafia. At bottom it is a parable about the dark side of the American dream. For all Tony's wealth and power, there is no escaping the family demons, nor the sense of being trapped in a system that forces him to act as he does, yet whose days are so plainly numbered.

Bush must have the same feeling. He makes speeches, but nobody listens. He pulls the same levers, but now nothing happens. You are reminded of Norman Lamont's cruel jibe about John Major being "in office but not in power".

So how will these two Mafias end? Bush will presumably stagger on to his appointed exit date on 20 January 2009. But Tony Soprano's fate is far less certain. In the first episode, back in January 1999, Tony is with his shrink, delving into his unhappy childhood, trying to explain the panic attack triggered when a family of ducks that lived in his garden abruptly flew off for good. In tonight's debut of the final series, a duck skims ominously across the sky, a harbinger - but of what?

We listen to Tony musing about how 80 per cent of people in his line of business finish either in jail or "in the embalming room". So how will it end for him: killed by a rival, tried and convicted in a court of law - or, most improbably, dead of a heart attack, like Marlon Brando in The Godfather, as he tends his tomato plants? As for Bush, his leave-taking will be gentler, but no less painful. Wasn't it another politician who observed that "all political lives end in failure"?