Covering the 1980 presidential campaign - 8 August 1980

An English lady writes to me, and it's plain that her patience is sorely tried. Nothing she says, can be more crashingly boring than politics, and American politics most of all.

She wants me to lay off the presidential battle, just as other people urge me to lay on. Better, she says, that you should open a Bible, shut your eyes, dab with your finger, and talk about whatever your finger alights on. I have just done this, and if I am to follow the injunction of this lady, our text today will be taken from the book of Ezra.

I am sorry, by the way for the translation, it’s one of those late new versions and it replaces English of noble and gutsy simplicity with English which is usually recognisable as coming from the transcript of a parliamentary or a congressional committee.

Anyway, here it is, "To King Darius, all greetings. Be it known to your majesty that we went to the province of Judah, and found the house of the great God being rebuilt by the Jewish elders with massive stones, and timbers laid in the walls. The work was being done thoroughly and was making good progress under their direction. We asked these elders, who had issued a decree for the rebuilding of this house and the furnishings. This was their reply. 'We are the servants of the god of heaven and earth, and we are rebuilding the house originally built many years ago. A great king of Israel built it. And completed it'."

Well, this suggests that Mr Begin is building a settlement in Iran of all places and we certainly don’t want to get into that. The complaint of my correspondent is one that I understand. I understood it more acutely, years ago, I remember exactly when, it was the presidential election campaign of 1948.

That time, the protester was a man, and from the tone of his letter I imagined him as a droll character out of PG Wodehouse, in a hacking jacket, and a bristly moustache, "Dear old fruit," he wrote, "please don’t go on about this fellow Truman. Everybody knows that he’s the most unpopular president in recent history, and is about to be pulverised by the governor of New York, Mr Dewey. That is all we really need to know. The more detail you go into, the foggier the landscape becomes. It’s bad enough trying to understand our own politics, but following American politics is rather like trying to learn another form of chess in which the pawns move sideways, the rooks backwards, and there is so to speak, no king and queen."

Well, we all know what happened to the most unpopular president in – up to that point – recent history, he was re-elected. As for the chess game, it is or was, a very apt comparison, because in those days, primaries didn’t cut much, the public opinion polls were unscientific and not widely believed in.

So that when a party came to a convention, while every delegate had his own passionate conviction about who was going to get the nomination, nobody knew for sure. So the day of the balloting of the states was a day of high drama.

The politicking between rival campaign managers only just started with the balloting. If a state was wobbling or badly divided, floor managers from the rival camps went to work during the actual balloting, to persuade the chairman of this state or that, to pass, when his state was called. Or sometimes better, to persuade some rebel on the delegation to ask the chairman to have his delegation polled.

Now this meant that the name of every delegate of single state would be called out, and he or she would respond. And at the end of it, the tally would be announced. I say that this was a better tactic of stalling because, for instance, if you could get New York polled the clerk of the convention would have to call on 96 delegates in turn, and by name. And then they would give their vote.

This would take about an hour and a half. You could go out to dinner. Meanwhile the floor managers of the rival candidates would be flitting all over the place, whispering to Pennsylvania, which obviously comes later in the alphabet than New York, "If you have doubts, why don’t you pass or get polled?".

These tricks and stratagems were all part of the cunning chess game disguised – as conventions always are – as a circus. The result of this system was hours, sometimes days, of suspense as exciting as any Cup Final. In 1924 it took the Democrats ten days and nights, and 103 ballots before they picked their man.

Let me give you just one example of how second thoughts on the floor could decide the nominee, and perhaps the next presidency. It was the Republican convention, 1940. Everybody knew the names of the only two men who would fight it out for the Republican candidacy, they were that same Governor Dewey, and a senator so revered by Republicans everywhere, that he was known as Mr Republican. Senator Taft of Ohio.

Then very late in the spring, another name came up, that of a non-professional, a non-politician, indeed, a man who’d always voted Democratic. He was a Wall Street lawyer named Wendell Willkie. He’d fought the government over its right to take over the Tennessee valley and make it a source of publicly-owned hydro-electric power. Mr Willkie said that this violated the rights of the private utilities companies. hat's all that was known about him.

However, one night, he went on a nationally popular radio programme – no television in those days – a quiz show. He was knowledgeable, he was amusing, he was very engaging and suddenly a movement started among young brash Republicans to have his name put in nomination at the Republican convention. It was a brave but amateur effort.

But by the time the convention met there was an organising committee, Willkie buttons and bows, and the appearance, at least, of a serious candidacy. He was plainly a far less serious candidate than Mr John Anderson is this time. All right, so we come to the convention. The legions of Taft and Dewey were so well matched, that we were obviously in for several hard-fought ballots and through four ballots they were neck and neck, and Willkie was the plucky but forlorn hope of the young amateurs.

Well, there were wholesale defections and by the end of the balloting, Willkie had got it. It was, I believe, the last great American Cup Final. Since then, the polls have grown in scientific accuracy – they are a dependable barometer now of popular feeling. Since then, hopeful candidates get out on the road during the two years before the presidential year and visit every party organisation, eat plastic chicken salad from paper plates in the mountains and the deserts, and ask every county chairman what he wants.

Nobody practised this new routine with more unflagging thoroughness than the late Bobby Kennedy on behalf of his brother. "What you want? A new post office, a bridge, a highway link between the suburbs and industrial plant? Money for black schooling? A higher subsidy for the soya bean crop, for wheat, sugar beet, whatever... a housing development for old folks? Fine, fine. You shall have them."

By the time in 1960, the Democrats assembled in Los Angeles the Kennedy brothers had the nominations sewed up. By then, too, television was nipping every rebel plot in the bud simply by reporting it. The rules were drastically changed in the interests of keeping the convention to four or five days at most.

I suppose, in theory, you can still pass on the ballot call, you could ask to have your delegation polled, but the chess game has been played out in the long safaris of the campaign chairman and in the primaries. This year, remember no less than 31 million people have voted, and declared their choice of the man they’d like to see as the Democratic standard bearer. A hefty majority has said Jimmy Carter.

Well, we’ll know from Monday on, sometime next Thursday, whether the new momentum of the primaries has made it impossible for anyone to stop Mr Carter. The Democrats, as I mentioned before, do have a habit of fighting each other harder on the convention floor than they fight the Republicans in the campaign itself. And it seems that we are in for at least one hot battle.

When Senator Kennedy, defying the etiquette of the game which says that no likely candidate shall make speech at the convention, except when he’s chosen as the nominee, when Senator Kennedy will attack the economic policies of the Carter administration from the rostrum – a bit of derring-do that will give great joy to the Republicans.

I said last time that the thing to watch was the moment when the rules committee puts a new rule to the convention. This is the rule bulldozed into the book of procedure by the Carter majority on the committee which says that a delegate must vote the way the voters in his state primary told him to. In other words, if he was picked as a delegate to the convention, because he put himself on the primary ballot as a Carter man, he must vote for Carter at the convention. The new rule says that if he doesn’t, he’ll be suspended and his so called alternate (every delegate has a standby) must move in and obey the rule.

The last word I had was a majority 54% was in favour of enforcing this new rule. It is possible as I talk, but unlikely, that President Carter himself will suddenly perform a noble gesture and say, "All right, you want an open convention you want to obliterate the mandate of the primaries, go ahead. Vote your conscience today". He certainly won’t do that unless he’s convinced that he’ll win anyway.

The one hunch I hold to is that Mr Carter is a far more able and decisive campaigner, than he is a president. If he is the nominee, his campaign will resound with glorious promises of the better life we didn’t get last time. And in debates with Governor Reagan I back him to be very eloquent and detailed about the complexity of the world we live in while Governor Reagan puts up simple slogans, and foozles his statistics.

If Reagan really does have 61% of the country behind him, he has peaked awfully soon. As the man said, "a week is a long time in politics". He might have added, three months is even longer.

Meantime, dear lady, I promise that once we know who the two candidates are, and they are off on the hustings, we will return to those topics that your heart holds dear. Like the foibles of American children, the leaf chemistry of the New England fall, the history of ice cream. Pending those happy talks, it does matter a great deal to all of us, and to you, who is to be the next President of the United States.

THIS TRANSCRIPT WAS TYPED FROM A RECORDING OF THE ORIGINAL BBC BROADCAST (© BBC) AND NOT COPIED FROM AN ORIGINAL SCRIPT. BECAUSE OF THE RISK OF MISHEARING, THE BBC CANNOT VOUCH FOR ITS COMPLETE ACCURACY.

Letter from America audio recordings of broadcasts ©BBC

Letter from America scripts © Cooke Americas, RLLP. All rights reserved.