Carter and Ford face conventions

Well, 'Captain! My Captain! Our fearful trip is done, the ship has weathered every rack, the prize we sought is won, the port is near, the bells I hear, the people all exulting.'

I imagine that that bit of Walt Whitman has become Jimmy Carter's favourite American poem. Whatever else he is, he's too cagey – some would say too humble – to claim literally that the prize he sought is won, that there has never been a time, in American political history, when a presidential candidate, other than a sitting president, has gone to a nominating convention with such an overwhelming majority of delegates committed to him. That is the novelty of the coming Democratic convention. 

The novelty of the coming Republican convention is, in a way, more startling still. There has never been a time when a president seeking re-election – or, since Mr Ford was appointed, let's say seeking a second term – has gone to his convention with such a vast number of his party against him. 

The lackadaisical popularity of President Ford is one thing, but the seeming popularity of Mr Carter has been demonstrated by something else. Simply that an unprecedented number of states, over 30, have held primary elections this year – preferential primaries, they call them. It's always been up to the party organisation in each state to decide how it would choose its delegation to the national conventions. The idea of giving to the people at the grass roots the choice of a presidential candidate is pretty new. It was started as late as 1903 by Wisconsin when that state became the standard bearer of, what was called at the time, progressivism. 

Even into my time, it must have been only 30 years ago, I remember an old doctor, a man of national, even international, reputation as a public health expert, I remember his explaining to me how differently the chief public health officers of the states were chosen. He took as a typical example of the extremes possible in American government the case of Nevada and the case of Wisconsin. He told me with considerable scorn that the chief public health officer of Nevada was simply a crony of the governor or the political party in power, a man with no medical experience whatsoever. 'He wouldn't,' said this old New Englander, 'he wouldn't know the difference between a microbe and a baseball.' On the contrary, he praised Wisconsin to the skies. 'Nowhere, not only in this country but in the world,' he said, 'is there a public health service so enlightened as in the state of Wisconsin.' 

In 1903, the Wisconsin legislature, fed up with having the party bosses send their minions to the national conventions, passed a law which gave directly to the people – or rather, to the registered members of a political party – the power to say which man they wanted to be president by electing delegates committed to that man. Before that, the presidential nominees had been chosen by party caucuses in Congress and then by state conventions in which the party bosses either appointed or elected their delegates. 

The direct primary system which, for this year, is just over with a final flurry of elections in California, Ohio and New Jersey, that system has been gaining ground down the years but, even a dozen years ago, there weren't more than a dozen states that held them. I don't think you have to look far and wide to see why the primary system has suddenly expanded around the country. Every public opinion poll for the last ten years has shown an increasing popular distrust of professional politicians and party bosses and Watergate carried the suspicion and distrust right into the White House. 

People in states which had formerly seen the bosses pick the convention delegates began to say, 'No more. We're going to have a hand in it.' 

There are, by the way, about a dozen states which still have to choose their delegates to this year's party conventions and they maintain that their system is more democratic still. They may have a point. This is how it works. Say a state has 25 counties. The registered Republicans in, say, Cherokee County go to the polls and elect ten delegates to go to a state convention of their party and so do the voters of the other 24 counties. Then these delegates assemble in a state convention and there they elect the delegates who will represent their state at the national convention. 

There are also big states that leave the choosing of national delegates to the party bosses. Not... not arbitrarily, they keep meeting and arguing and, in the end, they vote but, in those states, the people don't come into it. As in parliamentary countries, the people vote for the leader that the party leaders have already chosen. 

Well, as I say, over 30 states this year have held direct primaries and, on the face of it, Jimmy Carter will go to the Democratic convention in New York with only a hundred or two delegates short of the number needed to pick him as the Democrats' presidential candidate. Even Hubert Humphrey, who has been waiting in the wings for so long, hoping to hear Jimmy Carter develop a hacking cough, even he says that if, by the time the convention meets, Carter holds or adds a tittle to his present strength, it would be 'suicidal' for the party not to nominate him. 

However – and anybody in his right mind who's had experience of previous conventions would be mad not to mark time with a 'however' – however, we ought to peer through a hole or two in the blanket statement that Jimmy Carter is the overwhelming choice of Democrats around the country. 

In most states, the only people who can vote in the primaries are the registered members of the parties put on the ballot. If I tell you, which is nothing less than the truth, that of all the registered voters of the United States, the Republicans have only 19 per cent of them, we might just as well shut up shop and declare the presidential election over. How can a party with only 19 per cent of the registered voters possibly win an election? 

Well, in 1972 the Republicans had only 25 per cent of the registered voters but Nixon had the most smashing victory in the history of presidential elections. 

Today, the Democrats have, I think it's, 38 per cent of the registered voters, so you might say that two in three Americans are sworn Democrats and that would be so if 19 and 38 made a hundred. What about the other 43 per cent? They constitute the growing army, the now preponderant army, of the independents, most of whom are either declared independents who don't register either way or that baffling, silent, small army of the 'don't knows' or 'ain't telling'. The independents swing the election and they haven't been heard from. 

More than that, an actual majority of registered Democrats and Republicans haven't been heard from either. How so? More than two-thirds of the voters who were eligible to vote in the primaries, the registered party members, didn't show up. What it all means, then, is that of the voting population of the United States or of the, say, 80 millions likely to vote in November, only about 15 millions have been heard from – about one in five. Divide again between the Republican and Democratic choices and you find that Jimmy Carter's high hopes of becoming president are based in the votes of four million Democrats out of 80 million voters. President Ford's chin-up assertion that he's on his way back to the White House is based on the endorsement of three and a half million votes. 

Where are the remaining 72 and a half million voters? They're disillusioned in every candidate or they don't care or they're lazy or they'll stay home or they hunger for somebody new. And this is where the claim that the direct primary system is more democratic than any begins to look very fragile. 

When there were only a few primary elections, the winners went to the national conventions with nothing like enough votes to win the nomination and, consequently, the conventions could be a free-for-all. Up to the last hour of the day when names are put before the convention as presidential candidates, all sorts of potential heroes were rhapsodised and then voted for. 

I remember conventions where four or five or six names went up, some of whom had done very little in the primaries and there could be a ding-dong battle. The last ding-dong battle, and what a scene it was, was in 1940. Throughout the previous winter and spring, every knowledgeable Republican politician and pundit knew that once the primaries had identified and demolished the weak sisters, the fight for the nomination was between only two men, Senator Taft and Governor Dewey of New York. Nobody else had a look in. But in March, a Wall Street lawyer appeared on a sort of intelligentsia radio game called 'Information Please' and he was so warm and engaging that friends and other naive admirers started talking about running him for president.

Ridiculous. Not one American in 10,000 had ever heard his name. He was a maverick. He'd always voted as a Democrat. But the movement grew. The money poured in and the experts found it all very droll. At the convention in Philadelphia, after the early ballots were divided mainly between Taft and Dewey, the rebellion started and when, on the sixth ballot, the chairman of the Kansas delegation, a former presidential loser, squeaked to the podium on new shoes – I can hear them now – and threw the Kansas vote to this man, there was a stampede and the convention nominated Wendell L. Willkie. Taft and Dewey were left speechless among the ruins of political expertise. 

I don't think this could happen today because the primaries have now committed great majorities of the delegates to Ford or Reagan on the one side, mainly to Carter, on the other. The sudden, wide extension of the primary system has not opened up the choice, but narrowed it, corralled and branded a few and shut out all the mavericks. The primaries now bind the delegates and, by so doing, almost exclude the possibility of an outsider that the silent four-fifths of the voters might want. 

So, Carter and, probably, Ford are the beneficiaries of the new popularity of the primary system. Four Americans in five, come November, may well have no other choice than to follow the choice of the one American in five who got to the polls in the primaries. 

Put it another way, and say that the great extension of the democratic primary system could result in a president that 80 per cent of the voters in this great democracy didn't really want.

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.

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