Election envy

It's not often that Americans express admiration for foreign political moves or yearning for foreign political institutions. Stress the word political – I'm not thinking of them as the world's worshippers of foreign landscapes, history, buildings, places that pre-date the eighteenth century when this nation was set up.

The Sunday travel section of the New York Times, which is the size of the whole newspaper in other countries, is chock-a-block with dozens of well-researched articles on every country of Europe, Africa, Asia, all the famous metropolises, provincial capitals – not to mention remote stretches of country rarely visited by the natives from the Outer Hebrides to the inner vastnesses of Tibet.

We had a call the other night from a couple of old friends, now retired, who'd just come back from Korea and the outer islands of Japan and a Pacific island or two I'd never heard of. Last autumn they were off comparing the fjords of New Zealand, favourably, with the fjords of Norway.

This amiable couple is, by the way, typical of many seasoned American travellers in having sailed, cruised or flown to most parts of the habitable globe but has not, so far as I know, ever been to Bryce and Zion canyons in Utah – two marvels of sculptured geology which, if they existed in Europe or darkest Africa, would by now be as compulsory a stop on the American tourist's itinerary as the Tower of London or the Taj Mahal.

But we're talking about political moves and political institutions. This week there was a move made in Moscow which drew instant admiration, even grudging admiration, inside the Reagan administration, and from London came dispatches and telecasts about a British institution over which the American correspondents have grown positively maudlin with admiration.

First, the Moscow move. It began with the news of that 19-year-old West German who landed his single-engine plane in Red Square shortly after seven o'clock on a May evening. The cheerful audacity of this exploit was received here, in Washington especially, and I'm sure in every other Western nation with hilarity. Imagine a teenager thumbing his nose at the impenetrable air defences of the Soviet capital and its sleepless 24-hour guardians! What would the Russians do? What would we have done?

I think I can tell you what the administration would have done. The boy, the man, would have been arrested. The Democrats would have chuckled. The cartoonists would have had a field day and then the chairmen Democrats of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and the House Armed Services Committee would have demanded – they never ask, it's always demand – immediate open hearings and investigations that could go on through the summer.

Secretary of Defense Mr Weinberger, would have been the lead witness, followed by the chiefs of staff and the commandant of the West Point of the air in Colorado and somebody, eventually, way down the line, would have been fired. Probably, the young interloper would have been asked to testify in secret session or, at any rate, not shipped home until he had been debriefed.

Well, as I talk, the Russians are having second thoughts about sending young Herr Rust home with a medal, but I've noticed that the latest misgivings about how to handle him are, by now, tucked away on the inside pages. What the world will remember – and without question to the credit of the Muscovites – is that first the young man was congratulated on exposing weaknesses in the aerial defence of the city and second, two absolutely top military leaders, not some air controller on the graveyard shift, were promptly fired.

The officials' second thoughts, it seems, are fears that if Herr Rust is let off lightly, the big boys in the Kremlin might appear to be showing weakness to their own people and might encourage some other fly-by-nights to go winging in on hired Cessnas. Of course, none of us will ever penetrate the recesses of the official Soviet mind about what the Russian people are going to feel about anything, but if I were in charge of propaganda there, I'd decorate the boy in a ceremony in Red Square, send him home with a barrel of caviar, put out an official declaration that the capital's air defences were now utterly impregnable and that the next interloper to test them would be shot down on approach or executed on landing.

And now, as we are beginning to hear every night, this, from London. The top American television anchormen are not there yet, but by next Monday or Tuesday at the latest they will be. Of course, we're talking about the General Election. Already the news magazines and the newspapers from coast to coast, certainly on both coasts, have had cover stories or special feature stories about Mrs Thatcher and the big papers have introduced to Americans the previously unknown figure of Mr Kinnock.

There's no conscious discrimination in this. Just as foreigners read endlessly about President Reagan, they read considerably less about Senator Sam Nunn, the most influential Democrat in the Senate who is being pressed and harried to change his mind and declare himself a candidate for president and if he does, you may be sure, that you'll read or see a glut of instant biographies of him.

What is noticeable about the American coverage of the election has little to do with the political issues or the political divisions between the parties – which are, by the way, not unlike those between the liberal Democrats and the conservative Republicans. The best, the most thoughtful of the American correspondents are much more fascinated just now by the system, the mechanics, the positively whizzing speed of electing a new government.

Of course the old hands have always known this, but there's a new crop of television correspondents, a new generation that cannot believe it's possible to throw the old rascals out and put the new rascals in in just over three weeks, at the average cost to a candidate, of, I believe, £4,000. Millions of Americans will be learning about this incredible system at a time when those same millions are protesting more and more about the outrageous cost in a vaunted democracy of getting elected to Congress. Never mind the vast millions it takes to run for president. Mr Gary Hart – remember him? – is still several million dollars in debt from his 1984 try.

Just to run for the House of Representatives, to try for election to a two-year term in the House, now costs on an average something close to half a million dollars. One of our New York congressmen who's already running like an Olympian for next year's presidential election and running up millions of indebtedness, this man's campaign two years ago, just to get into the House, required him to raise one and a quarter million dollars. To run for the Senate, which is a six-year term, one and a quarter million would doom you to defeat. It would hardly pay for the buttons and bows with your picture on them, which, incidentally, are manufactured and circulated more than a year before the election.

And as for the presidency! I don't believe I have to tell you that there are already four Republicans running themselves ragged two or three times a week all over the country and seven Democrats, declared candidates for the coming, the imminent, presidential election in November 1988.

Well, over the past 40 years, the Congress has devised laws and new laws and newer laws to try and discipline the ways in which contributions can be legally made towards election campaigns. A maximum for individuals, a maximum for corporations, a maximum for what are called Pacs – political action committees, formed by groups of sympathisers or idolaters, trade unions, every sort of group. The money goes, partly of course, for the buttons and bows and the streamers and renting auditoriums and private planes and press planes, and the vast literature of pamphlets and booklets and fliers and form letters, which denude the forests of America.

But, mainly... mainly, the money goes to buy television time. Every minute, every 30-second plug, every 10-second plea, is paid to the networks and to local stations by the candidate and his supporters. And the prices are something; on a network, probably $30,000 for a 10-second plug.

What these ruinous costs result in is simpler and simpler and cruder and more melodramatic 10-second spots. I remember one way back in 1964 when Senator Barry Goldwater was running against the incumbent Lyndon Johnson. This tiny film showed a little girl looking up wistfully to the sky. They sky suddenly erupted into a mushroom cloud. Slammed on the screen was simply, 'Vote for Johnson' – the implication being, of course, that Senator Goldwater would not only extend the war in Vietnam, but very likely take us into Armageddon.

This was just one example of reducing a political choice to the lowest, the most lurid possible, common denominator. Everybody does it and the networks rake in the loot and everybody deplores it.

Now, Americans are hearing that in the British system, nobody buys time. The parties get equal time. Astounding! The problem of adopting this system painlessly and adapting it to America is that here, hundreds for the House, 870 candidates to be precise, buy time on television. It is the candidate, not the party who's being advertised and in the primary elections next spring, there'll be in most places, say, three candidates of the same party, each of whom will urge you to believe that he/she will be better for the party than the other two.

In a couple of short, exhausted words, we are already saturated and suffocated with the pleas, the claims, the rhetoric of about 11, 12 men already campaigning for November 1988. No wonder the American correspondents look on in a kind of trance at a country which abolishes the old parliament in one day, is out on the hustings the next and, three weeks later, has a new parliament. And that's all, thank you, till 1992.

It's a kind of practical shining miracle and the American people gasp and sneeze at the brilliance of it.

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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