Reagan's political honeymoon

I was flying into Los Angeles the other day and as we started our descent, I looked out and saw, far below, the yellow vale that separates the city from the blue bowl of the sky. It's the smog line and if I'd just wakened up, I might have just as easily guessed I was coming into Tokyo or worse, Mexico City, but the line was more blurry than usual, and darker.

It was not, for once, smog. It was a vast, uninterrupted drift of smoke from a hundred or more forest fires that had been whipped up by the dreaded north wind that seized on sparks or little glimmers of flame in the tindery mountain brush and, tearing through the canyons at between 85 and 100 miles an hour, turned those glimmers into crackling fires.

About 60 or 70 substantial houses south of Hollywood, in a prosperous section of the sprawling city, were evacuated and soon were mere skeletons drenched with ash. The ash powdered streets and lawns within a 20-mile radius.

It's a regular hazard of living in Southern California. It has nothing to do with the pestiferous smog which comes and goes according to the incidence of the west wind which picks up the rising exhausts in the most automobile-ridden city on earth and whirls them around the bowl in which Los Angeles sits in a ring of mountains.

Even so, the sight and smell of this fiery visitation was a tart reminder of Governor Reagan's statement, made rather fliply in the middle of the campaign, that atmospheric pollution is something we've managed to conquer. Mr Reagan was not there to see the untruth. He was in his hammock 3,000 miles away as the principal guest in a house the government owns, just across the way from the White House.

They call the period between the election of a president and his inauguration, the 'honeymoon'. Remembering other presidential honeymoons, I can only say Mr Reagan had better enjoy his before, like other bridegrooms, he must desert the lovey-dovey life of the lotus eater and settle into the House and the facts of life.

Now, this of course won't happen until 20 January and the first thing you must wonder about, especially if you're English, is why it takes so long – two and a half months – for a president to take office after his election? I say 'if you're English' because to any American who notices it, the most un-English thing about a General Election is the whirlwind haste with which a new Prime Minister whips into 10 Downing Street.

I was in London at the last General Election watching the returns come in with a visiting American friend. I forget now how soon it was certain that Mrs Thatcher would be taking over but I do remember television shots of moving vans trundling up to Downing Street early the next morning and, by nightfall, at the latest, she was, as they say of the Royals, 'in residence' and Mr Callaghan and his worldly goods were out.

'But what', asked my astonished American friend, ''what about the transition?' 'Oh that!' I seem to remember saying, 'Well, what with the permanent under-secretaries of the government and all their staffs, nothing much changes except the direction from the top'. And then there is an institution which does not exist in the United States which makes for rapid change, namely the institution of the shadow cabinet. It may be less titillating, less dramatic, to know, during any session of Parliament, who in the opposition is going to be the next foreign secretary and the next chancellor of the exchequer but it certainly helps a swift and unfussy transfer of power from one administration to the next.

In the United States, of course there is, too, a permanent civil service but it doesn't go anywhere near as far up as it does in a parliamentary system and whenever the other party takes over the White House, it expects to have about 10,000 jobs at its disposal, all the way from, say, the secretary of state and the ambassadorships down to the pages and cleaning women in the Senate. I should say that the incoming party used to have 10,000 jobs to fill but the Supreme Court has just ruled that it's unconstitutional to deprive somebody of a job which has nothing to do with political power or preference.

Presumably, a janitor will unlock doors just as willingly for a Republican as a Democrat and a cleaning woman will clean just as ardently or as lackadaisically. Such people as, also, filing clerks, librarians and the like, pay out their social security and expect to retire from their jobs. The Supreme Court has said so they should. And, in the result, the number of replaceable jobs in and around Congress will be, from now on, no more than 3,000.

This ruling fired a large groan in Washington and compelled Mr Reagan's transition team to start sending out regretful notes to the thousands of applicants for jobs that, only yesterday, were pending. Since the election, Mr Reagan's team has made a file of over 20,000 applications. One of them which I'm afraid would have been turned down anyway came from a young man asking to be appointed ambassador to the Court of St James's. He stated his qualifications quite crisply. 'Last year,' he wrote, 'I spent two weeks in England and feel that I can communicate with the British people.'

But now, all such swift devices as shadow cabinets aside, how about the long, long interval between being elected president and becoming president? It's a custom inherited from the Founding Fathers and their invention of the Electoral College. It's very difficult for us today to put ourselves in the frame of mind of the men who invented the American form of government and to recall that not only did they not expect political parties to develop, but specifically abominated and forbade them. There was no dissent from George Washington's view that 'political parties provoke the mischief of associations and combinations'.

The government would be formed by the ablest men in the republic and who was to chose them? Well, in the beginning, there was no thought of having the president, for example, chosen by popular election. The former colonies, now states, were scattered, some of them isolated from their neighbours by hundreds, even thousands, of miles. How was an ordinary man to know who was the ablest statesman in his state? And how was the handful of able statesmen in Massachusetts to know who were the ablest men in remote Florida?

The Founding Fathers decided that each state should appoint, usually by its own legislature, a number of electors, a number equal to the state's representation in the two houses of Congress, and these electors would go to their state capitals on a given day, the first Monday after the second Wednesday in December, and vote for president and vice-president. Then they would convey their choices to Washington. This took time, a month or more, for all the stagecoaches to bring the news and for Washington to have it confirmed by each state.

By the middle of January, all the ballots would arrive in Washington and be counted in the presence of the two houses. Then the sitting vice-president would announce the winners. To this day, the heyday or twilight of democratic voting, the people vote not for a president and vice-president, but for electors who will choose them, though, as you'll guess, the electors, long ago, simply registered the popular choice. But, to this day, the choice of president and vice-president is not officially declared until the first Monday after the second Wednesday in December, the old election day.

In the old days, they allowed about two months for the president-elect to travel and visit his likely cabinet officers and to prepare for the ceremony of his inauguration. The chosen date was 4 March but George Washington and his government were not ready on 4 March 1789 and the inaugural ceremony was postponed till the end of April.

This custom, like so many more eighteenth-century contrivances, hung on long after modern conveniences of travel and communication had made it unnecessary to the point of absurdity. March 4 it was in 1793 and March 4 it was in 1933, the first inauguration of Franklin Roosevelt, but that day, 47 years ago, fell in the pit of the Great Depression and one of the first things Congress did was to pass a constitutional amendment which brought inauguration day forward to 20 January.

In the middle of an economic disaster, neither the United States nor her allies could afford to go four months with a lame-duck Congress and a repudiated president. So we've done something to bridge the wide gap between the choice of a president and his taking office. Maybe, as the allies constantly protest, not enough. Mr Reagan still had 11 weeks ahead of him.

The mischief of this custom is that it makes the most of Parkinson's Law. If 11 weeks are set aside for the transition between one administration and another, then it will take 11 weeks. It's proved by the frenzy going on in Washington just now – the rumours of appointments, the offers, the rejections, the day-long briefings of incoming department heads and sub-heads, by outgoing heads and sub-heads, those 20,000 applicant files being riffled by Reagan's transition teams.

There is, however, an agreeable side to this and even doom-watchers, who predicted the end of the republic shortly after 20 January, grudgingly concede that Mr Reagan has made this long interval more agreeable than any president-elect in memory. Instead of staying holed up on his California ranch and having droves of appointees and possible appointees trek to see him there, as four years ago they trekked to Plains, Georgia, he has set a precedent by coming to Washington, visiting the leaders of both parties in Congress, touring the capital, saying howdy-doo to the justices of the Supreme Court, signing the visitors' book in government offices the president rarely sees and sending out sheaves of telegrams to a series of private dinners.

One old politician, a Democrat, had one of these and thought it somebody's bad joke. It was no joke. Mr Reagan invited not only his own men, but the big shots in the opposition, including Mr Carter's campaign chairman – old enemies, the new man hopes to convert into new friends.

Even the New York Times, which took a dim view of an impending Reagan presidency, had to say this: 'Mr Reagan is the first president in years who seems comfortable in the public eye and he's radiating charm, decency and competence. He is turning the honeymoon into a worthy courtship as well.'

So far, so decent.

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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