Caucus system - 12 February 1988

A few years ago, a friend of mine here, a producer of plays, took a successful Broadway play to London and kept his fingers crossed.

It was something he'd not done before and he was rightly nervous. Practically everybody in the theatre thinks he/she knows what will go on the other side of the Atlantic. But everybody has been wrong, often enough, to demonstrate that there are no experts in the matter of Anglo-American taste.

I think the most drastic example of a misguided export is that of Agatha Christie's The Mousetrap, which has been running in London, how long is it, 39 years? Must've been played more often than all the performances of Hamlet ever staged since Shakespeare's first night. Anyway, it was already set for a long, a reasonably long run, in London when it was brought to Broadway. I saw it here in its first week, which was lucky. There was no second week.

Well, my friend the producer, the morning after his play opened in London, I telephoned my daughter to ask her how it had gone, what did the notices say? "Daddy", she said, "it's a bomb!" "Oh dear!" I said, possibly even something stronger. There was a moment of silent confusion at her end and then I realised that she'd been in England long enough to pick up lots of English expressions, as indeed an American must to survive, or at least to avoid daily frustration.

It's not going to help your sewing if you go in a shop and ask for a spool of thread when you want a reel of cotton. Or barge into a pharmacists, a chemists that is, demanding absorbent cotton when you ought to say cotton wool. Picking up English expressions includes picking up American expressions which, after the long Atlantic journey, get misunderstood and have their meaning changed, usually to the opposite of their meaning at home.

It's a bomb! An American showbiz word often headlined in the American entertainment weekly Variety as, I recall, "Citizen bombs in sticks". That would be Orson Welles' masterpiece Citizen Kane which failed lamentably in what you'd call, and what you'd better not call in this country, the provinces. Sticks, by the way, has vanished. And so, I should imagine, its successor too, the boondocks, or the boonies.

Well, you'll have gathered that "to bomb" in this country means, has always meant, to flop disastrously. The show bombed! Oh dear! "Not to worry", as they say in England, for I soon realised that my daughter was using the word in the British sense and, hallelujah, my friend's show was a hit.

There is an old American word, it is, in fact, an American Indian word that has resounded through the news ad nauseam in the past few weeks and has surely re-echoed round the world. It's the word "caucus". It's a perfect example of an American word describing an American institution since the days of the Redskin and appropriated in the late 19th Century by the English, who got it wrong.

It was, of all scrupulous users of the language, Benjamin Disraeli who picked it up and got it wrong. He used it disparagingly to apply to the permanent Liberal party organisation of Birmingham. The word "permanent" is the key here. In America, "caucus" always meant a political meeting, a one-time thing, called for a specific purpose.

One of its earliest definitions says, "A caucus: a meeting by members of a party or faction for the purpose of choosing party leaders, formulating policy or naming candidates for public office". It's always the meeting of a small group within a larger group, such as voters in local districts, representatives in state or county legislatures, and so on.

Disraeli took it to mean the permanent party organisation. Which, in a state, would be, for instance, the Democratic state committee. In a city, a machine. For a very long time, Tammany was the Democratic party machine in New York City.

So the Iowa caucuses were special meetings – one meeting, one district, one town, one village – called on a particular date, last Monday, to... to what? How simple it would be if I could say that, as in the forthcoming primary election in New Hampshire, they were meeting to cast a popular vote for president.

The caucus system of nominating candidates for public office is a good deal more complicated than, say, first steps in learning chess. And I shall not stupefy you by describing it in detail. I don't think 15 minutes would be long enough. I'll try to simplify it, not too grossly, if only to show how spectacularly unrepresentative of the American voting population Iowa is.

Iowa is almost exactly the size of England and Wales. It's overwhelmingly a farming state, in the middle of the midwest. It's in a class by itself for the production of livestock and hogs. It accounts for over a quarter of the pork supply of the nation. It has 99 counties and 2,487 voting precincts.

The Republicans, you'll be glad to hear, adopt a very simple procedure. Registered Republicans go to the caucus in their precinct and cast a secret ballot for their presidential candidate. These results, precinct by precinct, are then telephoned to the state committee of the Republicans. Then each caucus, looking at the popular vote, elects delegates to each county convention which later on will whittle those choices down and elect delegates to the Republican national convention next summer.

But the Democrats – how to give you a faint picture of their procedure without having you leap to the switch and settle for a prayer meeting or some equally rousing bit of entertainment? I shall simply say that through six separate stages of election, the Democrats meet in 2,487 caucuses, debate a while. Break up into groups, each of which must constitute at least 15% of the whole to have their candidate called viable, or running.

Each group is told how many delegates it may elect. It goes ahead and votes delegates to its county convention. Some precincts use paper ballot, voice votes, some wait till the supporters of a non-viable candidate have beguiled or seduced or otherwise attracted those disappointed people into another camp.

Some of you may have noticed, for instance, that last Monday, former General Alexander Haig was listed in the final result as having no, zero, percent of the vote. How can you have no votes at all? Well, this meant that when the so-called preference groups were formed, and you produce viable candidates, or not, it must have been discovered everywhere that dashing Al Haig never collected as much as 15% of local supporters and so his supporters either went home in a huff or, more likely, were recruited by another candidate's group. I hope you're still with me. That was a very rough explanation.

The Democrats procedure is something which would take a stranger as long to master as to learn the elements of American football which looks straightforward on the ground, but is actually a form of chess disguised as armoured warfare.

Well, I should say that there is no obligation on the voters' part to attend a caucus. They can vote in November whether they went or not. In all, only about one quarter of all the eligible votes of Iowa went to the caucuses, and in the end, remember, voted for delegates to county conventions – 15,000 of them in 99 counties. Which will then pick, or elect, or appoint delegates to the national conventions that choose the two presidential candidates.

Now at the Democratic convention, which is to be held in Atlanta in July, there will be from all 50 States, 3,517 delegates. Iowans are apportioned 52 of them. The Republic convention at New Orleans in August will have 2,277 delegates. Iowa will have 37 of them. To give you an idea of the comparative pulling power of Iowa, California will have 314 Democratic delegates and 175 Republican delegates.

So, let's just take the Democrats. The Iowans in Atlanta will represent 1.4% of the Democrats' voice. Recall that one quarter of eligible Iowans voted last Monday and the people we heard from represent 0.35% or 1/300th of the Democratic voters of the nation. Some sample. Why, then, should this enormously complex, incredibly unrepresentative method of picking a president, from a wildly unrepresentative state (it's very representative of the farming midwest however), why should candidates amass or beg millions of dollars to go and plead and speechify there? Why should Congressman Gephardt spend 144 days in Iowa in two years?

Sixty per cent of Americans declare that the Iowa caucuses have far too much influence. Why do they have such influence, which they do? Because the parties and the media say so. It's like confidence on the stock exchange. It's what the brokers think is confidence out there among the investors. And because, since 1972, when the first Iowa caucuses were held, men who won Iowa went on either to win the nomination or to be fighting factors at the national conventions.

The Democrats in particular are bewitched by Iowa because the comparatively unknown Jimmy Carter won there. On the other hand, Vice President Bush, who took a cruel beating there on Monday, is cheering himself up by saying, "Yes, but Ronald Reagan lost in Iowa. But then he won in the New Hampshire primary."

Put it simply, and brutally. If the 13 – count 'em – 13 candidates for president believe that Iowa is important and to win there would be wonderful, then it is important. But maybe, after the New Hampshire primary and the catch-all southern primaries and the Illinois primary and the primary in the most populous state, California, in June, maybe by then we might know who the two heavyweights will be.

Only one thing I now dare, unflinchingly, to predict – the big fight will not be Al Haig versus Gary Hart.

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