Ferrero nominated

From time to time, my wife tells me, it becomes necessary to contemplate the clothes closets with a view to ridding them of the bulky brown files of cuttings that kept me informed about American farming policy [WORDS MISSING HERE] what it is, as a magazine biography of William H. Woodin who was Franklin Roosevelt's first secretary of the treasury – that would be Chancellor of the Exchequer.

Mr Woodin was a songwriter in his spare time, which is certainly a first of some kind and if he were still with us he would be something like 117. So, with respect, I think I'm safe in throwing out his biography.

Once this house-cleaning passion seizes me it can last for as long as 20 minutes. Some day I'm going to get round to tossing out all the vital stuff about Charles W. Bryan, Charles McNary, John J. Sparkman and William E. Miller and, if you don't know who they were, not to worry, not one American in 10,000 knows either. They were their party's choice for vice president in a year their party didn't make it. Few names in American history are so quickly forgotten as those of vice presidential candidates who went down with their boss.

A ghoulish thought which we ought not to dwell on in the month that every newspaper, every magazine, every television talk show and news programme is deliriously filling us in on the origins, the life, the opinions, the hobbies, the tastes, the daily routine, even the supermarket shopping habits of Mrs John Zaccaro, better known, for the time being at least, as Geraldine Ferraro. Once she decided to get into politics, she reverted to her maiden name because an uncle of that name was a politician with some clout in and around New York city.

So, just now I suppose everybody who pays even passing attention to America knows that Geraldine Ferraro of the borough of Queens in New York City, an Alf Garnett constituency, is the first woman seriously to be nominated for vice president. I throw in the adverb to accommodate the nigglers. Two other women in the past, the first in 1924 had their names put in nomination at their convention but this was a... a gesture of courtesy or an expression of awe. In one case, a tribute to a lady of surpassing beauty. There was never the slightest possibility that they would go on to the ticket.

But here we have a presidential candidate, Walter Mondale, one vice president whose name we're all familiar with so far, deliberately choosing a woman to strengthen the Democratic ticket. When she was picked, no word from the large treasury of the English vocabulary was so pronounced, so often, with such ecstasy as the word 'historic'. There were commentators who boldly declared that in the history of democracy no great nation had ever done so audacious, so historic a thing – forgetting, in their frenzy, Mrs Thatcher and Golda Meir and Mrs Gandhi.

Well, this too will pass and if the Mondale-Ferraro ticket goes down in November, I promise you it will not be many years before it will also pass quietly into oblivion. Ask even veteran observers of American politics who was Adlai Stevenson's first running mate? Who was Thomas E. Dewey's second? The response is usually silence or the wrong fella.

Well, I was starting to wade into a closet which has all the hat shelves cluttered with books and rusty seven irons and abandoned putters, when I saw a little file, not brown and tattered, but white and squeaky clean. I don't know what it was doing there. It had been slipped in, I imagine, quickly and guiltily, as the lady of the house was heard at the door.

Well, here it is in front of me, from a magazine, a very reputable and far-seeing one, one page dated March 17, 1984. It's about the perils of conventional wisdom. Conventional wisdom, in those far-off days, pronouncing that Walter Mondale would be the Democrats' choice. The burden of the piece was that the Democrats had just discovered a formidable threat to Mr Mondale in a man who had obliterated the former vice president among blue-collar workers in New England. This man, the piece suggested, was about to make history, again, by offering not so much a ready-made crop of novel ideas as the notion that as president he would open windows to let fresh minds ventilate American government while Mr Mondale's windows could be stuck shut.

The name of this clean fresh breeze was Gary Hart, remember? Well, no need to bone up on him any more, not for another four years, if ever. He has gone with the fickle wind of politics, along with Alan Cranston, Senator Hollings, George McGovern and John Glenn.

We're left, however, with the Reverend Jesse Jackson and I think it's absolutely safe to say he has not gone. Never to be president maybe, but he did represent the one really historic element of presidential politics in 1984. Not just a black man experimenting in national politics or making a game try at the impossible, he did something that not even the chosen couple, Mondale and Ferraro, can claim to have done for certain. He acquired a national constituency.

Wherever his name was on the ticket in the primary elections, the blacks voted overwhelmingly for him and, more important, as a new development in American politics, he did not merely corral a small constituency that was already there, he tripled its size in the sense that there are, this year, three times as many blacks registered to vote as there were in 1980. In that year, they would have been the decisive counterweight to Reagan's Southern conservatives and old-time macho whites and the large evangelical vote. They would have most likely won the South or many states of it, even for Carter. For a long time to come, the Democratic party and Mr Mondale in particular will owe dues to the Reverend Jackson.

All personalities aside, the Democrats have come out of their convention making a strong claim on two national constituencies – the blacks and the Roman Catholics. Considering that one American in something more than four is a Catholic, it is a constituency vital to any American political party. Mrs Ferraro is a Catholic, but the cunning part in choosing her was that she's a Catholic with a difference that appeals to Democrats, to most Protestants and Jews and to many Catholics who don't come out shouting about it in public. Namely, that Mrs Ferraro, while saying that she would not, herself, have an abortion, is in favour of letting a woman decide for herself.

This, of course, is the precise opposite of the official Republican position. It presents an immediate problem for Mr Reagan and he's wasting no time facing it. Within days of the nomination of Mrs Ferraro, the White House had set up for him a whole round of appearances in Catholic churches and Catholic neighbourhoods and Hispanic communities. It's anybody's guess now, and maybe until after the election, how much Mrs Ferraro will manage to draw the Reagan anti-abortion vote away from him.

Some of you may think that I've overlooked the main constituency that Mrs Ferraro's candidacy could capture, namely the women's vote. Of course, the Democrats are cock-a-hoop at the moment claiming it, but many fewer women voted for Reagan than for Carter and it's doubtful, to say the least, that Mrs Ferraro will attract more than a Democratic ticket with two men would have done.

This is a hotly debated question but the people who come up with the most dogmatic answers are usually people who wish it terribly to happen – the professional feminists most of all. The most skilful political analysts I know are saying that Reagan wouldn't get a large women's vote anyway and is certainly not going to reclaim any considerable number of women Democrats.

Well, now, one convention is over and one to go. By the way, the Democrats went into euphoria yet again this week when a new Gallup poll came out that a poll of the electorate now showed 48 per cent for Mr Mondale and 46 per cent for Mr Reagan. It is, said Mr Mondale, from his fishing trip on the lakes of Minnesota, a dead heat.

So it is but nobody should get excited or alarmed by any national poll taken immediately after a convention. It is, as you saw, an institution like a circus coming to town or a big, military parade. It warms the cockles, it rouses the imagination, it boosts the blood pressure. Forty-five per cent of the people polled admitted, in fact, that it was the sight and coverage of the Democratic convention that made them think they would now be more likely to vote Democratic than Republican. 'Now' is the operative and treacherous word.

Poll them again a month from now after the Republican convention in Dallas and see if many of the same, impressionable people will not be re-impressed by Ronald Reagan. A man who's helping to run the president's re-election campaign said it best, 'You always have to expect that after a three-day television commercial for a party, the nominee is going to have a surge of five to eight points'. He expected a similar swing toward the president after the Republicans' television commercial in Dallas. And when that's over, the weather, both political and actual, will begin to cool.

The first week in September, the presidential campaign begins. That's what the calendar always says and there was a time when it was so, when both conventions were held in June, there was a momentary firestorm of political passion which then burned out through the summer months while, in fact, the candidates took a long, statutory rest. No more.

The campaign has been waged since the first presidential primary in the winter and you will be appalled to hear that in September it will start to rage until the first Tuesday in November. Those three months have always been a trying time but they will feel worse, more deadening, this time because they will constitute the last quarter of a year of incessant campaigning. It's too much and 80 per cent of the American people think so, but nothing is done.

Even back 52 years ago, the din of the candidates' rhetoric, their self-righteousness, their laments for the survival of the republic if the other fella got in, all this drove Will Rogers to write in his nationally syndicated column, 'Who do these fellas think they are? We can get along perfectly well without either or both of them. Why don't they shut up and go fishing?'

Herbert Hoover took the hint and so, last Monday, did Mr Mondale.

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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