Republican convention Kansas

As everybody knows, we're on the verge of Kansas City, where the Republicans are about to choose the man who will – you'll hear the phrase in many, fancy variations in the coming week – the man who will lead us all into the Promised Land.

Until a week ago, the Republicans could offer only two impersonators of Moses, both of them beardless, the Honourable Gerald Ford – the latest of the nine what are called 'accidental' presidents, that's to say men who got there not by popular acclaim, but by the accident of the incumbent president's sudden death or assassination or, in Mr Ford's case, resignation. Ford is unique in having inherited both the vice presidency and the presidency by the freakish accident of two disgraced men in a row.

The alternative Republican choice is, or was, Ronald Reagan, whose detractors love to think of in his 1930s and the Forties in that incarnation as a second-string Wyatt Earp. But it ought to be remembered that, in those days also, he was better known – and painfully known to the moguls who ran the movie industry – as the president of the Screen Actors' Guild, a very tough negotiator, a leftist liberal and an idolater of the man whom the movie moguls regarded as a dictator, very little to the right, if at all, of Joseph Stalin – the name, Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

Many of the trade unions' protections that now cushion the life of struggling movie actors – and the vast majority are struggling to reach the top rung of the ladder where the stars live and luxuriate – many of those benefits and fringe benefits and unemployment relief and the like are due to the successful battles that Reagan fought with the film companies. However, he's reformed since then and hopped over from the left lane of the road to the outer lane of the right. If in his old, or young, days, Roosevelt was the true saviour and all his competitors for the Democratic nomination were wishy-washy middle-of-the-roaders, today President Ford is to Reagan's flock a wishy-washy middle-of-the-roader, suspect as a liberal, and not the man to move the Republican Party to the place it belongs on the extreme fringe of the right.

Now the problem for Mr Reagan here is that the only Republicans who have ever believed that's where the party belongs have always been defeated in Republican conventions. For two, maybe three, generations now, the presidential battle has always been between Democrats who were a shade left of the middle-of-the-road and Republicans who were a shade to its right. Through all the upheavals of history and ideology in the Western world and throughout the blasts of ridicule that ideologues have unloosed on the middle-class and the middle-of-the-roaders, the middle-of-the-road has been the place where an overwhelming majority of American voters want to live. From Roosevelt on, from the time over 40 years ago when the British and American political parties began to use the continental lingo of 'left and right', the American voter at the showdown, that's to say in the election, has always shrunk from either extreme and not only from the extremes, but from any candidate who seemed to be well over on the left. And it has to be said, as a simple matter of record, that for the past 40 years, the Republicans have been working the wrong side of the road.

Eisenhower was simply a tremendous oddity. He had no ideology at all – no politics – until he was persuaded to run. He was simply a conquering hero on a white horse, the man who, like George Washington, like Ulysses S. Grant, had won the latest big war and the people rewarded him with the only gift in their power, they made him president.

Well, I said at the beginning that, until last week, the Republicans could offer us only two candidates to fight it out in Kansas City this week. But now, a third Moses has popped up and he's not only beardless, he must be the first man to run for president with a crew cut. His name is Senator James Buckley, the junior senator from New York and the first in history to run for the Senate in New York and win as a declared Conservative with a capital C. For however conservative with a small c a Republican might be, he's usually sufficiently sensitive to the instinct of the American voter not to declare himself a Conservative with a capital C, which in America signifies that to you even the Republicans are too liberal.

In other words, an American who belongs to the small, but powerful Conservative Party – there is such a thing – would be well to the right of Mrs Thatcher or Mr Heath. He could be somewhere between Mr Enoch Powell and the National Front. 

Now Senator Buckley is a handsome, boyish-looking, extremely engaging and high-minded New Englander, son of an Irish millionaire but schooled in the right places and with an accent as invincibly upper-class as Roosevelt's. Strangely this does not alienate him from immigrants or the sons and daughters of immigrants with, what we used to call, 'broken' accents. On the contrary, he has a very powerful appeal to Italian Americans, Polish Americans and what you might call the old traditional immigrants who were once looked down on as gormless newcomers and who, themselves, now tend to look down on the latest newcomers, the Puerto Ricans especially. Maybe Senator Buckley's success, in being elected senator from New York, has much to do with the peculiar ethnic brew of New York City for there's never any question that a conservative Republican can capture the farm vote in upstate New York. 

Well, Senator Buckley this week declared himself as a candidate by saying that he wished to provide a symbolic candidacy that would ensure a second ballot 'and', I quote, 'help free up the convention to help the delegates make a free and mature decision.' The senator's witty and literary brother, William F. Buckley, must have been out to lunch when that tongue-twister was thought up. What the senator meant – what I think he meant – was that Ronald Reagan has every chance of going down once for all to Mr Ford on the first ballot and since Senator Buckley is an ardent Reaganite he wants to introduce his own name, drain off enough wobbling delegates on the first ballot and so diminish the strength of a tidal wave that would swamp Reagan and carry Ford to the nomination. 

It used to be called, to mix the metaphor, 'a blocking move' and it may be frustrated before it gains any momentum because in order to have his name go into nomination, in order to make it possible for delegates to vote for him at all, Senator Buckley will have to get the promise of a majority of delegates in five states, that's the new rule for being let in as a bona fide candidate. In Kansas City, most people seemed to think that it was already too late to shake five states away from their prior commitment to Ford or Reagan, though over the weekend it is possible that if there are enough Reagan-committed states who hear the thunderous approach of that tidal wave, they might, at the last minute, release themselves or be released by Reagan to go for Buckley and thus deny the nomination to Ford on the first ballot. 

Whenever a strong favourite fails on the first ballot, he's in, well, temporary danger, especially if he didn't get as many sure votes as he'd counted on. The delegates say, 'Well! Lookee here! His whole campaign has been a bluff!' or 'He's not the blockbuster we've been led to believe.' 

If Senator Buckley's plan works, then what most likely would happen is a few more votes for Buckley on the second ballot, markedly fewer votes for Ford, and Reagan holding firm. If Buckley's votes went up by only a handful on the second ballot things would begin to look rosy for Reagan on the third. This stratagem has worked dramatically in the past but it may collapse even as a possibility over the weekend. Maybe we are playing with a fantasy, the sort of fantasy that was so often a thrilling fact in the days when conventions were conventions, the most exciting of American poker games. In the days, however, when candidates did not travel the length and breadth of the land before the convention and more or less tie up the nomination on the first or second ballot. For we have to remember that we've had no convention of either party that ran to five ballots since 1940. 

So what I've been doing, I'm afraid, is performing an exercise in wishful thinking. For suppose Reagan did get the nomination! Or Ford! Or Buckley! Is that going to change the result in November? Practically nobody thinks so. This is, indeed, one presidential election that most good reporters wish they didn't have to write about. 

I'm reminded of the time that an American film producer brought into the United States three pictures he maintained were genuine Van Goghs. They were held at Customs as forgeries or new works. The movie producer refused to pay the duty so they brought in an international tribunal of famous curators, one from London, one from Amsterdam, one from New York and they looked over the paintings. What were they to say? Their problem was not to say if the works were fake or genuine, their problem was to hold on to their reputations as experts, so they... they got out a long report which was summed up in a phrase that kept repeating, 'on the one hand, on the other hand' – well, finally the FBI brought in its stroboscopic chemists. They photographed the pictures and found under the overpainting the signature of Van Gogh. And the experts said, 'What did we tell you!' 

Since every sign suggests that this week the Republicans will be sweating it out in Kansas City, temperature one hundred degrees Fahrenheit, in order to pick the loser to Jimmy Carter and since we remember what happened where we were equally certain in 1948, I'm looking around for an assistant who can handle these reports so as to suggest that whatever happens in November, I told you so all along. 

It's Carter then. Not a prayer for Ford or Reagan. And yet... and yet, I remember, also, what happened in 1916. Chief Justice Hughes went to bed on election night the winner. And then the California result came in late and Woodrow Wilson had gone over the top. An AP reporter telephoned the chief justice's house and a butler said, 'I'm afraid he cannot be disturbed, the president is asleep.' And the reporter said, 'Better wake him and tell him he's not president.'

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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