Pork barrel politics

I sat down with the thought of talking about two comics, not stand-up comics, but literary comics, what you might call 'write down comics', two Americans who contributed greatly to the gaiety of nations and have just died. And then it seemed to me a lot of people would think this a little tasteless just when President Carter and Washington and, for that matter, London and Bonn and Paris and the rest of us are baffled by the obscene fiasco being performed at the American embassy in Tehran.

However, it was not the seizure of the 60-odd American hostages or the Ayatollah Khomeini's chilling comment on the wretched Shah, it was not this that has made me think again, but rather the gift of yet another Kennedy to plant himself firmly on the front pages, however grimly the world is turning. I've tapped a few English friends in the past few days and there seems no doubt that Senator Edward Kennedy's challenge to Mr Carter for the 1980 nomination of his party excites, or at least fascinates, people far and wide. 

Now, I ought to remind you at the start and maybe beyond the start that, in this century, no incumbent president has ever lost the leadership of his party if he wanted it, no matter how awful the state of the nation. In 1932, when President Hoover looked around at the ruins of the great prosperity of the Twenties, the Republicans did not hesitate, in the pit of the Depression, to beg him to lead them – to the slaughter as it turned out – by Franklin Roosevelt. 

There are powerful reasons why no sitting president, no matter how badly things are going, can not be unseated – unseated as the nominee of his party, that is. And the first of them is presidential power. I mean a particular power of the president, the power he has, which is independent of Congress, to flatter and reward municipalities and cities and even whole states on the unspoken understanding that they will vote for him when the party convention is called. And this power is nothing less than the power of money. 

He has at his sole disposal not only scores of thousands of important regional jobs having power over states the size of Britain or France – a collectorship of customs here, the running of a government farm programme there, the administration of welfare here, there and everywhere. But he also has, what we always overlook when the national budget is being discussed, actually millions of dollars in what are called 'executive funds’ to dispense to the states for favours received, about to be received or, as in Jimmy Carter's case, expected to be received. Let me give you a couple of examples. 

A month ago Florida held what was popularly, and wrongly, known as a primary. A true primary, you doubtless know, is one in which the registered members of a party in a state show their preference for a presidential candidate. The New Hampshire primary in March is, for example, always considered the first primary vital to the candidacy of any challenger. Now New Hampshire is a very small state with a bare handful of delegates to both the Democratic and Republican conventions. Numerically, it doesn’t matter at all but emotionally, nationally, it's something else. It has never killed off a sitting president but if a newcomer, a challenger, fails there, he’s almost always doomed from then on. 

But now, Florida. What was held there a month ago was a popular vote to choose a caucus of one half of the delegates to a Democratic state convention, that is, to a Florida convention of Democrats, who would there vote, with half the rest of the party, to choose the state's delegates to the national convention. To put it simply, the Florida vote was three stages away from even guessing whom Florida would support when the Democrats meet in New York City next August. 

It was practically meaningless as a weathervane of popular sentiment about Jimmy Carter. And the press and the television went to great lengths to tell the people that the Florida caucus vote had no meaning whatsoever. But the Carter people built it up as a dependable barometer of national sentiment for their chief. Jimmy Carter knew better than anybody that if people think something's important, it will become so. 

Well, he won handsomely. Why? If even half the possible Florida delegates are for him, maybe the national polls are less reliable than we've been led to think. It's really quite simple why Carter defeated Senator Kennedy in that false primary. Throughout the summer, President Carter gave over some part of every day to hearing Florida's grievances and healing them with money. 

In the weeks before the caucus, the White House suddenly announced that the president was setting aside a million dollars here to subsidise a federal housing project in one hard-pressed and populous city. A county had long complained about rundown highways – another million and a half to repair them. Do you say that you've needed a new hospital for the Cubans in southern Florida? Here's 1.2 millions – done. And what's this we hear about poor public transport in another part of the state? By golly, we'll fix that now. And so they did, and so on, not to mention a positive invasion of Florida by 30 or 40 White House aides and Cabinet officers to campaign for the boss, saying, in effect, 'Don't listen to all these smarmy fellows who tell you this vote isn't important.' 

Well now the president has turned his attention to Illinois and this could be a decisive primary in the coming battle between Carter and Kennedy. It's the first one right outside what you might call the 'home ground', the private reserves of both of them. Naturally Kennedy is expected to swamp Carter and any other challenger in the Kennedys' native state of Massachusetts and probably, also, in neighbouring New Hampshire. And Carter can expect to win in three early primaries in the South. But Illinois, the fourth most populous state, belongs to neither Carter, the Southerner, nor Kennedy, the New Englander. It is always a vital state to win and a mortal state to lose. 

Well, Senator Kennedy, no doubt, will be out there soon telling people what he will do for their great state, especially for their great mid-continental capital of Chicago. But Jimmy Carter is telling them what he's already done. Just think, he was saying a couple of weeks ago, he's decided not to abolish 1,300 jobs that are paid for by the federal government. He's blocked off for the city of Chicago $127 million for grants in aid. Add to this another 5,000 jobs for urban renewal and development in Chicago. Let's build a new military or defence airport there, guarantee money for another 100,000 jobs for blacks. 

Now this is what we mean by presidential patronage or 'the power of the pork barrel'. Mr Carter's ingenious and lavish plundering of it has surprised and alarmed a great many of his critics and opponents who'd come to look on him as a pious little man from the rural South and a political amateur. I, for one, am pretty sure that if Franklin Roosevelt is looking down on the proceedings, he is aghast with admiration for Carter's expertise at a game in which Roosevelt was, till now, the twentieth-century champ. 

Well, am I saying you can buy the presidency? No, but you can go a long way to buying the nomination in a perfectly legal manner if you're president and if you're not, if you're a Kennedy, you can amass millions in campaign funds and cajole whole states to believe in more millions to come from the White House, which is what the Kennedy family did in 1960 on behalf of the second son, John Fitzgerald. Now Ted Kennedy has enough money to go far beyond his Senate's salary in hiring senatorial assistance. 

In my early time, let's say, in Washington most senators had a secretary, a stenographer, an aide who kept close to Congress, another to the White House, maybe one or two trouble-shooters. Senator Kennedy has 110 assistants in his Senate office. No issue in Oregon, in Israel, in California, among the poor, the bankers, the farmers, the electricians, no issue is ignored by aides who prepare papers for the senator to bone up on. No slogan goes un-memorised. And on his feet, on the stump, he is a flaming, indignant hero. In Senate investigations he has all the facts at his elbow. Caught on the hop for impromptu questions, he tends to hem and to err.... 

Well, we'll have clearly lots to say about Senator Kennedy as the New Year comes in. At the moment, the country, the whole country, seems to be asking itself, can the senator, by good research, by debating skill, with the help of the nostalgic halo that any brother of the two dead brothers wears, can these things outweigh the general doubts about his character? 

No bones have been made in this investigative era about three or four dark passages of his career. They're brought up daily and to him. He missed his degree at Harvard because he cheated on an examination. At Chappaquiddick, ten years ago, he didn't come out of the water – the drowned car and its imprisoned girl shouting, 'Help! Help!' – he waited nine hours and thought mightily about his career before he went to the police. He is, off and on, separated from a wife who not only confesses her battle with alcohol, but has said aloud on television that the senator's reputation as a philanderer has hurt her deeply. 

Nearly 20 years ago, Nelson Rockefeller, hot for the presidency, was divorced as the campaign began and people said that in this day and age it wouldn't matter. But the later evidence of the mass of people in the middle of the country showed that it mattered. Fatally, for him. 

And today, in our swinging time, there are undoubtedly millions who say that Kennedy's stoicism in taking on a huge family, bereft by a wartime death, two assassinations, one son with cancer, another a drug addict, that these griefs, bravely borne, will easily outweigh Harvard, Chappaquiddick, his wife troubles and the rest. And it may, in the end, come down to that. But the end is nine months away. Kennedy has nine months in which to build his energy and glamour into an irresistible engine. He has, if you prefer, nine long months in which to see his energy exhausted and his glamour tarnished. 

Meanwhile, President Carter, his fighting ability and his pork barrel are not – no question – not to be written off.

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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