A Brief Joust and Tumble with Sir Galahad - 10 March 2000

About six months ago I decided if there was one American topic more than another that would not interest listeners from Glasgow to Sri Lanka to Tristan da Cunha it was the start of the campaigning for the presidential election 14 months ahead of the event. And judging from the mail I was right.

But there came a day, a few weeks ago, when a gentleman in Tristan da Cunha professed to be excited about it.

Tristan da Cunha? I hesitate to tell you what it is and where it is because you'll probably think me patronising.

I've never forgotten the day when a visiting Englishman hearing that, on American television, I'd been regularly introducing, for years, a whole series of English dramas about life in England from Henry VIII to the abdication of Edward VIII - I used to set the social and historical background before each episode - "Interesting," he thought, "I suppose it's necessary for an American audience."

I gather that in Britain the plays had gone on, as we say in the television business, cold - that's to say no host, no introductions.

My visitor implied that every English shopkeeper knows about the Agadir war scare of 1911, every truck driver can recite the short sharp speech of a poor Welsh boy, born in a two room cottage, who stood up one morning in Versailles, before a glitter of ambassadors and soldiers from every country engaged in the First World War, and announced: "Gentlemen, the Romanovs, the Hohenzollerns and the Austro-Hungarian Empire are finished - let us proceed to business."

Well I'll take the risk, even with listeners in Scotland or the Americas, of guessing that offhand they can't pinpoint Tristan da Cunha on a map.

In fact many map makers failed to pinpoint it because they didn't have a printing typeface the size of a pinpoint.

Tristan da Cunha is a tiny island - one of three - the second of which is named Inaccessible - and it is and nobody lives on it. Tristan is about half way between the tip of South America and South Africa - 3,000 miles from either coast.

Anyway it has, I gather, about 2 - 250 British inhabitants. The English swiped it from the Portuguese. And the reason I mention it is because that islander wrote to me in great joy: because of his laptop and my website, he wrote, he was no longer compelled to get up at dawn in order to indulge, what he called: "the old habit of listening to you on the radio."

Now he can sleep as long as he likes. Any time he feels like it he manoeuvres the mouse, he gets my site, taps a few keys and sits back and listens to last week's talk or if he's morbidly disposed he can hear a dozen more from the recent past.

Well lately he's taken an avid interest in the news of Governor Bush and especially of Sir Galahad McCain.

Well now something happened last Tuesday that could make it unnecessary to talk much about American politics - the presidential campaign anyway - until the fall.

So let us recount what happened, not so much as a matter interesting in itself for the actual two characters involved, but as an example of a melodrama that has happened several times in American history and more often than not led to the oddity of putting in the White House what they call a minority president - that's to say a man who won with a minority of the total votes cast.

In this - whoops - in the last century, there were three famous minority presidents. Woodrow Wilson was one, Harry Truman was another and, surprising nobody's talked about this so far, Bill Clinton is the most striking case.

In 1992, 44 millions voted for Clinton, 58 millions voted against him. But there he is.

But let's come to this year, this campaign and last Tuesday. It was known - it's a new name for a new occasion - Super Tuesday: for the first time 16 states held primary elections on the same day and, what was equally revolutionary, in March.

First, though, before the ears start to twitch I think I ought to begin by saying what a primary is and how it has spoiled the great fun we used to have going to the two party conventions in the summer, not knowing who the nominees would be and then watching the incomparable drama of the balloting to choose the party's candidate.

Once, it took the Democrats 10 days and nights and 103 ballots to pick their men.

Well all that is long gone because of the adoption by all the states - 49 anyway - of this wretched primary system which the late great Adlai Stevenson called "a useless institution, that burns you up, that doesn't actually select presidential candidates, all it does is destroy some."

Well, for most of the 19th century and the first half of the 20th delegates to a party convention were chosen by the party machine in each state - that's by the active working politicians.

At the beginning of the 20th century a Midwestern state, under the influence of a populist rebel candidate, he thought delegates should be chosen by popular vote in a preliminary state election called a primary.

One or two states adopted it but it didn't catch on.

And as late as the 1960s only seven states had primaries and only one of them mattered, as what they called "a beauty contest" reflecting the amount of national sentiment for one candidate or another, that was in New Hampshire - even though New Hampshire is a small state with a small population.

What made all the states adopt the primary system in the 70s was the increasing accuracy of public opinion polls in gauging the national popularity of any given politician and this brought on the argument that it was more democratic than leaving it to the professional politicians in the states.

But what the primary system has done which we never anticipated, is to make each state decide long before the convention whom the convention is going to pick for president. As now.

Governor Bush doesn't even have to wait for Texas's upcoming 32 votes to know that he has an overwhelming number of delegates pledged to him at Philadelphia in the summer.

Even more certain, if that's possible, is the present standing of Vice President Gore on the Democratic side. He won every Democratic primary.

So Senator Bill Bradley, his only opponent, lost every one pitifully. Senator Bradley is a long, lean, thoughtful, gentle, professorial type - which proved not to be the role model for a man campaigning for president. He must have - and Senator Bradley has not - a slice of ham in his make-up.

Now at the turn of the year knowing the, by now, well-established system of the primaries all the reporters saw Governor Bush as an overwhelming choice of the Republican Party, the polls said so, and Vice President Gore for the Democrats.

So it was to be a very dull time until the fall when the two chosen haul off and start socking each other.

But then a month or two ago Governor Bush had a challenger, not a gentle, questioning professor but a small, bouncing, compact man known suddenly as a national war hero.

A navy flyer who took five and a half years of torture in a North Vietnamese jail, came out broke in body, his spirit high, a United States senator for the past 18 years - but coming into the public eye by his withering denunciation in and out of the Senate of the way political campaigns are financed, especially with something called "soft money".

Now by law you can give only a $1,000 per person to contribute directly to a candidate but an unlimited amount - known as soft money - for the general help of the party. Need I say that the passing over of vast sums of soft money - sub rosa, under the counter, between the sheets - to a particular candidacy has become routine.

Senator McCain called it "routine corruption". And both parties are guilty.

He was a pungent, downright, angry speaker and all sorts of people were drawn to what he called his crusade.

A month ago he astonished everybody, most of all Governor Bush and the Republican establishment, by winning the New Hampshire primary and then in Michigan, but both were open primaries - open to everybody, not just to one party.

But then also, it has to be said, Senator McCain did not maintain his inspiring role as God's angry man.

He felt hurt by Governor Bush's television advertisements. He complained about Governor Bush's meanness.

"Who me?" pleaded the innocent choirboy George W Bush.

Senator McCain became irritable, explosive, flying off the handle and many camp followers began to wonder if, in a crisis, this was what we needed in the White House.

In any case what happened was foregone and we ought to have recognised it a fortnight ago.

California and Ohio and New York, with a huge number of delegates, were strictly closed primaries - only Republicans could vote. And throughout, the regular Republicans have been down the line for Governor Bush.

And so it was. And so it is.

Senator McCain will not run, he says, as an independent so he won't take votes away from Governor Bush and let Gore squeeze in along the trail blazed by Woodrow Wilson, Truman and Clinton.

Senator McCain says he has withdrawn from the presidential race but his campaign is not abandoned, it is "suspended" - this is a carefully chosen word, it means that if he changes his mind and he goes on raising money the government will give him the usual candidate's matching funds.

He will, he says, maintain his crusade in the Senate, where he is, even in his own party, mighty unpopular.

It looks very much as if, after the brief joust and tumble with Sir Galahad, that we're right back where we started.

So you may relax and ponder, if you're of a mind, whether the country will go for Vice President Gore or George W Bush in the autumn. Wake me up when you've decided.

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