Democrats take Senate

Before we come to the inevitable and fascinating topic A, I should like to throw a sidelight on it as a proof, from the experience of my favourite New England state, that nothing in American political life is as simple as it seems, especially to onlookers from a parliamentary system.

Last Tuesday at about ten o'clock at night, I telephoned my daughter up in northern Vermont, pretty certain that a mother of five – spaced or ranging, shall we say, from age 14 years to 11 months – would be relaxing from her usual 14-hour day and turning on the tube to watch the national election results. I was wrong. The phone was answered by a pleasant young woman, a sitter, who assured me that on the domestic front all was calm and all was bright, but that my daughter had gone off with her husband and their first-born, a keen political student of 14, to a tavern to sit with a couple, their two closest friends, and watch and wait.

The watch-night vigil was all the tenser because the husband of the couple had been running for the governorship of Vermont against the incumbent, a middle-aged lady seeking a second term. I should explain at once that my daughter and son-in-law are dedicated Democrats and their two closest friends are devout Republicans – that's the way life can be in a rural state with short, hot summers and long, Arctic winters where your behaviour as a good neighbour can count a good deal more than your political affiliation.

In any case, I must say I'm glad to see that my daughter, for one, learned early on the lesson that to restrict your close friendships to people who share your political prejudices is to miss out on at least half of human life.

Anyway, let's put the Vermont race as simply as possible. Mrs A, the Democrat, was running for a second term as governor. Young Mr B, my daughter's friend, was opposing her as the Republican candidate. There was a third candidate, Mr C, running as a socialist – nothing odd about that. Mr C is the mayor of Burlington, the biggest city in the state. In the result, Mrs A got 47 per cent of the vote, our friend, young Mr B got 38 per cent, Mr C, the socialist, got 12 per cent. So Mrs A is governor again. Right?

Wrong! But she got a majority did she not? 47 over 38. She did not. She got a plurality – a vital difference in the language and the rule of American politics. Whereas in England where there are more than two candidates, the one who heads the poll is said to have a majority over the second contestant, in America they are said to have only a plurality. In America, the word majority is reserved for an excess of votes over all the votes given to all other candidates.

In the electoral system of Vermont, a governor cannot be elected unless he/she acquires 50 per cent or over of all the votes. Mrs A got only 47 per cent. This rule, by the way, applies in some Southern states in a primary election, then there has to be a run-off election. In Vermont, though, there's no general primary. Tuesday was the main event. So what happens? There will not be another election. The contest is thrown into the state legislature which must vote to decide who's governor.

Since Mrs A fell only three per cent short of the necessary 50 per cent, she is almost certain to be elected, but if four per cent of the vote had changed hands, Mrs A getting 43 and Mr B getting 42, then there could have been a hot time in the legislature. In a New York newspaper reporting the Vermont result, there was a photograph of Mrs A, her arms spread-eagled in ecstasy and the caption read, 'Democrat Triumphs in Vermont'. Well, probably. But not yet.

And this leads me to some of the headlines in foreign papers about Tuesday's national election. 'Bitter Blow For Reagan', 'Democrats Smashing Victory', 'US Voters Reject the Reagan Revolution', and so on and so forth. Well, let me put it this way!

As an indication of the way the American voters felt, there was nothing very smashing about it. It was, even for the Senate, a close thing. I ought to say that this is what is called an off-year election – not, in other words a presidential election. Every two years, including presidential years, the whole House of Representatives comes up for election – 435 seats – and every two years, one-third of the hundred seats in the Senate are up for election.

So there were elections in 34 states for senator and in all the millions of votes cast, a shift of only 50,000 votes in only five states would have produced a new Senate of 50 Republicans and 50 Democrats. Then, the vice president who presides over the Senate – Mr Bush – being a Republican would have cast a deciding vote to retain the Republican's control of the Senate.

You may say if, if, if... but it didn't happen. However, it takes time to reveal the effect on government of such a close thing. Some of you will recall 1960, the year of John F. Kennedy's triumph when he declared that the torch has been passed to a new generation, when it seemed the eight Republican years of Eisenhower were all over, when the Democrats under their gallant young Lochinvar would change the direction of American policy, both at home and abroad.

Shortly after Kennedy was inaugurated, a book appeared. A famous book called 'The Making of a President' – a quite new type of reporting of an exhaustive kind, of how the Kennedys, years before the election, went about building a national base for the 1960 campaign for the presidency. It was much too good a piece of extended reporting to have a thesis. Reporters don't have theses, they report the facts – agreeable, disagreeable, explainable, unexplainable.

But the book did, at the end, point a moral and the moral was the rather excited one that the common people, especially the first- and second-generation immigrants, had spoken and that they had seen to it that Kennedy was swept into power. Some sweep.

In that 1960 election, Kennedy got 34,227,000 votes. Richard Nixon got 34,108,540. In other words, in over 68 million votes cast in 50 states, a shift here and there of 20 votes, a hundred, in all, a shift of 60,000 votes in 68 million and Nixon would have been president. It was the late Richard Crossman, I think, the English politician who, reviewing the book in an English magazine, pointed out what nobody else had noticed that, in fact, the American people had been hell-bent to elect Nixon and just failed.

It took three years for Kennedy's very tenuous hold on the people's representatives in Congress to be exposed. A month or so, I think, before he died, I remember being at one of his last press conferences. A reporter asked him to explain why the momentum seemed to have gone from his presidency. There was a persuasive cover-up reply but there was no denying the fact. And when he died, Kennedy had over 90 bills on the shelf. No action in Congress, even though both the Senate and the House were controlled by his party, the Democrats; he could not get most of the legislation he wanted through Congress.

Now, in the election of 1986, certainly the simple news is that the Democrats have, once more, got control of the Senate. In 1984 for the first time in years, the Republicans had taken control, 53 of them to 47 Democrats. Now, the Democrats are back. 55 Democrats to 45 Republicans. The House, as usual, is overwhelmingly Democratic – 258 of them against 174 Republicans. The Democrats, in fact, actually gained five seats.

So now we have a familiar old set-up, a Republican President and a Democratic Senate and House. Surely this means that all Reagan's hopes, his Reaganomics tax theory, his continuing to cut social spending, his policies in Central America, his initiative to hold on to Star Wars, all will be weakened? You can only believe that if you take a parliamentary, or rather an ideological, view of the American party system, but there are two things that set the American system off from a parliamentary system that make it harder to say whether the president will be more or less successful.

One is the fact that the two parties are only roughly ideological. They are alliances of regional interests and prejudices. There are incoming Democrats, Southerners especially, who are more conservative than many Republicans and conversely there are Republicans more liberal on some issues than some northern Democrats. The other thing is that party loyalty is nothing like so strict or strictly enforced as in a parliament. There are no three-line whips. Very important Republicans can and do defy President Reagan on crucial votes. They are not sent in to political exile. Feeling accurately the sentiment of the people in their own state, they may actually gain in party stature.

The one power that does change hands when a party takes over control of the Senate is the great power of the committee chairmen. The standing committees of Congress are the trenches where most, if not all, political battles are fought. They have great power and now that the Democrats have taken over the Senate, all the committee chairmanships will go to their men and a chairman's unique power is the power to decide which bills to bring to the floor of the Senate and, more galling still to an impatient president, which bills not to bring to the floor.

With this in mind and knowing the identity of the new chairman of the Senate's foreign relations committee, the only prediction I dare to make is that Mr Reagan is going to have a tougher time getting more money, more support for the Contras he calls freedom fighters in Nicaragua and he may be stopped turning a blind eye to American mercenaries down there.

Otherwise, knowing Mr Reagan's energy and doggedness and his gift for twisting the arms of uncertain senators, we cannot be sure that he won't succeed in putting together his own alliance in the new Congress of Republicans and conservative Democrats that might give a long, dying kick of surprising force to the policies, the domestic policies most of all, he was twice elected on.

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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