Day care and recreation - 5 August 1988

About five years ago a new newspaper appeared on the newsstands of our eastern cities. It was yet another attempt in the wake of very many failures to create a national American newspaper.

It was conspicuous from the start because its masthead – USA Today – was in white blocked letters against a blue background and all its photographs were in colour. All previous attempts have failed because of the obvious and insuperable problem of distributing the same paper to the towns and cities of a continent 3,000 miles wide and diagonally 3,800 across.

Of course for several years now the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal have published, printed, separate eastern and western editions and they make the most of the three-hour time differential and the word processor to get their daily material from coast to coast, but the aim of USA Today was to be on the stands every morning in every city in the entire country.

Nobody knowledgeable about the newspaper business, nobody I ever talk to, gave it much of a chance. A man I know who’s been on the board of a newspaper chain for many years thought that two years would see it in it grave. That’s because this old man, like the rest of us, thought of a newspaper wiring or flying its text from a central place where it was printed. We reckoned without the invention of satellites.

All the new paper’s material, including news reports on one page from every state in the Union, is assembled at a plant in Virginia. When the forms are set up they are flashed to a satellite and the same paper appears early in the morning in slot machines in a thousand streets from Alaska to Florida and everywhere in between. It started with a run, I think, of about 200,000. Today it has over five million readers and rising.

It has performed several small revolutions in the general idea of what should go into a newspaper including, in the bottom corner of each of its four sections – news, life, sports and money – statistical reports in the shape of a graph, more often a pie cut up into sections, of just about every aspect of American life and I must say that for me these little boxes help along what ought to be one of the main duties of a foreign correspondent, namely shattering or at least shaking our preconceptions.

I gave an example of this shock treatment some time ago when the little box on the front page of the sports section divided the pie into percentage sections of the sports that most interested Americans. The question the sample body had to answer was very simple – "Which sport do you watch, play or read about?"

A day or two after this survey appeared I tested out several friends who are not about to trade their regular newspaper for one that prints photographs – ugh! – in colour. As you might expect, they gave a high percentage to the sport that interested them. Some golfers I know who also take a lively interest in one or two other sports agreed that baseball would be number one, basketball possible two, football next and then golf. The truth was jolting.

Football at the top, then basketball, then baseball, then on through boxing, wrestling, horse-racing, harness racing and down and down 'til we find about 7% of the population ever plays or reads or watches on the telly, tennis. Below tennis, at about 6%, was golf.

I found it almost criminal to believe and my golfing friends refused to believe that 94% of the American population doesn’t play, doesn’t watch, doesn’t read about, golf and has never heard of Sandy Lyle or Curtis Strange or Jack Nicklaus, an appalling fact of life that I’m sure Lyle, Strange and Nicklaus also refuse to believe.

The same with a study I recall about America’s spare-time recreation which showed Americans paying to go to symphony concerts more often than they pay to go to baseball games and so on, but there was a recent one which makes us drastically revise our notions about the average American family and much else in American life.

It revealed that only one family in ten in this country matches what a hundred movies and a thousand television commercials tell us is the all-American standard. Only one family in ten is a white family with a father who goes to work and a mother caring for two children at home.

Combine this revelation with another – that over 50% of married couples with young children have both husband and wife away at work – and you begin to see why the most pressing daily issue of life in America to most of the young middle-aged is day care for children.

The most astonishing thing about – let me put it this way – I don’t believe there’s a political candidate in American running for national or state office or the presidency who wouldn’t tell you today that of course in his campaigning he’s talked about day care. So they have, just as they’ve talked about crime, drugs, aid to the Nicaraguan rebels, farm subsidies, AIDS, money for defence and so on.

Only the Reverend Jesse Jackson could fairly claim to have curdled the blood of his audiences by hammering away at the need for small children to be cared for by day, though he was always, or mostly, talking about fatherless, black or Hispanic children. Yet only in the past week or two – actually since the Democratic convention – have Mr Bush and Mr Dukakis started to bring up day care as a vital issue because of late surveys suddenly showing that for a majority of the young middle-aged voters – and they amount to something like a third of the people most likely to vote – the problem of day care overrides every other issue, foreign or domestic.

Day care. It sounds so grey, so abstract, so undramatic, unless – like the Reverend Jesse Jackson – you appear in a slum tenement and point to a couple of listless children in a corner wondering when Mum will be home. I think that the sudden emergence of this issue into the ken of the presidential candidate throws off, for the time being, their standing in the polls.

As I speak, and remember this is before the Republican convention, in the most reliable national poll Mr Dukakis is 17 percentage points ahead of Mr Bush. This has led to soul-searching and image polishing among Mr Bush’s campaign team. They are the first people to confide to you, almost as a CIA secret, that at this time of a presidential year no one of the two candidates has ever been so far behind. The Democrats, as you can imagine, are cock-a-hoop about the figures and a note of jaunty confidence is noticeable in Mr Dukakis.

I had lunch the other day with a Republican, a conservative intellectual, and when I asked him off-handedly what he thought was going to happen he said, “I think Dukakis is going to win”, but we are at the beginning of August. Traditionally, it’s awful to realise the campaign has not begun. It used to be that conventions happened in June, the Republicans first then the Democrats, then the candidates went fishing until Labor Day. The first week in September and they were off on the stump.

These days, these years, they start campaigning – about a dozen of them – two years before the election and after 38 primaries have separated the two men from the mice and after six months or so of merciless campaigning they pick their men, go to the conventions and then start up again.

Two weeks from now, the Republicans will have left New Orleans and surely Mr Bush and Mr Dukakis will get lost for two weeks. Then in September, in theory, the campaign begins. Two months, with never a day’s pause. Don’t you think that with all that exposure, night and day, between now and November weird and unpredictable things are going too happen to the polls?

I still have the feeling that unless there’s a Wall Street crash or some other similar disaster the Democrats are going to have a very rough time trying to make the country fearful of its almost unprecedented prosperity. Recently Mr Dukakis has faced the lowest unemployment rate in 17 years, the very low inflation rate, the painful – for him – fact that more Americans are at work than ever in proportion to the adult population and the best he can say is, “It’s a fool’s paradise. It’s a house of cards,” he says “waiting to collapse”.

“What are you going to do,” he begs “next spring if things go bad?” At the moment I can only say I have never heard of an election year, not in the 1880s, in 1900 or 1908, 1920, '24, '28 or the 1950s when a prosperous America voted out the party in power and yet some of the best, the most experienced old polls in the Republican party are cutting through the issues and worrying about the personality.

These days that means the television image of their man. As one top man on the Bush team put it, “The big question is can our wimp beat their shrimp.”

Well back to that new, the first successful, national newspaper. One of its innovations which many of the old established papers have started to copy, though in a small way, is the whole back page devoted, in colour, to the weather. Four-day forecasts and highs and lows in 110 cities, the top half of the page dominated by a coloured map of the United States. It’s coloured according to the temperatures of every region, from white, zero Fahrenheit, to scarlet in the 90s and purple in the 100s.

For the past month it has been more often than not what I’m looking at today, a vast squashed blob of scarlet with great smears in the south-west and the mid-west of purple. The entire continent in the 90s and the 100s, except for a tiny sliver of yellow along the coastline at San Francisco, a delicious high in the 70s.

“What,” said my young Republican friend, a whipsnapper just turned 60, “what did you do before air-conditioning?” I said, "We sweated and grumbled." We didn’t think it was an outrage. It was like nappies to a baby. It was life.

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