Syrians free US soldier

It used to be a routine test in the public schools, the public, not the private schools, of this country to ask the pupils to call off the state capitals, that is the capital city of each state where, usually in a domed building that looks like a copy of the Capitol in Washington, its separate government consisting of a Senate and a Lower House conducted its separate affairs, which, in a continental country this size and under a system which from the beginning gave the states separate powers, can be very considerable.

The states have their own laws that control banking, education, housing; not least, their own codes of criminal and civil law. In California, much of the law that has to do with property and inheritance derives from the Spanish law imposed there in the late eighteenth century. The criminal code of Louisiana is based on the Napoleonic code and it's possible there to have a man tried twice for a crime which can be just marginally redefined so as to bypass the federal constitution which forbids anyone's being put in double jeopardy. That is, to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb for the same offence.

However, I didn't mean, just now, to do more than stress the great, separate powers of the states which we are vividly reminded of this week because it was the week when new governors were being inaugurated in many of the 50 states. Not in all of them, because the states elect governors as well as their legislatures for different lengths of tenure. In some states, the governor sits for two years, in others for three or four.

And just to look over the main issues they were talking about in their inaugural speeches spans a gamut of hundreds of problems, from raising state taxes to repairing highways battered by unprecedented storms, to new health programmes, new banking acts, pooling county taxes in the cause of strengthening the police, setting new high rates for telephones, appointing a commission in one western state to investigate bribery charges against a judge, and so on and on and on.

Incidentally, why did I bring up the game of having children call off the sites, the locations of the state capitals? Because being able to do it gives you a short crash course in American history. If you were to swoop down on a hundred schools scattered around the United States and without warning gave the pupils this test, I think you'd be lucky to find three pupils in ten who could pass it.

To a stranger, the game might sound a rather dull one, like calling off the names of the counties of England and Scotland but very many, most, of the state capitals are remote from the biggest cities by which the states are known. What, for instance, is the capital of California? Not Los Angeles, not San Francisco. It is Sacramento. How about Louisiana – New Orleans? No, it's Baton Rouge. Texas? Austin. Kentucky? Frankfurt. New York, it's Albany, 145 miles away from New York city on the banks of the Hudson River at the junction of the water route from New York city to the Great Lakes. And that gives you the clue.

The capitals of all the states I've mentioned, and most of the rest, are at the head of a river and when these states came into the union, these were the busy, central cities because they were the link between the main form of transport, water, and the new forms, first, the horse-drawn coach and later the train.

From time to time, the big city boys in many states complain that in the days of eight-laned highways and jet planes and the combining of all the big business of a state by way of banking, insurance, wholesaling, retailing or whatever, they say it's ridiculous to go on maintaining the state capitals in small towns, remote from the business capitals, at which point, a resounding hullabaloo goes up from the farmers, the upstate politicos, the upriver men and the counties that surround the state capitals and exist by putting up new government buildings and housing and feeding and gouging the legislators. They scream like wounded and disenfranchised eagles and the big-city boys cool down very quickly because they know that if they go on about it the upstate counties, which have enough representatives combined to outvote the big-city representatives, will brutally cut off big slices of funds that are being begged by the big-city mayor for big-city projects.

Few sights in American politics are so touching or enlightening as watching the feisty mayor of New York City, Ed Koch, the second most powerful executive officer in the United States after the president, to see him get off a plane in Albany and go cap in hand, so to speak, to beg a few million dollars from Governor Cuomo, not unlike a solidarity leader appearing in the private apartments of General Jaruzelski.

Well, I meant to thresh through the problems of the states, in 1984, this time, the problems that are common to most of them, which have to do with such chronic universal problems as state subsidies for housing projects, the armies of juvenile delinquents who are upsetting the school system, drug abuse among children, boosting unemployment and welfare grants to make up for the cuts in federal funds. What to do about illegal immigrants? Whether to repeal new laws in several states bursting with Hispanics which required balloting forms to be printed in Spanish as well as in English.

This is the time of the year, in short, while a new Congress is assembling, when most American states are preoccupied with their own state affairs. Many a governor hoped to get nice headlines in Wednesday's papers outside his state with his moving inaugural speech. Mr Walter Mondale, the – at the moment – runaway favourite as the Democrats' choice for president, was cagey enough to time a big speech on Tuesday evening which would next day make the front pages of the nation's press as a noble and impressive indictment of the Reagan administration.

Alas, for the hopes of conspicuous publicity! By the late afternoon on Tuesday, people were calling up their neighbours and, by six o'clock in Chicago and seven in the east, millions of Americans, who don't set their clock by the nightly television news, were galvanised by the first item. The audacious, the very precarious mission of the Reverend Jesse Jackson to get the Syrian government to set free their black prisoner of war, Lieutenant Goodman, had succeeded, where the President of the United States and all his aides and diplomatic channels and top-secret wires and hot lines had failed. Not failed exactly, but not come through.

A political coup for a political maverick worthy of 'The Pickwick Papers' or, at least, one of the droller chapters of a Disraeli novel. The Reverend Jesse Jackson, as I should guess everybody knows by now is the old lieutenant and Man Friday of Martin Luther King, was at his side in Memphis when he was shot, has risen in power among black people by his combination of soaring panting oratory and a helping hand always ready for the poor people down the block or the case of some black children being denied the bus to an integrated school.

He has spent the last few years travelling through dozens of states, especially where the blacks are numerous and he's constantly polished up his image as a statesman to be reckoned with by quick safaris into foreign capitals – to Africa, to Europe – being lavishly photographed with a head of state and next day mingling confidently with the black inhabitants of Brixton. He is, of course, a declared candidate, the first serious black candidate for the Democrats' nomination for president.

I don't believe that even in his most egocentric dreams he sees himself at San Francisco in July receiving the nomination while the defeated Mondale, John Glenn, Alan Cranston and the rest bow the knee to their next lord and master. He is not going to be the Democrats' choice and he knows it, but by threading his way through hundreds of thousands of miles of American highways and byways and urging the blacks to register for their presidential vote in November and throwing up his right arm at every stop and chanting, 'Our time has come' he has made an indelible stamp on the presidential race.

His Republican opponents, as well as his Democratic rivals, admit that he might well, alone, manage to double the number of qualified black voters this year. In a raft of key states that could turn the vote, unless the white population gets out in unheard of numbers. For it's a melancholy fact that whereas the percentage of voters in general elections in Britain, in France, in Germany, have been between 75 and 85 per cent, at the last presidential election, only 51 per cent of Americans qualified to vote voted. So, of those 51 per cent, by the way, a bare majority voted for Reagan. You could say, if nobody in the White House was listening and you could say correctly, that of the entire American population that was qualified to vote, only 26 in a hundred cared enough to vote for Ronald Reagan. We called it a landslide.

So, like Jesse Jackson or curse him, he's a strong card, could be the trump card in the coming presidential election. When the news came in that the Syrians had bowed to his plea for the prisoner, while they were temporising with the president, you could imagine a groan going through the White House, a wince passing through the body of Walter Mondale who hopes to collar the votes of the blacks by now treating Jackson as a sort of valuable field marshal, a gust of sighs passing over the other Democratic hopefuls. It really looks as if Cranston, Hart, Hollings and even Glenn could forget about November.

The White House men dedicated to winning the election are now storing all their ammunition against the prospect of having Mondale and his buddy, the Reverend Jackson, as the true opposition. Of course, nobody dare vent these true feelings. The president and all the Democratic hopefuls jumped into print with bouquets of praise for good old Jesse.

The president, probably, handled most adroitly. 'You can't,' he grinned, 'quarrel with success.' The grin is standard reaction but this time it could be taken as a grin of gratitude that the Reverend Jackson's triumph came in January and not in late October.

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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