Bush will win it

In the last day or two of my recent breathless trip to England, one of the surprises was the number and the variety of people whose interest had quickened in who is going to win the presidential election in November. I'm always wary of launching into any talk about American politics because, perhaps, I put too much stock in the people who write and say, 'Please don't!'

I'm still grateful to a man who wrote to me many years ago suggesting, in the friendliest fashion, that a small dose of politics from time to time was plenty. 'It's bad enough,' he wrote, 'learning to play one's own form of chess, without trying to catch up with a transatlantic form in which the pawns and the bishops seem to run the game and move backwards and forwards. There are no knights and worse, there's no king and queen.'

Well, there are differences, profound differences, between a parliamentary system with a constitutional monarchy and a federal republican system and it doesn't help things that so many of the institutions of both systems misleadingly carry the same names. We could have a talk – no doubt we've had one – on the unfortunate common use of the word Cabinet for, in Britain, an actual Cabinet system of government and, in America, a system which is not run by the Cabinet and it's parliamentary leader, but by a leader outside the Congress who picks his Cabinet from among old or new cronies who have never, or very rarely, been elected to anything.

And the word House, as in the House of Commons, is also unfortunate if you go on to suppose that the House of Representatives is its political equivalent. And so on and so on.

But I think everybody knows by now that the president, whoever he is, is in some ways a uniquely powerful leader as, also, in some parliamentary ways, remarkably powerless. He is, however, at once the head of state and the head of government. He has to do everything the monarch does by way of ceremony and he's also the leader of his own political party.

It has always been a more strenuous job than that of a prime minister and these days it's enough to break a young, strong man. So it has to be seen as something of a marvel that in spite of all the standard gossip that Ronald Reagan is a nine-to-five president, that he has vigorously survived for more than seven years after a minor and a major cancer operation and an assassination attempt in which he suffered a very severe close to fatal chest wound.

When Mr Reagan got back to Washington from Moscow, he was, not surprisingly, husky in his speech and this gave the irresistible opportunity to hundreds of reporters wondering what they had left to write to do yet another piece on a 77-year-old who must surely, by now, be immobilised by fatigue. He's no sooner positively diagnosed as a lame duck than he gets up and starts quacking as energetically as ever.

By which I don't mean that he's trying to prove a personal, physical vigour that's waning. I mean, as I reminded you and myself some weeks ago, he retains many powers any sitting president can still exercise, even if he has to perform them from a wheelchair. He has his veto to strike down any act of Congress he thoroughly dislikes. He still retains his powers of patronage, the power of appointment of thousands of offices, including federal judges, that he can fill with friends or friendly supporters, throughout the 50 states.

He is still the final voice, the voice of American policy when it comes to what shall be done in the Middle East, in Central America, in the trade war with Japan, in negotiations with effect in, anyway, Afghanistan and Angola, and – a personal priority for the next five months – the effort to persuade Mr Gorbachev to reduce the enormous Soviet commitment of arms and men to Cuba, and Nicaragua in particular, and Central America in general.

What he can't do, he must know now, is to push the campaign for a strategic defence initiative Star Wars either in its original or in its modified form, especially since, first, his own chiefs of staff are against it and, second, it wouldn't go into effect until the mid 1990s when not only Ronald Reagan will be long gone from the White House, but quite likely his successor – even if 1997 were the date of the blast-off of his successor.

Well, I take it that the renewed interest abroad in the immediate successor is due to the recognition that all these powers will pass on 20 January next year to another man and we now know, in the collapse of the old convention system, which of two men it's pretty well bound to be.

It used to be that once the primaries, the California primary especially, were over, even the most unpolitical American began to get fired up by the convention game, as people who don't routinely watch baseball suddenly get excited by the World Series that clinches the season and the championship. It used to be that we watched the delegates assemble in the convention cities, with two or three or more candidates taking off the gloves and getting ready on the first three days of the convention to light into each other and woo and try to win a majority.

The mushroom-like growth of the primary system over the past 20 years has put paid to that and deprived us of the incomparable moment of suspense when a man, usually with a deep, baritone voice rose and intoned, 'Alabama', and the chairman of the Alabama delegation would rise on the floor and announce the count of his delegation. So many for A, so many for B and, perhaps, a freakish couple of votes – it used to happen – for, say, Groucho Marx. Slowly, the entire alphabet of the states would be called and we would tot up the scores and nobody had it. On to a second ballot, third or more. In 1924 the Democrats took 103 ballots before they got their man.

Well, all that has gone with the primary system whereby, throughout the spring, regional elections commit so many delegates to one or other of the competing candidates. So, by now, we know that George Bush and Michael Dukakis are going to be respectably the Republican and the Democratic nominee, unless one or both fall down in a dead faint, never to rise again.

'Yes, but,' the people ask, the people being everybody from a high court judge to a soccer fan, to a taxi driver, 'who is going to win in November?' Well, I'll tell you. It will be Dukakis or George Bush. You really have to be a monster of conceit or forgetfulness to go beyond that and pick either man at this early stage of the campaign. Imagine, early – after 18 months of beating their brains and bodies out on the stump at the price of $277 million, contributed by upstanding, high-minded citizens and groups, who will ask absolutely nothing in return, and couldn't possibly be thought of as special-interest groups.

First, though, let me summarise the conventional wisdom, that is, the balance of opinion among the most astute politicians, commentators, campaign advisers, pollsters and other seers. It is that Vice President Bush is in trouble. He will have to shake both the looming shadow of Ronald Reagan and his own Andover and Yale prep school, rather wimpy, image, that Dukakis is, in most parts of the country, getting known and increasingly respected as a thoughtful, cagey administrator who's shown surprising strength in the west and south-west to offset the Democrats' most recent lamentable showings in the South, and that, according to the most reliable surveys, he is bringing back into the fold possibly a half of the blue-collar Democrats who, in 1980 and '84, deserted to Reagan.

So the upshot of this wisdom is that Dukakis is ten points ahead of Bush around the nation and it looks like time for a change.

Now, I will desert my habitual role of cool, objective, fair-minded reporter and I'll reveal, for once, what I personally feel in my bones or my nerve ends. If the election were held... let me put it this way. At the moment, I don't think Dukakis will carry more than eight or nine states, including however some big ones like California, New York, Illinois, possibly Texas, which would make his popular vote much larger than his failing electoral vote would suggest.

Now this is what strikes me, apart from the fact that a national poll in the spring tells nothing about the national preference in the autumn – as the song says, 'Will you love me in December as you loved me in May? Unless there is, before November, another Black Monday or, what would be worse, a steep decline in the actual economy, I expect that what the Democrats will have to face and consistently duck are three, for them, very unpleasant facts. That against all the rules of all the economists, the United States has close to record low unemployment, low inflation and the greatest number of people at work in proportion to the population since the republic was founded over 200 years ago.

Now, that's to say, to be coarse about it, that in spite of the undoubted fact which the Reverend Jackson has been so eloquent in stressing that the country is riddled with pockets of poverty, homelessness, drug addiction, lonely children – they are pockets – that the great majority of middle-class are comfortable and that unless they go against all their habits and instincts, they will vote as they did in 1928 with Coolidge, when similar ominous signs clouded the general prosperity, they will vote for the man who promises to prolong the Reagan heyday.

I admit that the Reverend Jackson has, in many places, effectively punctured some of the big, shining bubbles of the Reagan prosperity and that economists of many schools, practically of all schools, say that a recession is bound to come next spring or summer, but that would be too late for Dukakis.

So, at the moment, I would give Dukakis, say, nine states and Bush, 41 states, but don't place any bets!

Remember, I was the man who, on the very morning of the election in 1948, wrote for my paper's readers a political obituary under the resounding title, 'Harry S. Truman: A Study in Failure'. By ten o'clock the next morning, he was president again.

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.

Letter from America audio recordings of broadcasts ©BBC

Letter from America scripts © Cooke Americas, RLLP. All rights reserved.