New Hampshire, the political weathervane

One of the standard jokes about Southern California – standard, that is, among Easterners – can be most easily understood if I tell you about what happened out there one day a year or two ago when my wife and I were staying with a friend in Beverly Hills.

My wife has a lively interest in plants, everything from the pineapple cactus to Dusty Miller and when she mentioned that she'd never been to some botanical gardens nearby, our hostess took her off there and left me to bang away at the typewriter.

While they were gone, the mechanical sunshine of that part of the world was interrupted by, well, let's say a London shower and then the clockwork sun ticked away again. They came back in the late afternoon by which time the evening paper had arrived. It had a thundering eight-column headline. It said, 'Storm lashes Southland.' 'Where? Where?' my wife cried. 'Here! Here!' I said, 'That shower was it.'

Any rain coming in from the sea is always defined by the California newspapers, both in the south and the north, as a storm, usually a lashing storm bringing chuckles to any resident of three-quarters of the rest of the country where a storm is a 50-mile-an-hour wind and ten inches of snow.

I had a letter from this old friend of ours this week. She was lamenting how long it had been since our families had come together and she invited us to revel in the, quote, 'glorious sun' unquote, of Los Angeles, a city I've come to call 'the city of dreadful day'.

Well, by the time she had my reply, she must have been eating her words and very soggy words indeed. For, finally – and worse than any time in living memory – southern California, or what the natives call 'the Southland' had a deluge of the real thing. They've had rain for more than a week, rain coming down like stair rods and where other cities built on rock might have been able to take it with some nuisance flooding of basements and the underground system, southern California has soft, crumbly soil and a thin layer of topsoil and a couple of days of heavy rain can have waves of mud sliding down the mountains like lava and your little hill-top house starting to creak and tilt.

Well, the pictures of the damage on the Los Angeles hills near the coast and to such coastal settlements as Malibu are horrendous. By Wednesday morning, a score of people had been killed or drowned in mud, about 50 handsome houses had been totally destroyed and many hundreds more badly damaged. A levee broke and the famous naval air station at Point Mugu had six feet of water and had to be evacuated.

Governor Brown declared a state of emergency in an area about half the size of England, an act which entitles the stricken land to aid from the federal government. This required the governor to stop campaigning in New Hampshire for the coming primary and tear back 3,000 miles to his state, a place he's not often seen in these days, which just shows you how serious things are.

He signed the act and then he flew back again to New Hampshire and there he, no doubt, reflected on the fickleness of nature for New Hampshire's neighbour state, Vermont, is also begging to be declared a disaster area. Poor Vermont has lost, in the past three months, about $50 million on account of the dreadful weather. The dreadful weather? That's right! They call it the first green winter since 1923. In other words, their complaint is not storms but the absence of storms. They depend on getting by now about 70 inches of snow to maintain their big winter industry – skiing. All they've had is a small snowstorm – small by their lights – at the beginning of October and then nothing. This is as freakish as England in 1976 going through the spring and summer with not a drop of rain and the parks getting to look like sinks in the Persian Gulf.

Vermont, not a rich state except in natural beauty, thrives on many family-run ski resorts, each of them expects by Christmas or the New Year to have about 600 skiers out every day. Well, most of them have been open only two weekends this season. The banks are trying to forgive and forget or lend and lament and the federal government, not quite accepting the plea of disaster, has agreed to call the states of New England which live by the skiing population in winter 'economic dislocation areas' which entitles them to loans – one family, one loan – of $100,000 from the government's small business administration.

So, what the meteorologists call 'precipitation' causes disaster in southern California and the lack of precipitation causes disaster in Vermont. The rest of us are rollicking in the mildest winter in memory and are free to devote our time to the troubles of the president, the United Nations and the presidential candidates who, a month or more ago, made the standard promises to discuss issues and not personalities and who are now thumping away at each other like punch-drunk heavyweights.

Poor Ronald Reagan. He tried to lighten things in a campaign bus the other day and entertained the reporters present with a joke about a Pole, a duck and an Italian. In this country, the Poles, as I've mentioned before, take with good grace their status as the butts of jokes about stupidity, as the Irish with, I hope, equal grace suffer the same fate in England. In no time, one of the reporters leaked Mr Reagan's locker-room indiscretion and that evening, on the national television news, I imagine that something like 40 million Americans saw and heard Ronald Reagan make a public apology. One of his campaign aides dismissed the incident with the glum remark, 'There goes Connecticut' – which has more than its fill of Polish and Italian-Americans.

I think this is pretty rough on Mr Reagan. As the New York Times pointed out the next day, there's plenty of coarse political humour being aired by the candidates for which nobody apologises. The great sinners in this are the television and radio political commercials with which the voters of New Hampshire are now being doused.

How about, for instance, one radio commercial which produces in 20 seconds flat a statistic and a plea: 'Since Jimmy Carter became president, the use of marijuana has soared. Isn't it time to get dope out of the White House?' Or another candidate's distribution of a motorcar bumper sticker which bears the stark sentence: 'More people died in Senator Kennedy's car than at Three Mile Island'.

This last crack is not only tasteless but unfortunately very much to the point, at least as many millions of Americans see it. The Columbia Broadcasting System and the New York Times together sponsor a regular public opinion poll and in the latest, which came out this week, one of the questions asked was one that was put three months ago.

In November, people were asked, 'Do you believe that Senator Kennedy told the truth about Chappaquiddick?' Only 30 per cent said yes. In the middle of February the believers dropped to 15 per cent. Well, if 85 per cent of the country is still not satisfied with the senator's apologia for something that happened ten years ago, it can only mean that the doubts about his character are still outweighing the new vigour of his campaign and the burden of his daily complaint that President Carter is too frightened to debate with him and is hiding behind manufactured crises in Iran and Afghanistan.

As for the president himself, while his relative popularity among Democrats is dropping from the high point it reached after his announcement of the Olympic boycott and the banning of high technology sales to the Soviet Union, the professionals in Washington are full of technical admiration for the way he's shovelling money out to New Hampshire – farmers, small shopkeepers, the highways – federal loans which, it is not cynical to say, New Hampshire would go a-begging for if it did not happen to have the first of the state primaries.

Maybe I ought to say now that a presidential primary is an election in which registered members of one party or of each party vote to choose delegates to the national convention which will choose its presidential candidate. The system started in Wisconsin in 1905 and by now there are I think about 30-odd states that hold them. The primary laws vary widely from state to state. The primaries that are looked on as a weathervane are those in which the delegates chosen to go to the national convention are pledged to vote for the man the party voters chose.

Now, New Hampshire is one of the least popular states. Out of the 537 electoral votes which the country will cast in November, New Hampshire has only four. Why should its primary be so terribly important?

Well, 30 years ago, New Hampshire introduced a novelty into the primary laws. Till then its primary directly elected delegates to the national convention. They could be pledged, as they still are, to one man or they could go unpledged and make their minds up at the convention. That still stands, but in 1949 New Hampshire put on the ballot not only slates of delegates but in a separate column what they called 'a presidential preference poll'.

In other words, the voter voted for the delegates he wanted to go to the convention but he also, separately, voted for the presidential candidate he liked best. This new feature became known as 'the beauty contest' and because it's the first indication of how party members feel about the charms of the competing presidential runners, New Hampshire has come to have a psychological influence on the rest of the country out of all proportion to the weight it will bring to the convention itself.

In the past 30 or 40 years, New Hampshire has not, so to speak, 'made' a president in the actual presidential election. In 1932 it voted for the loser, Hoover. In 1948, for the loser, Dewey. In 1960, for the loser, Nixon and, in 1976, for the loser, Ford.

But New Hampshire's primary, while not being able to ensure a national preference, can certainly kill a man off. The list is too long of ambitious and leading presidential candidates who were dealt their death blow in the snows of New Hampshire, or even on the green ground.

A drubbing for either President Carter or Senator Kennedy, for instance, might later appear as the mortal blow to their candidacy.

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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