First primary in presidential campaign

Well, the first hurdle is behind us, buried in the snows of New Hampshire. We now have only 29 primary elections to go through, a hot summer, two brawling conventions, one in Kansas City, the other in New York, an autumn of deafening oratory – claims, counterclaims, insults, contradictions, dire prophesies – then an election the first Tuesday in November and then we shall know who is to be the next President of the United States.

Whenever one of these presidential campaigns gets under way, which is never later than a year before the election, I think wistfully of the old lady who, many years ago, heard me going on about this time of year about the chances of this man and that for the presidency and wrote me a simple, succinct sentence on a postcard: 'Instead of fretting for so long over who is likely to be president, would it not be wiser to wait until November and see who is.' 

It would indeed! But wisdom has no more to do with electioneering fever than with gambling on horse races or looking into a crystal ball. You don't need to be endowed with much wisdom, you don't even need to be an elementary scientist, to know that what the ancients thought they knew about the behaviour of the sun and the stars and what we know, not to mention that their calendar was different from ours, or the glaring fact that people born on the same day in Peking and Pimlico have vastly different genes, upbringing and the rest. In spite of these wildly varying conditions, millions and millions of people around the globe turn every day to a column with some such title as 'Seeing Stars' or 'Your Fate Today' and read that they should write no letters, avoid financial advice and anticipate romance in the evening. Or, looking across the column to the sign of their mate, business partner or enemy, read 'your natural cunning promises a big bargain today' and the reader sighs, 'The lucky stiff! Just like a Scorpio.' 

Well, the American primary elections are a dogged attempt at a step-by-step system of democracy. Ordinary folk in one region of the country are allowed to look over the big boys trying for the presidency and say whom they prefer in each party. And then ordinary folk in another, different part ofo the country are allowed to do the same. And, in spite of all the hullabaloo of campaign buttons and posters and gaudy promises of the millennium, we ought not to belittle the good intentions – you might almost say the bravery – of the system. It would certainly be a radical change if eight Russians had to go from door to door in the town of Minsk, say, and beg the farmers and the factory workers and the man who keeps the corner store to vote for them to replace Mr Brezhnev. 

It would even require quite a change in the British system. If you never knew who the Labour Party or the Conservative Party were going to have as their next Prime Minister until five Labour candidates and two Conservatives had trudged through Oswaldtwistle and Burnley and Cleveleys in the Lancashire primary and, in the result, effectively knocked off two or three hopefuls, the others going on to Hampshire and to speak in schoolrooms and outside petrol stations in Southampton and Winchester and Petersfield, and then the candidates who survived that massacre would go on to Maidstone and Ashford and Sevenoaks until the Kent primary had declared the winners and caused the rest of the country to say, 'Well, what do you know? That's the end of Fred, or Ted, or Philip, or whoever!' 

The New Hampshire primary may not tell us whether either Jimmy Carter, the successful Democrat, or Gerald Ford, the successful Republican, is going to be president next time round but it does tell us who isn't. Sargent Shriver, for instance. Sargent Shriver is a brother-in-law of the late President Kennedy. In 1972 he was the chosen vice-presidential candidate of the Democrats and he was chosen, it's generally agreed, because he peppered the ticket with some of the gold dust that brushed off the dead president. Mr Shriver may have been tempted to try again – for the big prize this time – on the assumption that the gold dust still sparkles, but in the past few months the picture of the late president has been considerably tarnished, first by a Senate committee which practically concluded that the CIA's plot to assassinate Fidel Castro was masterminded by Kennedy, and second, by a lot of uncomfortable stories, some pretty well proven, some conjectural, that President Kennedy had a rather active intral-mural and extra-mural romantic life. I mean inside and outside the walls of the White House. 

Anyway, Mr Shriver came at the bottom of the list in the Democratic primary, taking only nine per cent of the Democrats' votes and that, in an election in which he was the only Roman Catholic in a state where over 50 per cent of the population is Catholic. It would seem that if he couldn't win in New Hampshire, he couldn't win anywhere. He's probably come to the same conclusion and, even as I talk, he may have thrown in the sponge. I imagine that Mr Fred Harris with only 11 per cent, and possibly Senator Birch Bayh with 18 per cent, at least are looking at the sponge. 

I really don't think there's any point in going into the characters and beliefs of any of the Democrats because there are so many of them lusting to be president and it would be a waste of your memory bank to learn the philosophy and foibles of three or four men and then have to forget about them come Tuesday when they hold the Massachusetts primary or after Florida the following week. I'll say for now simply that Jimmy Carter, who looks like Huckleberry Finn and comes out of Georgia, is an interesting case of a Southerner somehow able to win in a northern state and what he's done is to make the Florida primary more critical. For if he won there, he could puncture once for all the hopes, the candidacy, of the man who expects to ride high in his native South land, George Wallace. 

For the rest of us and the rest of the country, the most interesting thing about the New Hampshire primary was the close race between President Ford and the former governor of California, and before that B-film cowboy, Ronald Reagan. By the way, you know that in the past year the television networks have tended to dredge up all the films of Ronald Reagan in the hope of attaching his charms to the accompanying commercials. However, the Federal Communications Commission decided, a couple of months ago, that this was a form of privilege. Under the law which allows candidates for the presidency to get equal exposure outside the time they themselves have bought, Mr Reagan's films were banned from the box. 

At that time jokers said that the other candidates ought to tot up the running time of the Reagan films and be given equal time. A better joker, considering the dim quality of many of those films, said that any network that ran the Reagan films ought to give Reagan equal time to reply. 

Well, back to the case of Reagan versus Ford. Before the New Hampshire primary, it was being said, and truly said, that the winner in New Hampshire, in fact the winner in all or most of the state primaries, is by no means necessarily the man who's going to win the November election. Indeed three men, two Democrats – Stevenson in 1952, Humphrey in '68 – and one Republican, Wendell Willkie in 1940, won their parties' nomination without going into the primaries at all. On the eve of the New Hampshire primary, the statisticians, sociologists and professors of political science (in which this country abounds) were flooding us with fat pamphlets and thin pamphlets proving pretty conclusively that the primaries prove nothing at all. Or, proving anyway that the truth about them discovered by Professor A is exactly the opposite of the truth discovered by Professor B. 

To me, the most interesting discovery – and one that could almost excuse us from giving any weight at all to the primaries – is a study done by a student at the University of California, which says, in effect, that what you should watch is not the primaries, but the public opinion polls. Now, old politicians temperamentally hate public opinion polls because they rob the old men of their old fondness for displaying their professional insight into matters that, before the public opinion polls, could not be scientifically tested. This California student proves, with a raft of historical examples going up to this year, that the men who take the presidential election, and sometimes the primaries before it, are practically always the men who stand at the top of the popularity polls among the voters of their party. 

Against this, we have all learned a cautionary lesson which may not be a lesson at all. It is that if an incumbent president doesn't win in New Hampshire, or only just wins, he'll quit the White House. This bit of witchcraft is based on two examples: Truman in 1952 and Lyndon Johnson in 1968, but there is, I'm afraid, lots of evidence to show that both men had resolved to quit politics before the New Hampshire primary. 

So, we come down to the persuasive study of Mr Beneger of the University of California and, applying his test, popularity among your own party's voters across the country as the polls record, the election would now seem to be between President Ford and Hubert Humphrey. Humphrey is not going into any primaries, not campaigning – simply waiting for the crown to be handed to him when five or six Democrats fight to a standstill in the New York convention. 

But President Ford is another case. Mr Ford won – narrowly – over the 'Lochinvar out of the west', Reagan. Both sides claim a famous victory. Mr Ford is certainly going to go on and, in one primary or another, we shall see if the apparent lesson of New Hampshire is a true one, namely that the country is going more conservative. 

Jimmy Carter, a conservative Democrat, handsomely beat the four liberal Democrats. Reagan, the conservative Republican came awfully close to beating the moderate Ford. 

My own hunch is that Reagan is not going to make it. This is a hunch that has no base in sense or science. So if you must bet on the election, take the bets of people who think they know. Bet against everybody, not for somebody and don't take any wooden nickels.

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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