Democrat prospects dim

Way back there in New Hampshire at the kick-off of the presidential primaries, which offhand I should say took place about eight years ago, but I see from my diary was only four months ago – how time crawls – I made a promise to all those people who yawned at the mere mention of American presidential politics that I would not follow the races step by tedious step.

And, better than that, I promised I wouldn't even behave, as all political writers in every country must if they're going to fill their column and earn their bread and beer, which is to anticipate the next race, scan the form sheet, remind you who was sired by whom, out of whom, like, for example, Mondale out of Carter by Hubert Humphrey, and then give you the absolutely expert tip for today and tomorrow. And then even the prophets have to sit back or, if they're actually at the race, to lean forward and see what happens. Once the race is over, the expert is seen to be not much wiser than the humble citizen who tosses a coin but, amazingly, the expert retains his reputation and goes on into an honourable old age.

I recall a man, a dapper, tweedy, quiet, rather delightful man, a journalist, a pundit who bore a striking resemblance to that bewhiskered character that Peter Arno created and used so often and if there's anybody in the class who can lean back so far they will not need to be told that Peter Arno was one of the great cartoonists of the New Yorker magazine in its early days, which – another shock – is just now celebrating its 60th birthday.

This character had a bristling, guardee moustache, a bloodshot eye, it was only one talent of Peter Arno's genius that he could suggest late nights and a bloodshot eye in a black and white drawing. He, the character, was well along in middle age, was portly, a club man and a low-key rascal. A typical Arno drawing of him showed him lying on the beach at Newport or Southampton or some other, in those days, exclusive stretch of ocean real estate, he looks up and sees a toothsome young lady in a bathing suit, stepping on to the beach and he turns to a male companion and hisses, 'Gad! I could dip into capital for her!'

Well, excuse me for getting carried away there for the moment by just one, great memory from the New Yorker in its early heyday. It's now in its late heyday.

I was talking about this dapper, tweedy, twinkly little man who looked like Arno's character and maybe I thought of it that way because he was, in fact, a writer for the New Yorker. He was its racing correspondent. He wrote under the pseudonym of Audax Minor because before him his father had written as Audax Major. Anyway, Audax Minor had, every week for, it appeared, 52 weeks of the year, a column, a full-page column on the horses, sometimes written from Long Island or from Florida or from Kentucky or from Saratoga or from memory.

He knew everything and he wrote modestly but I don't suppose he had a better than average record of picking winners, but I remember once having him pointed out to me on one of the very rare occasions that I found myself in the vicinity of a racehorse and my companion, a staff member of the New Yorker, said, 'Now, see the little man with the field glasses and the tweeds, there is a connoisseur of horse flesh!' Audax Minor kept his column going for, it must have been at least 40 years, until he was in his middle eighties, when one day he died as quietly as he'd lived.

The New Yorker has a tradition, a habit rather, of giving a man his head at something he does very well and so, to the reader, he seems to be setting up what editors call a department, as a regular theatre department, baseball, books, so on. But, on the New Yorker, when a man or woman has made a department his or her very own and dies, the department disappears. I don't believe there's been a racing piece in the magazine since the death of Audax Minor.

Now, I don't wish very often that when political pundits die their editors would kill all future political punditry but there are times when I wish the whole breed of us was put out to pasture. For four months now, what hurts, what bores, is not the succession of actual primary elections and caucuses, but the reams and reams of writing and talking that poured out before the races telling us what was going to happen and then, if it did happen, we were told why and when it didn't happen, we were told why again.

I don't regret making that March promise to lay off the presidential scene but I did warn you that on 5 June we should come to the very last of the primaries – not quite, there's a small one left in North Dakota – but June 5 was the fateful date when three states would hold their primaries, states that together could deliver a whacking slate of delegates to any Democratic contender. California, the most populous state in the union, New Jersey and West Virginia.

June 5, I promised you, was, as we tipsters like to say, the moment of truth. That being the moment when, according to Ernest Hemingway, the bull comes intact into the hands of the matador who, with the muleta, corrects any tendencies towards hooking towards one side or the other, to place him in position for killing and to kill him from in front, making him lower his head with the red surge of the muleta and killing him with the sword, driving it in high up at the top of the angle between the two shoulder blades.

Well, I quote that just to show how far a good idiom can be stretched, but that's roughly what Mr Walter Mondale intended to do to Senator Gary Hart last Tuesday, most decisively, he thought, in California and New Jersey. Well, he didn't. Senator Hart won very well in California. Mr Mondale won very heavily in New Jersey.

I'm not going to review the history or the procedures which vary from state to state of the interminable primaries and caucuses. As Macbeth said after his first visit to America in a presidential year, 'Returning were as tedious as go o'er'. I will simply say that the purpose of these primary elections which are participated in by registered members, usually officers, local and state, of the party. Democratic or Republican, the purpose is to see how the sentiment of the party regulars – note, not the ordinary voter! – how that sentiment is flowing towards or against a given candidate. There have been Republican primaries though you'd never know it because we all know that once President Reagan said he was going to run again, the Republican convention would be simply or elaborately a Republican coronation.

The great question or, at least, back there in the late winter, the lively question was who is going to be chosen by the Democrats to run against Reagan? Some of you with very good memories may recall that in the beginning there were eight Democrats, each one of whom said he was the man to beat Reagan. Can you remember their names? Remember Senator Cranston of California? Remember Senator Hollings, the droll, courtly Southerner – I'm sorry we lost him – George McGovern? Remember John Glenn?

It's cruel but correct to say that there is no longer any need to remember any of them. If the primary system has a virtue, it is that of advertising at an early stage the lacklustre appeal of this man and that and so, of disposing of them.

Three men, however, drew enough votes and enough enthusiasm to stay in the race. Those three men were – even now we may say are – Walter Mondale, Mr Carter's vice president, Senator Gary Hart and the Reverend Jesse Jackson.

Not to put too fine a point on the results of those 39 primaries, what has come out of it is that Mr Mondale has collected more delegates than Senator Hart and the Reverend Jackson combined. To win the nomination in the balloting at the San Francisco convention, a candidate needs 1,967 votes of all the delegates present. Mr Mondale has done his arithmetic and says he has just over 2,000. Senator Hart is credited by the media with about 13 or 14 hundred. The Reverend Jackson has several hundred.

Of course, he never expected to get the nomination. What he has done is to rouse the black population, make them register to vote and vote for him in such huge numbers (between 80 and 90 per cent of his vote in most places came from the blacks), that he could make or break the Democratic candidate, whoever he's to be.

In other words, if Senator Hart goes on saying that Mondale's arithmetic is wrong, that many of those so-called committed delegates are only leaning towards him or favouring him at the moment, could switch in San Francisco, if Senator Hart does carry the fight to the convention floor, then whichever one wins is going to have to begin at once to woo the Reverend Jackson.

The black vote in the South this year is expected to be at least three or four times what it was in 1980 and if you look over the results in the southern states in that year you'll see that, if there'd been two or three times as many blacks voting and they'd voted against Reagan – as nearly all of the black voters did – most of the southern states would have gone for Carter. Former President Nixon, who has emerged to display as much political shrewdness as anyone in the game, says that the main threat to a Reagan re-election is the southern black and, after all the primary results were in, the chairman of the Republican party in Texas looked them over and concluded that President Reagan has two big hazards to overcome.

One is complacency among Republicans and other conservatives, complacency which assumes that Reagan can go waltzing in and so no need to help. And the other peril is the many thousands of new voters, blacks, that the Reverend Jackson has persuaded to put themselves, for the first time, on the voting registers. Simply and memorably, Mr Strake, this leading Texas Republican said, 'It scares the bejeebers out of me!'

Well, all technical expertise apart, there is one deep impression left on the weary public which the Democrats are now labouring to wipe out. It is that whether or not Hart gives in and bows to Mondale, Mondale and Hart have spent so many months destroying each other, been so busy shredding each other's reputations, have ended up with two catalogues of each other's political ineptitude that President Reagan doesn't need to dream up nasty accusations against either Mr Mondale or Senator Hart. They've done it to each other.

Unless the Democrats suddenly unveil an attractive dark horse at San Francisco, it seem to me that their prospects for November are dim indeed.

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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