Mondale's wobbly leadership

If New York or any other place in America where you had access to a television set was a good place from which to watch the Democrats performing in San Francisco, it struck me that London might be a good place to watch the Republican circus in Dallas and it was a better place to watch how the foreign press, one section of it anyway, was covering the goings-on.

And it did, indeed, turn out to be an interesting object lesson in Anglo-American understanding or, should I say, misunderstanding. On the whole, what struck me was the grateful zeal with which most correspondents fastened on those elements of ostentation, vulgarity and jingoism which they had preconceived to be characteristic of Texas. They would surely have been totally bewildered if the ghost of the late Lord Halifax had appeared and repeated what he once said to me when he was the British ambassador in Washington, that he retreated from Washington to Texas as often as he could, he said, because there he could rest, not only with the most hospitable hosts, but because, he said, 'of all the peoples I've known, the Texans have the finest manners'.

Well, no danger of running into that at a political convention of either party anywhere since a convention is dedicated to jingoism, rowdy good fellowship and, simply, blazing rhetoric. What a relief it must have been to see that the inhabitants of Texas' quarter of a million square miles were hiding amid their ample acres and leaving the Republicans in brash Dallas to reinforce all the blare and the reckless wealth of the TV soap opera.

It only went to show that foreign correspondents, like anxious travellers everywhere, look hard for what they want to find and find it. It reminded me of the reverse habit of American television reporters abroad.

There's one American national network which, whenever there's a story from London about the stock exchange or a lurch in the price of gold or some such, this network always threads its cameras through the greatly varied population of London and unerringly picks out one man to give the comment of THE typical Londoner. It must take them days to find this man – sometimes I think he's hired as a portable prop – but there he is, black coat, pinstripe trousers, stiff collar and immaculately rolled umbrella. THE typical Londoner, what else!

My wife gaily read the Dallas coverage and said, 'Well, good luck to them if that's what they found. It's not my Texas'. And so it isn't. Her mother was a Texan, daughter of a French Roman Catholic priest, originally from New Orleans. How's that again? I hasten to say that he left the church, went into marine insurance and, God bless him, fathered my splendid mother-in-law who never betrayed a northern vowel till the day she died, who was not in the least eccentric, never a touch of the snob but who had an exquisite antenna out for any touch of conceit or show-off, vanity or taint of vulgarity and who, later, damned such a person with one, ominous word. 'But,' she'd say, 'he's/she's so ordinary.'

I exempt from the foregoing strictures the excellent Frank Johnson of the Times who has great and healthy fun with politicians of any nationality, exposing in his own country primness, pomp, condescension and, in America, sentimentality, crassness, deafening patriotism. Mr Johnson is not anti-American. He's simply anti hypocrisy, pretentiousness and the more glucose forms of political sentiment.

First though, some listeners may be shocked at the audacity of a commentator on American affairs retreating 3,000 miles in order to get a better view of the combat zone. Well, it's true it would have been the limit of irresponsibility if this had been 1924 or '48 or '60 or even 1976. And even in 1984, at San Francisco, there was the faint off-chance of a flanking attack on Mr Mondale or a brief guerrilla uprising from the legions, or rather the boy scout troop of Senator Gary Hart. Remember him?

But at Dallas there was no combat zone and, of course, I must say this is almost always true of the convention of the party whose man is finishing his first term in the White House and is seeking a second. Even in the pit of the Depression in 1932, the Republican convention was an automatic show and the renomination of the luckless Herbert Hoover, though not his subsequent massacre at the polls, was presumed.

In 1956 there was never any doubt that President Eisenhower was going to the Republican convention to be crowned again, although there was a stubborn, former governor of Massachusetts who had enough support to want to deny it to old Ike. I don't know why I call him 'old' Ike. He was a youngster of 65. Of course, the governor's plan failed miserably but there was one wonderful moment, as I recall, at that convention – the cry of a single voice simply registering a wistful protest against the unbroken formality of the proceedings.

After Eisenhower's name had been put in nomination and then that of the Massachusetts' governor, the chairman of the convention recited the routine formula – 'Are there any other nominations?' A delegate from one of the Carolinas, I forget which, rose, leaned into the nearest microphone and demanded recognition. What had he to say? 'Mr Chairman,' he bawled, 'I wish to propose the nomination of Joe Smith.' The chairman who was then the speaker of the House couldn't quite catch it. 'What was that?' The brave Carolinian bawled again, 'I wish to place in nomination the name of the next President of the United States, Joe Smith.'

A great buzzing of questions and mutterings and gasps from the floor. The chairman was baffled. He turned for a hurried conference with the parliamentarian of the convention who knows all the rules and who's supposed to know in advance the names of everyone who's going to be nominated. It broke on the assembled thousands sooner than it broke on the chairman that the Carolinian was a wag. Of course there was no such person as Joe Smith. The convention let loose with a tidal wave of laughter which was amplified by the chairman, flushing and flustered, as he shouted back, 'Get your Joe Smith out of here, whoever he is!'

Well, at Dallas there was not even the relief of a surprise gag. Everything was plotted, scripted, even the bursts of spontaneous applause. King Ronald the First and, to safe time, his heir apparent, vice president George Bush, were nominated as a team in one breath. That, at least, was a novelty.

The only move of any political interest was the decision taken, after the first shock of Mrs Ferraro's finances had registered, not to attack Mrs Ferraro in any way, but to put on display three of their own prominent women, two of them of cabinet rank – Mrs Kirkpatrick, the ambassador to the United Nations, a relapsed Democrat, and the beautiful and greatly accomplished Mrs Elizabeth Dole, who is the secretary of transportation – just exhibit them early on in all their eloquence and integrity and so, as Loren Stern said in another context, put upon the audience the odium of the obvious interpretation.

The Republicans will do well to maintain this calculated gallantry through the campaign. Of course, I don't doubt they will now needle the Democrats more than usual about two issues the Democrats have hammered away at with much righteous indignation, namely, the issue of the sleaze factor and the issue of fairness. 'Sleazy' is a seventeenth-century, English word taken to America then and, for a long time anyway, replaced in England by the word 'shoddy'. They both have the same meaning and originally had the exactly same application to a poor piece of textile.

The 'sleaze factor' is a vein of shoddiness the Democrats claim to have seen in many of the Reagan appointments. At least a couple of his Cabinet or sub-Cabinet appointees resigned, the implication being that these people were going or had done dubious deals with contractors or with people willing to buy a government job with a loan.

Mr Ed Meese, Mr Reagan's White House adviser, you may remember, is still under investigation by a prosecutor outside the department of justice for having acquired a mortgage on a loan from a man who was subsequently given a federal job. That's seems to be about all he's charged with, but he's spending the summer collecting all this financial records from way back.

I doubt now whether he will be put on the rack much longer in light, in the glaring light, of the fact that Mrs Ferraro was found to owe $50,000 in back taxes, that when she first ran for Congress in 1978, her husband made large, illegal contributions to her campaign fund – a thousand dollars is the limit for individuals – and there is the fact that her husband invaded the estate of an old lady to finance his own company.

There are Republicans who are still pressing the House Ethics Committee to investigate the charge that Mrs Ferraro is, or has been, a full-blown partner in her husband's real-estate business and, therefore, should have disclosed much more than she did. I should think it unlikely that the House Ethics Committee will be seen to rise in public wrath for a simple, stark reason – investments in real estate are a popular, favourite and legal device for leaping through a tax loophole. The loophole dogs, I suspect, will be allowed to lie.

The Democrats were on much firmer ground on the fairness issue. Their contention that President Reagan's tax policies have given big breaks and will give more to the middle class and to the rich and actually add to the tax burden of the poor, this becomes a very tough charge to refute and if any hackles were raised in the White House by the Democrats' convention, it was when first Governor Cuomo of New York and then Congresswoman Ferraro movingly revealed themselves as the hard-working children of poor Italian immigrants. Mrs Ferraro, it's agreed, is a gutsy and attractive lady, but the fire of the Democrats' charge of unfairness to the struggling poor is a little damped by the disclosure that Mrs Ferraro and her husband are multi-millionaires. We shall see.

I should guess that the Ferraro scandal as a scandal has been quashed, but however spotless she emerges, the bombshell of the disclosures and the confusion in diffusing it, like the early choice of Mr Bert Lance as the Democrats' campaign manager and then the demoting of him within 24 hours will not be allowed to be forgotten as alarming symptoms of Mr Mondale's gift for wobbly leadership.

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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