The Democrat Convention of 1924 - 23 December 1987

I caught, a little late, the most sensible, the most comprehensive, simply the best comment on the Gary Hart matter, intrusion, fiasco, however you want to define it.

The comment came from the oldest of American political journalists who’s kept a Scotsman’s wary eye on politicians from the dawn of Franklin Roosevelt’s presidency to the twilight of Reagan’s, and he’s James Scotty Reston of the New York Times.

The other day he said it all in six short snappy sentences. Here they are, “The only possible explanation of the Democrats’ campaign for the presidency is that somehow it’s being run by the Republicans. The Democrats have made every mistake in the book except bringing back Ted Kennedy. Their best men won’t run and their worst men won’t quit. It would be funny if it weren’t so serious. The reappearance of Gary Hart on the scene has been helpful in only one respect – he has created such a mess in his party that it will have to wake up or give up for another four years.”

Well this shrewd comment left me for the first time with the serious hunch that, saving some disaster in the economy, the Republicans may very well be on their way to another four years in the White House. Mr George Bush, for so long kidded and mocked as an eastern Establishment wimp begins to look President Bush.

President Reagan’s popularity has risen after the summit to a breathtaking 67%, far far above the figure of any other president at the end of his second term, 40% better than Harry Truman, and it could be that what the country wants is a stable, moderate version of Reagan.

The coat tails of Reagan which for so long have been supposed to be a fatal drag on Mr Bush could, on the contrary, whisk him into the White House, not because of any positive, newly-discovered virtues in Mr Bush but because the alternatives from the ranks of the Democrats look so unstable, so stammering, so mixed up.

It reminds me vividly – and brought back a dreadful warning – of the Democrats plight which they thought of at the time as a triumph, in 1924. They met in convention in Madison Square Garden in New York. Those were the days when there were no more than two or three state primaries and they had no effect on the party’s choice of the man except to commit the delegations of those states to their popular choice.

In those days, and on through the 1940s, the convention was the place, the only place, where sometimes through many ballots two or three favourite candidate battled it out for the prize. Well, 1924 the Democrats met on the battleground with several main candidates but two mainly ready for the slaughter and the factions of each were so well matched, so dug into their trenches, so determined not to surrender to the other guy – certainly not to a compromise – that when the roll of the states was called and each state voted its choice, somebody there guessed that the balloting might go on for two days and nights. It takes about ninety minutes for a ballot.

Well it went on for ten days and nights. No pause, no break, no recess, dirty deals are best made at night. The delegates would stumble off to their hotels and grab a few hours' snooze leaving their stand-ins – or alternates as they’re called – to be at the ready for a vote.

The man who got it in the end wasn’t even a candidate. He was a spectator in the gallery and I asked him, in old age, if there came a time during the continuous sweating uproar – it was 100 degrees most days and no air-conditioning in those times – if there was ever a moment when it crossed his mind that he might be chosen. He said “Oh yes, at the end of the 72nd ballot when Smith began to lose the tussle”.

Seventy-second ballot! We’ve had no more than three ballots for 30 years. He had to wait only another two days and nights.

On the 103rd ballot, to their own astonishment, the Democrats had their man, a benign, gentlemanly Wall Street lawyer from Virginia, John W Davis. "John W who?" the country cried.

But when it was over the Democrats and the Democrat-leaning newspapers exulted in what they called “a wonderful demonstration of American democracy in action”. No automatic leader, no shoo-in hand-picked by the party bosses, not like the Republicans who had sheepishly renominated the sitting president, the mediocre, melancholy Calvin Coolidge.

I suppose if you were a Democrat at the time or a young, ardent reporter, it was possible to see it that way. What everybody saw in the following election, and has accepted ever since, is that the country had not been inspired by the battle of Madison Square Garden. It had been scared by a party so confused, so swollen by windbaggery, so faltering with indecision that Coolidge looked like the steady old captain on the bridge. In the result Coolidge went waltzing in.

So it strikes me now if the Democrats go on maintaining a family squabble between seven men each pretending to be Moses they’ll wind up looking like a party with nobody capable of handling the Congress, let alone Mr Gorbachev.

The end of each year always produces another spectacle which also would be funny if it were not so serious. It’s the cliff-hanging ceremony of saving the country from going broke. I’m not thinking of the deficit, I’m talking about the money in the federal till that pays every government employee from the civil rangers to the forest rangers of the national parks, the cleaning women in every office building run by the national government, the postmaster in Santa Claus, Arizona – there is such a place.

Now you’d think that the cost of this daily bread would be guaranteed by a separate, untouchable budget. Not at all, it has to be voted as part of the whole budget that decides finally how much in the next fiscal year shall go for defence, social services, for everything else.

Well the budget had not been voted on when the government’s authority to pay out its employees’ wages expired last Saturday and as always the chivalrous president – Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan – stepped in and sent an emergency message extending the spending authority ‘til one minute after midnight on Monday.

Now the point of this brinkmanship is to force a decision from the Congress on the whole budget by keeping them up all night – in this case two nights – at the end of which time they are too bleary-eyed to keep an eye on their pet projects and they weave their way to a final vote and pant out “We did it again” and the post offices will stay open and the park ranger’s wife can buy her turkey and the halls of Congress will be scrubbed clean.

There is one Christmas package of happy news of a kind we never expected way back there in the late summer and the fall. After the marathon debate over the fitness of Judge Bork and the fatuous episode of Judge Ginsburg’s withdrawal, we have a ninth justice for the Supreme Court.

May I just remind you of the woeful preliminaries to this happy ending? Judge Bork of a federal court of appeals was nominated by Mr Reagan to fill the vacancy of a retiring justice. Judge Bork, is without question or quibble, a remarkable intellect and a constitutional scholar of the first chop. He loves the Constitution as an intellectual puzzle. He does not find in it rights which everybody assumes are there if they are not specified.

He found, for instance, no guaranteed right of privacy. He did not see that the equal protection of the laws clause applied to any group of Americans as such, only to individuals, so his critics leapt with a fear that he would allow the government into the bedroom, no right of abortion, and would exclude blacks from equal protection which, of course, is grotesque.

In the end, however, his most serious questioners on the Senate judiciary committee feared that he would leave open to questions rights – the integration of the races for example – which have been lately guaranteed. In his sparring with the committee he disclosed a fatal flaw: he was too clever by half. His intellect seemed to get ahead of his humanity and he was turned down.

The next nominee, Judge Ginsburg, confessed he had smoked marijuana when he was a law professor. Silly, but fatal, since marijuana is still illegal. But he was vulnerable on really serious grounds – he said he’d argued over 30 cases in court but had only argued three or four. He’d sat on a case involving a television cable company when he had shares in another such company, which is not only improper but violates an actual statute. He withdrew, however, on the marijuana lapse.

Now a third man has come before the judiciary committee, Judge Anthony Kennedy, a Californian, who’s been given the highest possible recommendation by the American Bar Association. He has no theory about rights specified and rights to be deduced. He respects precedent but is willing to overturn it if he thinks it maintains social injustice.

He is a Catholic but he said his religion would not dictate his judgment on any given abortion case. He came across as a conservative of the centre but making no promises about when he would move to the right or left. It was pretty clear that he’s the best the right, left or centre can hope for and his confirmation by the Senate seems to be as certain as anything ever can be in American politics.

One final Christmas present – for Woody Allen. He’s had his first baby, a son, or rather Mia Farrow his live-in companion, has it for him. It’s to bear the wonderful name of Satchel. Satchel Allen. Now this name can have come from only one source in the history of the human race, from an old dead black baseball player, Satchel Paige, who was something of a folk hero – not for his baseball prowess, which was considerable, but for his philosophical musings. As such, I should guess, a private hero of Mr Allen.

I recall one jewel Satchel Paige gave to the world in what, for a baseball player, is extreme senility. He was in his sixties when he pitched a very fine exhibition game and after the match a radio interviewer asked him the secret of his astounding longevity. He replied with a bit of advice we could all use at this time of the year.

“Well,” he said, “I puts it down to my diet. I eat nothing that’s strictly fried. Fried foods give the grumbles to the stomach.”

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