Conventional Wisdom - 4 February 2000

Tuesday 1 February 2000 is a date that will live either in glory or in infamy.

It was the day on which we entered the 107th month of continuous prosperity - the longest boom anyway, if not the strongest, in American history.

And it has been greeted with innumerable sermons, declarations of pride on the event with only a few expressions of anxiety from chronic anxiety practitioners who've been anxious ever since the first day of the present boom in March 1991.

Of course until this past Thursday morning I had every intention of talking about it and putting it inside the large framework of a little history of booms and busts.

But I've changed my mind and I'm going back on my promise made months ago not to talk about the presidential election until midsummer when the conventions are over and we'll know which two heavyweights or lightweights are going to step into the ring.

In that single sentence I've already revealed a dumb oversight.

That promise, I realised rather late in the day, was due to a slip of the mind. Due to long practice in covering presidential nominating conventions - my first was in 1940 - I and nobody else ever dreamed then the convention system was doomed to sink into history. We'll say how and why in a minute or two.

In a word the convention system in which the delegates proposed - two or three or four or five men - to lead their party and then chose through several ballots the one - once in Madison Square Garden in 1924 through 10 days and nights they had 103 ballots. Well the convention system has been replaced by the primaries system.

Long before the coming conventions this year teams of delegates from each state and both parties were chosen by a primary or by caucuses or by little state conventions and those delegates then go off to that party's national convention, already sworn to the primary winner in their state.

So New Hampshire's four Republican delegates will vote at their convention for Senator McCain, who won a thumping victory last Tuesday.

To gauge the relative importance of two states just consider that at the Republican convention New Hampshire will have four votes, California 54.

In 1960, seven states chose their delegates and hence their candidate through primaries. Today every state has a primary or caucuses or a state convention at which the party's choice of its candidate will be decided.

They all then, in the summer, a thousand or more delegates, troop off to their convention centre in Philadelphia, Los Angeles, Chicago, wherever and on the balloting day they say "Aye" to the man who has already been overwhelmingly voted through all the primaries.

What I'm saying is that a month from now, by March 7, the race between Bush and McCain, Bradley and Vice President Gore will be all over. We'll know by then which two are going to fight it out in November.

The conventions, in other words, have turned - they turned long ago - into coronations.

Even so foreign broadcasting companies will no doubt, following my dumb mistake, keep sending huge teams of so-called reporters to cover the "choice of presidential candidates". They could effectively cover the conventions with one reporter and one recording engineer.

How did this come about? Well it might be fun, enlightening anyway, to sketch the different ways the president was chosen since the beginning.

First, George Washington. The men, mostly lawyers, who in 1787 met in Philadelphia to write the Constitution simply agreed that Washington was the man.

It's hard now to imagine but you see there were no political parties. In fact a system, such a system, the delegates to the Constitution were most anxious to avoid.

That decision came early. When they started out discussing what form of government they should have, remember they were literally inventing a nation, what sort of government - a monarchy, a republic, a syndicalist form, Swiss cantons whatever - they agreed, without any debate, that one form of government they weren't going to touch with a barge pole was democracy, which, as George Washington reminded them: "...among civilised nations is regarded as most disreputable and leading to factions" - factions meant quibbling political parties.

And Washington underlined the menace of political parties by stressing that: "They provoke the mischief of associations and combinations." Which indeed they do.

By the same distasteful scruple George Washington, having been handed a piece of paper that had dropped on the floor with notes about their meetings, scolded the assembled delegates, told them to be more careful "lest our transactions get into the newspapers and disturb the public repose."

Did you know that? The whole Constitution meetings were a secret meeting, pledged not to deteriorate into political parties.

So one party wished to see all the men present having decided on a republic, naturally decided that the chairman - General Washington - should be the first president. Right? Right. So ordered, by acclamation.

It was the one and only acclamation. The citizens of this new republic who called themselves Americans discovered next time that they too were human, even as the detested British and they developed political parties. Which in the beginning divided roughly into men who wanted a strong central government and the men who wanted to give the states plenty of powers so as to check a too powerful-executive. They'd been there, done that.

So at first they had federalists versus republicans and the way they chose the presidential candidate was through caucuses of the congressmen who represented their states.

Well pretty soon there was a lot of popular protest against congressmen in effect choosing the president and that led to the convention system. Which started in Baltimore in 1832 with a small protest party recruited from all the states voting on a set balloting day and the system flourished throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries and I'm happy to say I was not too late to come in on it.

At the ones I attended as a reporter from 1940 to 1972 I had a ball. You arrived at a huge auditorium and after three days of parties and often preposterously demagogic Dickensian speeches and a lot of hoopla and actual entertainment then came the balloting and usually there were two candidates and you took bets - was it going to be Governor Dewey of New York or Senator Taft of Ohio?

Well in that thrilling year of 1940 it was neither. It turned out to be a lawyer from Indiana - a maverick - not even registered as a Republican. A big shambling, charming bear of a Midwesterner who was against the Republican establishment and backed the hated President Roosevelt for his efforts to help the British in the war, while the establishment Republicans were petrified with fright that Roosevelt might beguile America into it. When he did they loathed him more than ever.

Well at the 1940 convention suddenly the frontrunners - the inevitable Dewey and Taft - wobbled a little on the fourth and fifth ballots and on the sixth, up came roaring out of nowhere this maverick bear, Wendell Willkie. He won.

It was the last exciting convention, the last time there were more than two ballots.

This first week in March, exactly a month from now, 16 states hold their primaries, 13 involving both parties including California which alone has a quarter of all the delegate votes spread between 50 states.

California has the last and decisive word, so I'm saying you're going to be spared a spring and summer of political talks. I imagine that from time to time I'll paint in the detailed features of the two men who, on the evening of 7 March, will be the chosen warriors in the November battle - that's the way the politicians describe it, though both parties, as usual, are suggesting there won't be any battle in November, just a simple walk over for the present Vice President Gore or, pardon me, for Governor Bush of Texas.

Governor Bush has done a fine job in Texas we keep hearing and for his part his statement of the issues is that he represents the only true conservative Republicans and proposes to practice what he calls "compassionate conservatism".

He has not gone so far into the details of what this means, just as his father, when he was president, decided to produce "a gentler, kinder nation". He didn't have the opportunity because Mr Clinton pushed him aside to "build a bridge to the 21st century."

In the meantime Mr Clinton, it has to be said, disgraced himself but abolished the dreaded deficit.

Governor Bush's opponent - assuming today that Governor Bush's $35m will have done the trick of persuading all those primary delegates - Mr Bush's opponent will most likely be Vice-President Gore who, in the past month, has turned from being a squeaky clean environmentalist and hearty do-gooder into, first, a bad actor - he tried being Hugh Grant and then John Wayne and failed miserably but then he said, in effect: "Aw fellas, let's lay off these impersonations - why don't I be myself?"

And so he became a tough debater, teeming with information and nasty mean jabs at the over-delicate and maybe for the party too-liberal former Senator Bradley. Mr Gore is now a formidable candidate.

Meanwhile, we're told by old Texans, that there's more to Governor Bush than meets the ear.

So I've gone on the assumption, which is conventional wisdom, that Governor Bush for the Republicans, Al Gore for the Democrats, will be the set-up after 7 March.

The question of whether the Navy war hero - Senator McCain - the spunky, anti-establishment Republican, will repeat his whopping New Hampshire massacre of Governor Bush in South Carolina will soon be settled.

Two weeks on Monday in fact. Stay tuned.

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