The 1996 presidential election - 8 November 1996

On Tuesday evening, election night, I was invited to sit in on the workings of the election studio of one of the three main commercial networks here in New York City, which is anyway at all times, the national news headquarters of the twenty, twenty-five or so national networks.

I sat first in a television control room where a semi-circular bank of desks, as in a medical lecture theatre, were staffed by maybe three, four dozen men and women, all extraordinarily quiet, all looking up or down to an enormous wall which contained ninety-four monitors, screens, all directed by a bulky man on the front row who was also bafflingly quiet.

In my day, control rooms were organised bedlams of directors shouting to assistant directors, "Ready camera three," and then shouting out to the cameramen on the studio floor: "Ready three, dolly in, hold it. Camera four at the ready." No human sound came out of this silent team. The whole direction was done with fingertips on an infinity of tiny screens.

We left the control room and went down several floors into another enormous room in the basement, a room about as cosy as St. Paul's Cathedral, but also warm and brilliantly lit in spots and even quieter than the control room. This was the actual studio where the performers performed. The performers were the network's main anchorman and four assistants.

First a veteran television reporter sitting with the anchorman. Then off on a balcony, standing by his own lectern, was a familiar Washington commentator who that night was to report on the Senate races. Down below and way off in her own corner was a pretty woman, sharp, in a custard coloured dress, who is the network's expert on the House of Representatives. And if anybody ever doubted her expertise, they had only to consider on Tuesday night that she was going to have to report on four hundred and thirty-five races, know the contestants, something of their background, their hopes, their backing.

Sitting at what you might call the altar, at a curving desk and most of the time in a lonely, milky spotlight, was the anchorman who thirty years ago joined this network as a foreign affairs reporter, a man who hated American politics, possibly because he'd been born and bred in Canada with a simpler, at least more comprehensible parliamentary system. In thirty years he's learned, I won't say to love American politics, but to become a seasoned and knowledgeable expert. And on Tuesday in this quiet cathedral of light you'd have thought you were present at a low mass. His was the only voice. He never raised it. He kept up a steady report on what was happening everywhere. He too, I presume, pressed tiny buttons and vast maps came up, and many of those ninety-four graphics, and the numbers in any contest the two others had just heard about.

At one point, I looked across the floor at the banks of computers and ring of silent, young women looking at them. The one nearest to me was a dark, pretty woman who never took her eyes off the screen, but often silently tapped a key or slid the mouse. During a short commercial break I asked what she was doing and went over and she explained the incredible.

She was handling the internet. She was in touch with two or three million people who came up on the screen asking every conceivable political question: when was the last time all of New England went Democratic? Which president caught pneumonia at his inauguration? Can you tell me how Dianne Feinstein, the senator from California, voted on the first environmental bill of 1994? Please give us the totals of the popular vote for president in 1960, a pal of mine here says Kennedy got in by only a whisker. Answer, in about three seconds: Kennedy, thirty-four million, two hundred and twenty-seven thousand ninety-six. Nixon, thirty-four million, one hundred and eight thousand five forty-eight. Your pal was right: Kennedy won by just over a hundred thousand in sixty-eight million votes.

The silence was the total surprise. We were in an elegant, as I say, cathedral of light, everybody tip-toed around. The one voice we could hear faintly was the incomparable, nonchalant, quiet paced anchorman as easy going and conversational and as informative at two o'clock on Wednesday morning as he'd been at six-thirty on Tuesday evening.

I'm sure this scene would puncture for any foreigner one of the most tenacious of preconceptions about American television and American reporters, who in all British films anyway, are shown as frantic, mannerless tabloid monsters. I have never seen in any studio in the world, a more relaxed, civilised scene, made possible not only by the sophistication of the reporters and staff, but – this is the shock that will stay – by this astonishing new technology.

So Tuesday evening, which I'd expected to be an exciting circus, was a restful, almost devotional evening, watching and hearing every sliver of information about the election slide easily into a modem somewhere and another, and then up onto your television screen. Never a slip, never a noise. Till shortly after nine o' clock, a cluster of results from the Midwest, from states with a clutch of electoral votes, and we knew it was all over. We went then to Little Rock, to the crowds outside the white colonial style state house, and a now bellowing crowd.

It struck me on that memorable evening, that four, maybe eight years from now, the scene will be performed by ten robots and one human being.

I should mention that one beloved institution that is vanishing from our telephone system is the voice of a live human who can or will talk back to you. I've given up and taken to what my frugal father-in-law said would always work better, what he called a "penny postal".

On the way home on a balmy, starry night, I wondered for the first time in my life if the stars were real. I recollected that moment in the 1870s when Samuel FB Morse threw the switch that sent out the first telegraph message ever. Somebody said, now Florida can talk to Maine." And up in Boston, the genial old curmudgeon Ralph Waldo Emerson said: "Yes, but has Florida anything to say to Maine?" A good question in the age of a million pictures and encyclopaedias at our fingertips.

But on Tuesday evening Florida had everything to say to the country and very early on. About eight, eight fifteen, the first call, Florida had gone for Clinton. It presaged the end. In thirty years and seven presidential races, it has gone for a Democrat only once – for Carter in 76. Mr Dole had pinned his hopes on Florida and then Texas and a very fleeting hope on California. So he won Texas, the only big state with enough of a population to offer a goodly number of electoral votes.

If you saw on your own screens a map of the United States with the states coloured in two colours – here it was blue for Dole, red for Clinton – by the end a stranger might have felt Dole had won in a landslide. Three quarters of what you might call the American arc, the whole map, was blue. That's because most of the Western states, except on the coast, and the South Western states are firm Republican country.

But if you look closer and see the numbers, you'll notice that these physically huge states have very little population and so very few electoral votes. Utah has five, Nevada four, Montana three, Idaho four, New Mexico five. California, wait for it, fifty-four. I figured that Mr Dole could have won thirteen particular states and still lagged behind California's total.

It's calculated on a simple basis: population decides the number of members you send to the House. There are four hundred and thirty-five seats. Every state, tiny or huge, has two senators. So four thirty-five plus one hundred, plus three votes recently given to the district of Columbia – that's Washington DC – and you get five hundred and thirty-eight electoral votes. Divide by two, add one, and the necessary majority is two hundred and seventy. Clinton got three hundred and seventy-nine, Dole a hundred and fifty-nine.

From the welter of statistics poured in by the million through the modems to little you and me, there are merely a handful that tell the story. Clinton is re-elected as expected. The Senate and the House, as expected, are still run by the Republicans. "Are you saying," that fetching female expert on the House was asked, "are you saying that after all this heaving and puffing and racketing two-year campaign that the American people have voted again for gridlock?" She said, "Er yes".

Any why did it happen? There are about a hundred and fifty theories. It's an entirely personal interpretation that Mr Clinton succeeded in making enough voters believe he was running against Mr Newt Gingrich, the villainous Speaker of the House. How so villain? He was the one who, when the president refused to sign the Republicans' budget bill, shut down the government. He himself has since said: "It was the dumbest move we made".

There's no debate about the very large fact that women voted for Clinton on the whole in the ratio of three to two. That gave an enormous edge. The males of the species split their vote evenly. The best guess is that women, wherever they wobbled, thought of Mr Dole's vote against gun control, of the plank in the Republican platform to ban abortion, and the legion of retired old women in Florida fell for the president's wrong, wholly outrageous contention that the Republicans would cut Medicare, the free health services for the elderly.

If issues were what ninety million people thought about and voted on, they had only to look back at all the issues and solutions that Mr Clinton swiped from the Republicans, leaving them nothing to go on about except his character. Then we have to say that the president won again because this time he shrewdly ran as a Republican for Clinton.

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.

Letter from America audio recordings of broadcasts ©BBC. Letter from America scripts © Cooke Americas, RLLP. All rights reserved.