1988 televised debates and Thatcher in 1979 - 7 October 1988

I don’t remember a time when so many people fake a loud yawn or wring a hand or otherwise express screaming boredom at the prospect of a presidential election.

By people I’m talking about the people you run into every day – the grocer, the newsagent, the pharmacist, the cab driver. Our man Joe, a hefty man who picks up the garbage – “How about it, Joe?” you shout at him as he bangs and clatters the bins. He freezes for a moment. “How’s that?” he says. “The election.” He shakes his head vigorously like a dog coming out for a swim. “Let me out of here”, he bawls and he goes clattering off under the trees to his truck.

Of course we all know people, friends, acquaintances, who like to pick up a quick reputation for knowingness by deploring all candidates from the start, but this time there must be millions of people, normally responsible citizens who frankly feel indifferent or allergic to both candidates.

Somebody put it glibly but shrewdly the other day by saying that the choice between Bush and Dukakis was between a man who can’t express his thoughts and a man who can’t express his feelings.

These separate disabilities came out early on in the race and the campaign teams took care of it, or rather that essential or core or nucleus of a campaign team which is not made up of politicians but of advertising men, hired from firms that have an impressive record of marketing corn flakes or perfumes.

I can’t remember how long ago – goodness, it must have been in the '50s – when I, who had spent most of my adult life reporting politics amongst other things first heard of a candidate who had hired a couple of public relations men and through them advertising copy writers to craft, as they now say, the candidate’s message. That ought to mean his political beliefs in a punchy way, in brief radio commercials. I was simply shocked.

The candidate was a Californian running for the Senate. His name was Richard Milhous Nixon. The two men who crafted the snappy, cunning messages, nasty little half-truths about the Nixon opponent, turned up as national characters of some disrepute later during the Watergate hearings.

The advertising-PR crew is now in such command that whenever either Mr Bush or Mr Dukakis appears at a police station or a navy base or outside a shut-down steel mill or by an ocean beach you may be sure that there was nothing spontaneous about it. It had been elaborately arranged to show, in a quick melodramatic take, the candidates devotion to putting down crime, to building extra aircraft carriers, to exhibiting the victims of one of the industries – very few – that are suffering from high unemployment, to bemoaning pollution.

The two most ludicrous – and also the most memorable images, I’m afraid – we shall carry with us for some time were first Mr Dukakis, an unrecognisable midget in full battle gear riding a tank; this shows he’s for a strong defence. And Mr Bush appearing out of a fluttering blizzard of little flags visiting of all absurdities a flag factory. His statesman-like comment was that “the flag factories are booming and so is America”.

Visits to any group of Americans, any individual Americans, are not made on any impulse the way Lyndon Johnson driving in a motorcade into a city would break away from the secret service and get lost, pressing the flesh in a surging crowd. Well, once I remember in Pittsburgh getting lost for ever, it seemed and then suddenly appearing at the bedroom window of a mean house drinking coffee with an old immigrant couple.

Today this would be scandalous behaviour, a departure from the painfully-constructed script which dictates every move, every smile, every sentence of the roaming candidate. It’s become part of the same scripted routine, too, that candidates don’t ever pick up a question and say “Well let’s go into this. The easy answer is so and so, but it’s more complicated than that. Let me try and straighten a few things out.”

Presumably it’s been proved in a thousand surveys that that approach to an audience about to be sold a package of corn flakes is fatal to their attentiveness. They’re going to wander off or switch off, so judgements, opinions on the profoundest issues of our time, Star Wars or child care for the 50-odd percent of young families with two working parents, the conquests of the drug cartels, the bulging prisons, the collapse of elementary education, the deficit – neither candidate has told us even in a snappy one-liner how to reduce the deficit – all these great and pressing issues are flipply summed up in two short sentences and a thirty-second commercial.

Mr Bush and Mr Dukakis are each spending $30million, half their campaign budget, on these 15 or 30-second commercials. No more unexpected, spontaneous visits to ordinary people here and there. These are now devised as photo opportunities. No more thoughtful analyses, for heaven's sakes, the candidate’s final position on matters that have engaged and baffled some of the best minds of this generation, they’re packaged into a six-word slogan, a sound bite.

So between the photo opportunity and the sound bite the whole electioneering process has been reduced or degraded or glorified into a national advertising campaign.

The other night there was an interview with the two principal craftsmen of this election – the man on each side who is the producer of his man’s TV commercials. One was said to be in the advertising world, a whizz of a motor car salesman; the other has had an equally distinguished career in getting millions to switch from this cola drink to that. These two anonymous, unsung men are, more than any of the campaign staffs, the king-makers of our time.

I remember being called over to England by my editor in 1955 to cover, for a change, a British election. I was prejudiced in favour of the British system if only because as a long-suffering camp follower of American candidates over many thousands of miles I was cheered and relieved at the prospect of paying close attention for only three weeks instead of two years.

It was indeed a strenuous but stimulating experience. I roamed to London to Wales to Glasgow and had many stops in between and enjoyed following Mr Eden through a Lancashire mill town and hearing him bawl through a crackling microphone at marvelling street audiences who couldn’t understand more than a syllable or two of his strange accent. I guess they took him on trust. He won.

And strangely, the most vivid memory was revelling in the rural pleasure of tagging Mr Attlee and his wife bumping through country lanes in their Mini car and stopping now in a dismal suburb, now in a small market place, now outside a village pub, and the old man – come to think of it not so old at the time – but looking more like a village bank manager than a major, a veteran of Gallipoli, standing up before a hundred people, sometimes no more than a score, and making quieting little off-the-cuff pep talks to a rustle of hand claps or small cries of “Good old Clem” or “That’s the stuff”.

No cameras, no television crews on this country safari and only two or three reporters. One time he lost his scarf, put the brakes on, find it, a small cheer, on our way again. You never knew whether the next town would have a thousand people on hand or a dozen, no matter. Plato was right – democracy is a charming system of variety and disorder.

Of course there were big rallies, a thundering performance of Nye Bevan I remember at Reading and a speech – the day of judgement was at hand – from Bertrand Russell in a Glasgow cinema which the next night would be showing a Mickey Spillane horror film. But I did come to the general conclusion that no candidate I listened to, none of the big guns certainly, had a script or a teleprompter or a soft drink salesman telling him what to think.

I was back again for another election 24 years later. It was the spring of 1979, the entry into the kingdom of Mrs Thatcher. It was a shock and a disillusion. There had been, as the song says, “some changes made”. The British commentators called them "American-style". It was all too true. Whereas Mr Attlee had lost his scarf and he and his wife fumbled around under the car seat to find it without benefit of an accompanying photographer, Mrs Thatcher cuddled a calf for a pack of television cameramen.

I had the nasty suspicion, later confirmed, that the main speeches of the two principals – Mr Callaghan was the other – had been at least vetted, tested for wholesomeness and snap, crackle, pop. Pretty soon I heard that Britain, too, was trusting the expression of its democratic philosophy to PR men and later on, perhaps then, party campaigns were conducted at the command or on the advice of highly-paid advertising agencies.

I wrote, at the end of that British campaign, “Soon the polls in Britain, as here, show the contenders to be running too close for the comfort of either side. The PR men now step in and report that one issue is boring the people while another is inflaming them, so the runners concentrate on the combustible material. They fuel it with an indignation that is less and less truly felt. The recipes for Utopia become more and more slapdash and in the end, in the final days, the Labourites who were warning us of a coming orgy of capitalist greed and a free-for-all and the Conservatives were frightening us with the nightmare of a slave state hell-bent for Moscow.”

Well we have a month to go and we certainly can expect nothing better here. The closing statements of Senator Benson and Senator Quayle in their well-scripted debate on Wednesday were soaring balloons of language, windy, signifying nothing.

Former President Jimmy Carter spoke up the other day. This had been, he said, the worst campaign he could remember – thoughtless and vituperative. It’s a fair comment.

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