Jobless are main elections issue

One of the pleasanter memories of my schooldays is the first day of the new school year – the summer over, sweaty sweaters going into the laundry and the cricket bats going back into the lockers with their old gloves and smell of linseed oil, much talk before the first bell rang of the new line-up of the rugger team, who was to be captain and whether the popular Jones or the less popular, more studious, Smith would be head prefect and then the first assembly and the rustle of whispering – before the head marched in – about the history master's new wife and the geography master's new moustache.

Then the first gathering of the new form and the form master, uncommonly genial and sporting a remarkable tan, quizzing the boys about the summer. 'And where did you spend the holidays, Wharton?' 'With my uncle in Essex, sir.' And, 'Bunter, what happened to you?', pointing to the amiable class dunce with a bandage swathed round his forehead. 'I was kicked by a horse, sir' – which, don't ask me why, was the sort of reply that produced dumb hilarious laughter which, in turn, provided the cue for the master to say something like, 'All right, all right! Settle down now and take out your Seatman! (Seatman being the name of the man who had written the standard French teaching manual). 'Take out your Seatman,' was the end of all pleasantries, the signal that we were back to school.

Well, we are back to school, finally. You may wonder why we've waited seven weeks after Labor Day, the first Monday in September. Well, remember, this country, this nation, was founded – forgetting the Virginians for a moment – by hardy types from Yorkshire and Suffolk who settled on the coast of New England. Much of what they enacted into law was grounded in their memories of England by way of institutions, like habeas corpus and trial by jury, that they would reproduce here, and other institutions, like a state religion and being tried twice for the same crime, they decided they would not have here. When September came in, they remembered that that was the practical end of summer and, in spite of their subsequent experience of hot Septembers and balmy, brilliant Octobers, the English theory held.

So, for the past six weeks, I have mooched along a sandy beach, stripped of high ladders, lifeguards, boats and people, lapped by waters in which we swam until a week ago. And so, in practice, while the farmers mend their snow fences and the schools and colleges are in full working order and the summer cottages are boarded up against the coming blizzards, and the locker-room talk is of the football season, if the strike ever ends, yet, the great summer game did not end until this week.

On Wednesday night in St Louis, before 56,000 fans, Milwaukee was doomed. The St Louis Cardinals were the new world champions and it seemed about 50,000 of those fans invaded the field. The city of St Louis went into delirium and, in all the bars and restaurants, in the homes of Milwaukee, the beer brewing capital of the country, the citizens were awash in the suds of their grief.

The baseball uniforms and bats and gloves and windbreaks go back into the lockers. Summer is positively over. We're back to school and there's no longer any excuse for ignoring the world's affairs in the euphoria of the World Series.

By the way, visitors sometimes ask why the baseball play-off championship should arrogantly call itself the World Series and the winner be known as world champions in the teeth of the Japanese, the Puerto Ricans, the Filipinos, the Mexicans. Well, it's a vanity exercised by every nation that invented a game. What American golfers call the British Open is insistently referred to in Britain as THE Open.

Last Saturday, on my way to taking yet another hopeful playing lesson from the pro, I stopped by the town hall in our village to register for the election, which comes up a week from Tuesday or, as I once would have said, Tuesday week. We'll be voting, like most of the country, for a United States senator, a congressman, a new governor and all sorts of local offices from county supervisors, to select man and, I shouldn't wonder, dog-catcher. After you've filled out at least three forms and signed your name to them, you're given the choice, an ancient word meaning option, of signing a smaller form and registering under a party symbol.

These forms used to say Democrat, Republican and then various fringe parties like farm labour, socialist, free silver, prohibitionist etc. but new arguments, new issues, new parties. I had a choice of five parties to any one of whom I could indicate my allegiance. Democrat, Republican, Liberal, Conservative, Right to Life (that's the anti-abortion party). As a wary reporter and an independent who cantankerously refuses to pin his preference to any ideology – look where ideologists have got us! – I chose, which is the voter's privilege, not to pick any party, but to sign my name and decide a week from Tuesday, inside the curtained-off, confessional box of the voting booth who was the likeliest-looking man or woman. And so, then on to the rolling Linksman and the pro who spotted what had been wrong all summer and I drove home in high spirits knowing for certain that, by George, I've got it!

I must say that if Americans in their autumn habits seem to stick to their English heritage, their latitude gives them daily cause to know that they are in a southern country where New York, for instance, lies 800 miles south of London. What this means is that by six o'clock we are putting out on the 16th hole by candlelight. In high summer, eight o'clock, eight-thirty, is about the limit of daylight. Nowadays, now-a-nights, all outdoor work and frisking is over by six and it's reported almost twice as many people now watch the seven o'clock evening news as watched it in summer.

So now every night we see a president got up in extraordinary disguises as he barnstorms across the country giving, he hopes, aid and comfort to Republican candidates who may be in trouble. President Calvin Coolidge, a small, wry and monosyllabic New Englander – the incorrigible Mrs Alice Roosevelt Longworth said he looked as if he'd been weaned on a pickle – Coolidge detested the requirement of political candidates to appear as one of the folks whose support he was soliciting, but even Coolidge milked a cow for the good of the farm vote and, I remember looking about as warlike as a plucked chicken, agreed to smother his features in an Indian headdress.

Mr Reagan, on the contrary, is as extrovert as a politician can be. A Midwestern boy who says, with constant passion, that the values he cherishes are the values of the small, rural, Midwesterner – help your neighbour, the school dance, the football game, the weiner roast, mother's day, good old free enterprise, thrift and a brave smile. Night after night we've seen a wiry man in a steel helmet among the steel workers. Then he's in a red helmet, sitting in the cab and driving a tractor out in the farmlands. If he's in a mining town, he'll be down the mine with a ritual smudge on his face. Before a bankers' rally, he'll have the three-piece suit and the tie pin. I don't know if the Republicans are having trouble in St Louis but if they are, I'm sure the president will be out there wearing a Cardinals' cap.

Before he left Washington for this bustling safari, Mr Reagan acquired from his advisers a pack, or deck, of cards, not playing cards, but campaign cards on which are written in downright quick phrases the issues – what this town, that town, this state, that state – takes to be its main trouble.

Last year, the survey said that across the nation crime was the chief anxiety and so in places that show alarming statistics, the president has pulled out his crime notes and, one day last week, he announced the massive crackdown on drug traffickers, that will, he promised, cripple the power of the Mob in America. Next day – the White House said the timing was entirely accidental – there was a dramatic raid and arrest party in Miami, another in Los Angeles and, this week, as we all know, the astounding story of John DeLorean.

In parts of this country with large Polish votes, Mr Reagan makes no bones about the Polish government, run, as he diplomatically put it, by a bunch of lousy bums. No help, no loans, no sales to them. But a day or two later, he was in Iowa, the land where the tall corn grows and Mr Reagan went on the air to announce over 350 stations in the farm belt that in the coming year he would guarantee delivery of 23 million tons of grain to the Soviet Union.

With magnificent poise, the secretary of agriculture said, 'It has nothing to do with the elections.' Maybe it hasn't but it just happens that the Republicans are in dire trouble in the farm states, simply by virtue of being the party in power at a time when the farmers of the staple crops are spending more to produce them than the selling price they get from Americans.

The point of Mr Reagan's resounding promise to the farmers was brilliantly sharpened in a cartoon by Kelly of the San Diego Union. I think I've mentioned before that we rejoice these days in about a dozen, fine political cartoonists whose ideas are an instant attack on the jugular and who, unlike their counterparts on the other side of the water, are also first-rate draughtsmen.

You'll recall President Kennedy standing before half a million people in Berlin declaring that that was the American frontier and shouting, 'Ich bin ein Berliner!' Well, last week Kelly had a cartoon of President Reagan standing at a lectern in Iowa in front of a parcel of farmers and declaring, 'Ich bin ein grain dealer!'.

But if the farmer is always a paramount concern of the Midwest and the South and crime was a concern of everybody last year, this year, around the entire nation, the main issue is 10.1 per cent unemployment.

The president begs everybody to believe in Reaganomics and stay the course. Another cartoon stuck the needle into that slogan, showing the president driving a truck towards a precipice. On the edge of the precipice an unemployed man is holding by his fingernails. The president is leaning out and shouting, 'Stay the course!'

It puts the vital question to the Republicans in their anxious week before the election, how many of the unemployed will vote?

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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