Primary battle reaching climax

I've been saying, or assuming, all along that the little old lady who wrote to me from Surrey distilled an ocean of wisdom on a postcard in the single sentence, 'Instead of telling us who might be president, why not wait till November and tell us about the man who is?'.

This, and a wry variation on it from a man in a London club, convinced me that, as he put it, 'There's no point in going on about other people's politics. They're as puzzling as a new kind of chess. In America, I take it (he took it) the pawns move backwards and there's no king.' 

Well, now I discover that there is the most alert interest in the American election in Germany and Pretoria, in Tokyo, Cairo, Canada – everywhere, from Latin America to Whitehall, to Jimmy the Greek – who, by the way, is giving odds on the Republican nomination to President Ford. From South Africa, a government man, speaking anonymously but not timorously, says, 'We are very much pinning our hopes on Ronald Reagan'. A Japanese official suspects that Reagan will do better as president than he did as governor of California, though in Ronald Reagan's book that's like asking God to create the world in three days instead of six. 

Then the French, in their knotty way, are writing profound, analytic pieces on the Carter phenomenon. Well, though you might expect the Arab League and the Israelis to be wondering what Jimmy Carter's Middle Eastern policy might be, it surprises me, at any rate, to hear that the Russians have sent out a team of campaign watchers to go along with the candidates and report their findings back to the Kremlin. 

The director of what in Moscow is called the USA Institute – I suppose he would constitute one of the leading Soviet experts on American affairs – has already come to the conclusion that the next president will be the present president, that Mr Ford will go back to the White House because the economy is coming back to new vigour every day. Superficially, you could expect a Soviet expert to make a healthy economy the supreme criterion of any healthy society, since in socialist societies it is from a healthy economy that all other blessings flow, in spite of the puzzling fact that many socialist societies, from Scandinavia to Asia, seem to be cursed with sick economies which may, or may not, be relevant. 

However, the word from a good many American news bureaux is that seldom have what they used to call the chancelleries of the world taken such a knowing and anxious interest in an American presidential election. 

The men that foreigners most want to know about are Jimmy Carter – who appears, at the moment, to be headed for the Democratic nomination – and Ronald Reagan, who is certainly the only man who can stop President Ford's nomination. I ought to say who can stop him face to face for when a political party is split in its loyalties to two or more leaders, the party bigwigs, as any British politician can tell you, don't sit back and leave everything in the hands of the Lord – the Lord, as we all know, helps them that help themselves, and inside the Republican Party all sorts of adroit shenanigans are going on to promote Reagan over the Establishment regulars, or to stop him in his tracks. 

As one example I ought to mention, a bit of stage management that Vice President Rockefeller performed behind the scenes a couple of weeks ago that could dim all the razzle-dazzle of Reagan's campaign appearances and the primary victories that take the headlines. Reagan, there's no doubt about it, has magnetised, what we now call, the 'Sun Belt' – the long, southern stretch of hot and sunny landscape that goes from Florida in the east, through Texas to the south-western states of Arizona, Nevada and California. It has, of course, a varied population but increasingly it's possible to believe, if you visit the Florida Peninsula and then Nevada and then southern California, that you're in the same country and a very different country from one that includes such states, as different in their own ways, as New Hampshire, say, Wyoming, New York or Pennsylvania. 

Florida and California alike have millions of old people retired – farmers and small businessmen – and also their young grow up in the healthy, sun-drenched, outdoor life by day and the discotheque, barbecue, rock festival life by night. The 2,000 miles of the Sun Belt also embrace people who exercise the money power in the same things, in oil and real estate and insurance and ranching and aviation. 

Now, obvously, it would be possible to deny any collective political character to this belt by finding all sorts of eccentrics and large bodies of God-fearing people who defy the Sun Belt labels. Southern Baptists, for instance, who are the oldest and most entrenched inhabitants of the south-eastern states or what H. L. Mencken used to call the 'Bible Belt'. 

It's not an accident, it's entirely normal that the first big Southerner in history to stampede his party's primaries at this stage of the game should be Jimmy Carter, a Southern Baptist so dedicated – so obsessed, you might almost say – that people clamour to know where he stands on nuclear power or Africa or how to finance state universities, but hear instead that 'God is Love' and 'The Family is Sacred' and he will never tell the people a lie. 

But I think it's fair enough to say that the Sun Belt has come to be recognised as a separate regional force in American politics because it's united by its conservatism, its almost ostentatious patriotism and its yearning for old bourgeois values that seem to have been battered or forgotten during the violent Sixties. There's no question that Ronald Reagan is, as I talk, the god of the Sun Belt but, for all its vast extent and its easily dramatised virtues and vices, the Sun Belt does not have anything like the number of delegates to the Republican convention to guarantee Mr Reagan's nomination or much more than, I suppose, a modest nucleus to build on. 

It's true Florida's population has quadrupled since the war so it now sends a sizeable delegation to the conventions. Texas had doubled its population since the war and will now send 130 delegates to the Democratic convention, or almost half as many as New York. But a win for anybody in Nevada is negligeable so far as bringing power to the convention is concerned. Much was made of Mr Reagan's win in Nevada. I was in Carson City at the time and the hullabaloo among the slot machines that night suggested that the Second Coming was imminent. 

But while Reagan's Nevada triumph was a-brewing, Nelson Rockefeller – who's the leader of the New York delegation to the Republican convention – Rockefeller called his delegates together. New York doesn't have a Republican primary, its delegates are elected in a state party convention. In New York, a delegate may declare himself for a particular presidential candidate or he may decide to remain uncommitted till the convention meets. 

Well, while Reagan was riding high through the West, Nelson Rockefeller took a beautiful revenge for the humiliation he suffered in 1964 at the hands of the right-wing Republicans who are now hot for Reagan, who were hot for Goldwater in 1964, and who booed Rockefeller from the convention podium. Not for nothing is the elephant the party's symbol of the Republicans. A Republican never forgets! And Rockefeller, in the quiet of a delegation meeting, far from the heady hoopla of Reagan's triumphs, persuaded 120 New York delegates to abandon their neutrality and plump for Preisdent Ford. And that's before the convention has met. 

Similarly Pennsylvania, a great state with huge power and the third-largest delegation after California and New York, Pennsylvania was beguiled by its own leaders and by men who, thinking of the patronage that can come their way by being nice to the New York neighbour and to its distinguished oiler of patronage, governor, former, now Vice President Rockefeller. Pennsylvania also weaned 88 of its 103 uncommitted delegates away to the Ford camp. The headlines may reflect the sporting drama of the primaries. They did not scream the fact, which must be intensely painful to Mr Reagan, that without the sale of a single campaign button or the waving of a flag, President Ford picked up 208 delegates while Reagan was sweating and speechifying for something like 60. 

And the Democrats? Well, the whole question there is who can stop Carter and where is it to be done? Next Tuesday, 8 June, the primary battle will reach its climax in the state that could tumble Carter from his high horse and could certainly make or break Ronald Reagan; it's his own state of California. California has a whacking number of delegates to offer both to the Democratic and the Republican winners. If Reagan wins, the Ford establishment will make a bezerker raid on the uncommitted delegates of the other states and we could see a bitter, split Republican convention. 

And if, on the Democrats side, the present governor, Jerry Brown, wins then Mr Carter will be in similar trouble and we can look forward to a split and noisy Democratic convention. A Brown win in California would, therefore, not only dash Carter, but widen the grin on the face of the Democrat's elder statesman, Hubert Horatio Humphrey who may, once again, see himself moving from the wings, uniting the fratricidal Carterites and Brownites and becoming, once again, their man for president. 

Now, just to make this muddy, political pool crystal clear, let me read to you from a speech, eloquently rendered by a man who backed Humphrey for the Senate in his first, and successful, try in 1948. It was a speech received with a tidal wave of applause and it accurately expresses what Humphrey's supporters feel about him today. This is it: 'Prices have climbed to the highest level in history, labour's been handcuffed by a vicious law, social security's been snatched away from almost a million workers, veterans pleas for low cost homes have been ignored, in the false name of economy, millions of children have been deprived of milk – this is the payoff of Republican promises, this is why you should elect not only President Truman, but men like Mayor Hubert Humphrey of Minneapolis. Mayor Humphrey is fighting for the principles advocated by President Truman for low-cost housing, civil rights, prices people can afford to pay and for a labour movement free of the vicious Taft-Hartley law.' 

This ringing affirmation of Truman-type liberalism came from the then Democratic liberal whose name is Ronald Reagan.

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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