President Reagan’s final Republican Convention - 19 August 1988

I should guess that the main concern of most of the 240 million Americans this week has been to survive in something approximately to comfort and their main anxiety has been that their electric power will not go off.

This has already happened in hundreds, possibly thousands, of communities across the whole stretch of the continent from southern California to northern Maine. For only a sliver of the land edging the coast of northern California and Oregon has been living in a bearable, by contrast, a delicious climate of daily highs in the low 70s.

Most of us – and that means people across the midwestern plain and the south and the south-west and the high plains of the north – most have endured for 40 days or so stewing, burning temperatures in the 90s and the 100s. The draw on the power grid has been, in some big cities over 95%, which is perilously close to a complete breakdown and here in New York the electric company, watching the enormous consumption of air conditioners going at full tilt night and day, deliberately shut off the power in 13 of the tallest apartment buildings on the upper East Side and left 13,000 residents without light, running water, lifts, TV, refrigerators, worst of all without working lavatories, and they had paramedics climbing up the stairways of 30, 40-storey buildings looking for, and finding, old people who needed emergency medical help.

Countless hospitals had to evacuate their patients across the nation. In other parts of this town the voltage was reduced throughout Monday but if the air-conditioning was only half as effective as usual at least the food in the stores didn’t rot.

In the general torment the nightly news no longer shows us the vast middle stretch of the country, millions of acres whose farmers in the worst drought since the mid-1930s stand in the stupefying sun and see two-thirds of their crops wilt and die. And I suppose the network news directors have decided we’ve been titillated long enough with marvellous aerial shots of the thousand or more forest fires raging out there in the west, in California’s coast range and the Cascade mountains to the north, though if you scrutinise the papers carefully you’ll read that in this state another hundred thousand acres and there fifty thousand acres are going in smoke and flame.

I have a suspicion which, of course, is not grounded in any scientific study that the unending atrocious heat has not helped either the Democrats or the Republicans at their conventions, which to the watching multitudes around the country must represent a gang of happy politicians fiddling while America burns.

By the way, don’t be put off by the funny hats and gaudy jackets and drum majorettes which somehow hypnotise the European television correspondents here. It’s as if the meaning of Christmas was beamed to non-Christian countries exclusively through shots of Christmas trees, teddy bears, plum pudding and old men in paper hats from Christmas crackers.

Franklin Roosevelt, Truman, Taft, Kennedy, Adlai Stevenson, Carter all wore funny hats or rakish boaters in their time. It’s a weird old custom. It’s doesn’t mean that inside the clownish costume is a clown.

There is, however, scientific evidence to show that the public has had its fill of the conventions as occasions of vital interest to the citizen, or even as entertainment. Compared with 1984 and all the years before, the television audience for the Atlanta convention was way down. The only big audience was for the Tuesday night speech of the Reverend Jesse Jackson because surely people were expecting ructions.

The television audience dipped dishearteningly for the Democrats on the Thursday when Governor Dukakis made his acceptance speech and when the ratings come in, I’m pretty sure no national audience for the Republicans will surpass Monday night’s audience for Ronald Reagan’s farewell.

There must have been across the land a fearful scrunching sound of Democrats biting nails as they watch this once second-rate actor achieving – through practice and eight years' exposure – the poignancy of Gary Cooper, James Stewart and John Wayne rolled into one.

Whatever history, even in the short run, may come to say about his policies, even the most devout Democrat winces to concede that Reagan’s continuing personal popularity has been unmatched by any president this century and that no president since Franklin Roosevelt has so unerringly touched a common chord, whether it is of patriotism, pathos, self-deprecation, sentimentality, or apparent common sense.

By the way, we shouldn’t forget that actors need scripts. I remember James Mason once saying that he never would make a public speech because the audience would at once compare the thoughts of James Mason with the thoughts of William Shakespeare, Bernard Shaw and all the other authors he’d learned to spout.

It should not go unrecorded that for the past few years Mr Reagan has had at his command a very gifted young woman named Peggy Noonan. She’s been his principal speech writer and she is the one who has hit on the exact style of character and expression that an ideal Ronald Reagan would most want to have as his own. This leaves up to us, and history, the knotty question – who, then, is the real Ronald Reagan? We may never know.

Out of Monday night's artful, moving presidential performance the Democrats plucked one great hope – that the people would, by seeing and hearing George Bush on Thursday night and for all his height and war hero’s record, would be shocked into recognising a comparative midget. Well, that remains to be seen not only in the days after New Orleans but in the two months of the campaign.

I ought to mention that I’m told Mr Bush has also acquired the talents of Peggy Noonan and maybe she can now recreate the public image of George Bush in the private image of his heart’s desire.

Of course the one solid, irresistible reason why the people are turning off the conventions, why the three big television networks have more or less decided that this is the last year in which they will treat them as events of consuming national interest, is the fact that the nominating convention system which was born in 1832 died without our knowing it in 1956, the last time there was a roll-call of the states whose outcome was contested by two or more rival candidates. And it’s only this year that everybody has come to see and say that the huge increase in state primary elections from, I think, six or seven 30 years ago to nearly 40 this year has meant that the delegates have already chosen their nominee before they get to the convention.

So for 32 years we’ve not known the bubbling suspense of the first three days of the convention which came to the boil when a baritone first intoned “Alabama” and started the roll-call and from then on through one ballot, two, four, five, 30 – once 103 ballots – it was up to Lloyds and Jimmy the Greek to take bets on who among three or four or more contesting men would survive on Thursday or Friday night. Who would be the chosen Moses?

They were stirring times I can tell you, not to be compared with any political occasion I know for the encouragement of heart attacks and life-long enmities. All this has gone. The people know they are going to watch a prolonged, too prolonged, coronation and the networks have said that the conventions have turned into unpaid political advertisements.

In the old days they competed for covering the conventions from gavel to gavel, that’s to say from noon to midnight or beyond every day. This year they started at 9pm and went on for only three hours or so, 'til the speeches ceased from droning and the bands from playing and, in New Orleans, the 20,000 balloons had ceased their floating.

You may be curious to know why I say the system died in 1956 and not 1952, which was the last time there was more than one ballot to pick a presidential candidate. It’s a good question.

In 1956 at the Democratic convention in Chicago Adlai Stevenson had already been nominated by acclamation on the first ballot. Now the unchanging custom had been, and is, for the presidential candidate to retire with his advisers, campaign team, mayors of cities, governors to a private room and discuss and choose his running mate, his vice president, from which he would emerge to a palpitating press corps to announce the name.

Most often we could only guess who he might be. I remember in 1944 the great shock to the Democrats convention when the word was passed by the absent Roosevelt that Senator Harry Truman was to be his man.

I was standing at a basement lunch counter next to a bouncy midwesterner in an electric blue suit, a spotted bow tie, thick glasses, munching on a hot dog. He suddenly cried, “By golly that’s me.” It was, it was Harry about-to-be-vice-president Truman.

Well in 1956 Stevenson had the odd, the very weird idea, that the choice of a vice president should go to the convention. The chairman of the convention, the speaker of the house, Mr Sam Rayburn, was disgusted and outraged at this flouting of an unbroken custom, but Stevenson had his way.

Two men hot for the job were nominated and the balloting began. On the third ballot Senator Estes Kefauver of Tennessee was chosen. Senator John F Kennedy of Massachusetts lost and for the rest of his life he said that loss was the luckiest break of his political career. Only once in 180 years of voting for president and vice president has the defeated vice presidential candidate been heard from again as a presidential candidate.

It’s a spooky thought that may haunt the nights of both Senator Benson and Senator Quayle between now and 8 November.

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