Massachusetts primary, March 1976

A week or two ago, a friend of mine was travelling through Missouri and he came on a roadside lunch counter which had outside a board advertising its big bicentennial special – a feast for a farthing, which evidently will be offered as a bargain right up to that blessed dawn of 1 January 1977 when we can all rise from our knees and get about the business of facing the twentieth century, not to say the twenty-first.

The big food bargain in this small town in Missouri was 'Bicentennial Gettysburger' followed by 'Apple Mattocks pie' and if you don't get it, please don't worry. It would be a kindness not to go into it. You may notice that both these puns attach to events in the American Civil War which has less to do with the 'founding' of this republic than with the time when it nearly 'foundered.' And, as 1976 drags its infinitely slow length along, it's noticeable that even the most rapacious merchants are running out of ideas celebrating what we're supposed to be celebrating, namely 1776 and the birth of the United States. They're riffling through the whole 200 years and making a thing – a theatre show, an article of clothing, a product in a word – of almost anything odd or startling that happened along the way. 

Well, when the... when the New Year came in, we'd already had enough warning of the commercial orgy that lay ahead to make me take a mental vow not to bring it up again. But... as a passing item, I'm happy to report that one town in America had the wit last week to set aside a day on which it urged people not to buy bicentennial products. It held an awards ceremony over which the mayor presided. The awards were called The 1976 Bad Taste Awards and they were won by business firms that have so far contributed in the words of the citation 'the most tasteless abuse of America's 200th birthday'. 

And which was this civilised town whose mayor had the courage to slap big corporations in the face with these prizes for abusing the bicentennial? New York, Philadelphia, Boston? They are the great bicentennial cities. Yes, but the mayor of any one of them would be out of his mind to preside over a public insult to prosperous, and to that extent influential, companies and corporations, he'd have just so much less money in his campaign kitty next time he ran for office. And somebody would certainly be hired to start probing into the mayor's public or private past to see if we couldn't dredge up a little slime on which the mayor could then slide into scandal or obscurity. 

Well, this mayor, who apparently didn't give a damn for such hazards to his political career, has the splendid, the almost Dickensian, name of Hondo Crouch and he's the Mayor of Luckenbach, Texas. It's true that Luckenbach is not a metropolis. It may be that Mayor Hondo Crouch harbours no secret ambition to be President of the United States or even Governor of Texas. It's also true that Luckenbach has three buildings and one parking meter and a mean man might speculate that the mayor might have been fulfilling an ambition of a sort when he saw, literally, thousands of people pour into his tiny town. Maybe it won’t be tiny for long. But I should guess that any people attracted to live in Luckenbach because of its Bad Taste Awards Ceremony has the makings of a decent citizen. 

Anyway, as the tedious Speech Day speakers say, 'But now to the prizes'. Two products tied for second place. One was a prominent brewery for putting out bicentennial beer cans whose tasteless feature, I'm sorry to say, I've not been able to discover. The other was a coffin maker in Mississippi who's been busy manufacturing bicentennial caskets lined with the flag and painted on the outside red, white and blue. The grand prize, and there was obviously no dispute about it, went to a livestock breeders' cooperative in the State of Wisconsin. It had got out an advertising poster, George Washington of course at the top of it, offering during the bicentennial year only, seven quarts for the price of six. Seven quarts of what? Bull semen. 

I move on quickly, and almost with relish, to the latest round of our presidential knock-out bouts. I promise you that by, I should guess, the end of next week you'll hear from me not much more about the presidential sweepstakes till the summer, unless the desperate Democrats, who always spend six months cutting each other's throats before they discover that the enemy is not another Democrat, but a Republican, 'unless', I say, the Democrats turn in their present frustration to Paul Newman or Robert Redford, some bang-up, first-rate, present-day movie star – who's also a Democrat – to oppose the old deputy sheriff, Ronald Reagan. That manoeuvre would, however, presume the victory of Mr Reagan in some of the coming primaries and it seems at the moment to be quite a presumption. 

Now you remember the first and greatly touted primary, New Hampshire, proved nothing to the Republicans? President Ford won the popular vote by a whisker over Reagan and both of them flashed their, by now, mechanical grins and claimed a famous victory. But apart from the emotional effect of the popular vote, that's the way the general total's divided, the primary purpose of these primaries is to vote not directly for your favourite presidential candidate, but to vote for local delegates to the party national conventions who are pledged to a particular delegate. And in New Hampshire, the delegates pledged to Ford, who won, were five times the number of Reagan men who will go to the Republican convention on his behalf. 

Well, last Tuesday we had a very different proposition. The Massachusetts primary. Massachusetts is, in size, 44th among the States but tenth in population. It has eight million people against New Hampshire's 800,000. It's one of the great centres of electronics manufacture, metals, plastics, textiles, shoes. It has an impressive dairy industry. Because of its colonial history, Boston and the surrounding cradles of the American Revolution, it has a thriving tourist trade. In short, it's a big, industrial state, a farming state, a third of its population works in industry and it has the widest range of immigrant blood, or as we now say 'ethnic' variety – Irish, Poles, Czechs, Russians, Italians, Germans, the lot. 

It has a very downright, liberal tradition. If it were an English county, it would be predictably a Labour stronghold. When, in 1972, the whole country fled for salvation to Richard M. Nixon – remember him? – Massachusetts was the only state in the union that gave a majority to Senator McGovern. So, because the Democratic bias is so marked, the main interest was in seeing which Democrat, of the nine, this time, who entered the Massachusetts primary, would have most appeal to these tough and much more representative voters. Remember in New Hampshire it was Jimmy Carter who won, the sunny, former Governor of Georgia, who looks like a rested-up Mickey Rooney. In Massachusetts he came in fourth and his new-made halo was a little dimmed. 

The man who won was Senator Henry Jackson, who appealed to the embattled whites of South Boston by coming out squarely against compulsory bussing of schoolchildren and he attributed his victory quite frankly to what he called the 'lunch pail' vote. In other words, he plumped for the factory workers' votes and effectively massaged their prejudices. One of which, quite plainly, is a suspicion of blacks, though there are lots of blacks in the factories. Another, and a more important one, is the hope of more work in a bigger defence programme. Senator Jackson comes from the state of Washington and that's where the Boeing Company has its centre, its heart and its payroll. Cancel a contract for a new Boeing plane and 50,000 people can be suddenly out of work in Seattle alone. And when Boeing sneezes in Seattle, Senator Jackson in Washington DC catches a cold. He's consequently known from conviction, as well as self-interest, I ought to say, he's known as a famous hawk and the question in Massachusetts – which it's impossible to answer from the vote – is how much of the 23 per cent of the Democratic vote he got came from workers who stand to gain from a more hawkish defence policy? 

Now it's easy to be mislead by Senator Jackson's victory and say that, in some measure, he repudiated the liberal tradition of Massachusetts. Not at all. He still got less than one Democratic vote in four. Forty-eight per cent of the entire Democratic vote went to avowed liberals, but the impression of this fact is obliterated by the spreading of the liberal vote among six candidates. However, in November, there'll be only one Democrat running and Massachusetts, it's pretty safe to say, will vote for him. 

But how conservative or how liberal will he be? That's the secret of the national trend that was not revealed last Tuesday and may not be until the conventions. In other words, are the mass of liberal voters in America more conservative now than they were four years ago? We don't know. But we do know from, I must say, a rather alarming national survey just published, that the people's interest in serious news has slumped. The television networks are cutting back on news coverage – cutting back I ought to say from a formerly enormous amount of news coverage. Still, the networks have taken their own surveys and they find that after the orgy of investigative reporting that came in the wake of Watergate – bribery among airplane companies, the excessive licence taken by the CIA and so on – people are getting exhausted by revelations of vice and chicanery and greed that never seem to flag. 

They don't condemn the digging of the journalists. They just don't like what they dig up. They've had their fill of statesmen and businessmen with feet of clay and in this year of all years they'd like to feel a man could die a patriot, even if he had to be buried in a red, white and blue coffin. 

This finding does, I think, reflect one general mood of the country brought on by scandal and exposure – fatigue. And this suggests not a conscious swing to conservatism, but a drift. The liberals may be wrong-headed but they are still angry. A tired conservative is about as lethargic a voter as you can find and if the country is all that tired, it seems to me that it will look for the man least likely to view with alarm, blaze a trail, stir up a hornets' nest or rock a boat. 

A very probably candidate for this soothing assignment is Leslie King who, when his mother remarried, took on the name of his stepfather, Gerald Ford.

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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