1988 presidential primaries - 11 March 1988

Those of you who are interested in the presidential primary elections and caucuses that were held in 20 states last Tuesday will already have read about what happened and I doubt there’s any way of ensnaring people who are not interesting into reading or hearing about those results.

It’s a highly complicated system which varies from state to state and explaining it to a foreign audience would rather be like explaining the stock market to the Zulus. Having said that, I expect to hear by the first post that the Zulu tribe has a very sophisticated portfolio and owns 20% of British Petroleum and 30% of the Sony Corporation.

Let me say, then, that I quail and give up before any attempt to attract you to hear about something you’re not interested in. However I can hear one or two solid citizens saying “But it has to do, has it not, with who’s going to be elected president in November?”

Well, even that’s not certain. It may decide who’s not going to be president but all I’ll say for now is that these elections were to choose delegates to the two party conventions in the summer, that the chosen are not in every state bound to vote for the man they’re going to Atlanta or to New Orleans to represent, that at the moment Vice President Mr Bush does seem to have the edge on being the Republican candidate.

As for the Democrats the most revealing and unsettling statistic from all the reams of statistics we’ve been trying to digest is that 67% of Democrats across the country don’t like any of their contenders, not Dukakis, Gephardt, Jackson. “None of them” said an old pro, a former member of the Democrats’ national committee, “None of them grabs my imagination.”

On that side of the barricades there’s only one thing that’s agreed on, a conviction that didn’t exist four years ago and it’s this, that anyone who hopes to emerge as the winner from the Democratic battle of Atlanta will have to sit down very early on with the Reverend Jesse Jackson, the black parson who’s shown enough acceptance in many states to give him enough delegates to Atlanta, both black and a surprising number of whites, enough to make him if not the king-maker at the very least the broker who will have to be wooed and won.

My final comment comes from former President Jimmy Carter. He said for some time and he still says that there’s a 50:50 chance of what we now call a “brokered convention” at Atlanta, what we used to call simply a convention in which three or four men will be contesting for the prize which will go to the man who on the first, second, third, fourth, whatever ballot gets the necessary majority. I’ll say no more about this unending presidential campaign except to express a yearning, a sneaking hope that that’s what happen.

Well, that’s enough about that. In the next month or two we shall see most of the early contenders drop out for lack of votes, mostly for lack of money, three or four of them I shouldn’t wonder deep in debt to the tune of a million dollars, or two, which like John Glenn, like Gary Hart – remember him? – they will painfully attempt to pay off through public speaking, fund-raising dinners and lunches of plastic chicken which only friends and old loyalists will subscribe to.

It’s a wasteful, exhausting, demeaning system and these days hideously expensive because it’s been lamentably proved over and over again that the thing which magnetises the voters is the $30,000 30-second television commercial in which all the great and pressing and difficult issues of the day are reduced to a three or four word slogan or a three or four word insult tossed at your rivals.

Everybody knows this, everybody deplores it, everybody talks about changing the system in various big and little ways but, as Mark Twain said about the weather, “Everybody complains and nobody does anything”.

I am at the moment in California, in northern California, which is to say about 600 miles north of the Mexican border, 400 miles north of Los Angeles – in fact, in San Francisco, to escape from the winter of the north-eastern seaboard.

Brilliant days in the 60s, sharp at night. March is a month here when you do not see too many tourists, conventioneers of course, but the Chamber of Commerce for some reason does not advertise the fact that the best months to spend a holiday in and around San Francisco are September, the warmest month, October, November, December.

January and February, though mild, have or expect to have most of the annual rainfall but then March, April, May, June. The time to stay away, which obviously the chamber of commerce is not going to advertise because it’s when most people take their holidays, is July and August – chilly grey days and foggy nights. It’s sad but predictable to see the midsummer tourists emerging from their hotels in the morning and shivering and saying, “What is this? I thought this was California” and then bustling off downtown to buy some sweaters.

So March is a pleasant time to mooch around the countryside and watch the poppies pop and the cherry trees out and the lupins swaying and on the windless mornings smell the scent of the eucalyptus trees and then ride around the town and note the changes.

There are always changes in this state, no matter how recently you last came here. My almanac says the population of California is 24 millions but that was the 1980 census. It’s now 28 millions and an official projection has close to 40 millions 30 years from now. It’s a figure that frightens the men and women in the state legislature and it has caused them to take a new, a most un-Californian view of progress.

Here, as in all the western countries, progress has meant growth and growth has meant more spreading suburbs and in the cities more skyscraper office buildings and more high-rise luxury apartments tempered at intervals by the protests of reform movements and a mayor who builds a clutch of low-cost housing.

Now this state as you know is – has been for two decades or so – the most populous in the nation but it has a disproportionate number of cars, about 20 million automobiles for 28 million people. And while the way to solve this disproportion has been to build more and wider freeways, motorways, finally the citizens, the voters, are saying “Enough!”.

Whenever an issue begins to burn Californians they go outside the state legislature. They put down a prescribed number of signatures on a petition and get out what is called an initiative. It will go onto the ballot sheets at the next local election and when they do this state-wide they call it a proposition.

I’m sure you’ve heard of the famous by now notorious Proposition 13 which in 1978 registered the citizens’ distaste for taxes. The proposition was passed by a good majority. There was a general cut in rates and public property taxes and for a heady year or so California romped in the sensation of having more to spend on everything until they discovered that nobody was spending anything on schools, fire departments, police forces, road building, repairs, services of every kind. So first they grumbled at potholes and striking teachers and then grow alarmed at loose drug enforcement, fewer cops and slow responses to fires and little road building.

Eventually, inevitably, the localities and the counties began still grumbling to put the taxes back again. Now one county south of Los Angeles is up in arms about progress itself. Three months from now it will vote on an initiative actually to curb the developers, to limit the size of office blocks and to permit new ones only when the developer has submitted a plan for reducing the traffic flow towards those buildings.

An acceptable plan is one that not only specifies a smaller than usual office block but sets a limit to the number of cars that serve it and their average speed and to specify the water resources that will be available. First, of course, you’d have to get permission to build your block and the initiative sets a limit on the number that can be built in any designated locality.

To get this idea off to the ballots 65,000 signatures were required; they got 90,000 and it seems pretty certain to pass. What fuelled the protest in the beginning was the fact, which at one time everybody would have boasted about, that over 15,000 new cars, vans, trucks are registered in Orange County ever month.

As you’d guess, Orange County does not in the least look like the county it was named for. The discovery of citrus concentrate during the Second War is what led to what shall we say de-orangizing of Orange County. It was a government plan designed very successfully to get vitamin C in the form of orange juice to the blitzed children of Britain.

Cargoes of whole oranges were much too bulky for freighters carrying arms and other vital supplies to Britain, so they concentrated the juice and shipped small containers of it requiring the beneficiaries to add four or five parts of water to get the nutritive equivalent of whole juice.

After the war, of course, this became a great national commercial business and California was able drastically to reduce its acreage in orange groves. Also, real estate was more profitable than oranges and to the developer and growth and freeways and suburbs on the freeways and high-rises and skyscrapers. In a word, progress.

Today Orange County must be one of the few places on earth where, when a cab driver says, half-sadly half-proudly, “Well you can’t stop progress” the citizen replies, “Yes you can too. Wait 'til the first week in June.”

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