From Exciting Horserace to Exhibition Trot - 4 August 2000

I began the talk last week by noting that the three biggest, the oldest, the most famous national television networks - NBC, CBS, ABC - intended to devote only about a third of their usual time to covering the two political party conventions.

I misjudged them - I greatly exaggerated.

In the event one of the three skipped the whole thing except in its regular news bulletins. The other two devoted just one hour - 10 to 11pm - each evening.

Why is this? Because they'd caught up, a little late in the day, with the fact that in the past quarter century the conventions have abolished their main business which was to meet, to battle between several contestants and to choose, by a series of ballots of every state, choose the man - name their presidential candidate.

The conventions are still called presidential nominating conventions but the naming has nowadays already been done before the convention because of the spread, throughout the country, of what you might call the "winner takes all" primary.

It used to be that most states sent a delegation which split its choice between two or three even four men and they were voted for at the convention. Now all the Republican primaries except in two states picked one man - George W Bush - months before the convention.

Put it simply - as I said last time - it used to be the most exciting horserace in America. Now it's like going into the derby to watch an exhibition trot of the winner. The winner having been chosen in a series of preliminary run-off races around the country.

Consequently the conventions now hold all the suspense, the newsworthiness, the hypnotism of a Conservative or a Labour Party conference.

That is exactly what they have become - devoted entirely to saying, with many various flourishes, that "our country is great and good" and "our man is the greatest and the best".

A few months ago the network chiefs took a backward look at the audiences they'd mustered down the years for the once every four years conventions.

In 1960 for the Kennedy/Nixon bout 28% of all homes with television watched the conventions and that's, by the way, much less than most people would have guessed.

In 1976, the last time there was a big tussle between two contestants, between the Reagan camp and the Ford camp about who was going to get the nomination - Ford got it - 31% of homes watched - that was the peak.

And since then, which after all is almost 25 years, since then no convention has ever put more than one name in nomination. The man's been chosen beforehand by these primaries and since then the listening figures have gone down and down. Last time - Clinton versus Dole - only 16 American homes in a hundred watched.

Well the networks' decision this time has been dramatically vindicated. This past week only six families out of a hundred watched on the Monday evening and it rose to between 10 and 12 on Thursday when Governor Bush delivered a speech which had been re-drafted and re-written by his speech writers 17 times before it was given over to the teleprompter.

All of which only goes to show, I think, that the people have been way ahead of the network moguls in anticipating that the new style convention is about as riveting to watch as a school speech day or commencement.

And at this Republican convention it became startlingly clear from the first speaker on that all the speeches had been vetted or cleared for acceptability by the Bush chieftains.

In fact the most striking feature of this speech week has been the absence of controversial figures - not people who might oppose or deny the main beliefs of the party but those who've been most vocal in expressing them.

Both Governor Bush and his vice presidential choice - Mr Cheney - have been strong to repeal the law that made abortion legal, both as strong for prayer in schools, both are against gun control - no mention of these issues or deadly phrases, no sight anywhere of Henry Hyde who led the impeachment hearings or of the old, great warrior Newt Gingrich.

All speeches were to be proud, resonant, vague, patriotic and non-specific, and so they were. The old Kremlin could have learned something from the Bush managers.

So those of us who, for one reason or another, had to pay attention watched and listened to the TV commentators and so-called analysts sweating to find hints of policy and deep or subtle meaning in speeches which, as Churchill said of the speeches of an opponent: "compress the largest possible number of words into the smallest possible amount of thought."

All the obscure or well-known figures in the party came obediently to the rostrum and spouted their pieces like schoolchildren hailing Horatius on the bridge.

Why then, somebody asked, are there 2,000 delegates but 15,000 reporters mostly from abroad, how do you explain that?

A veteran reporter, who'd covered conventions for 60 years, said promptly: "Sheer ignorance of recent American history, or perhaps they read up about the early famous party conventions but didn't notice along the way that their main business had been abolished or possibly their introduction was, like mine, an account of the incredible, the outrageous, the most melodramatic of all conventions - the meeting of the Democrats in 1924. Maybe they hoped for something like that."

I wasn't there but I was 16 - older enough to be sentient - and read about the extraordinary goings-on called a party nominating convention and tried to imagine the unimaginable scene at Madison Square Garden in the summer of 1924.

The Democrats met on a Monday in July in the usual infernal New York weather.

Every day it was in the middle or the high 90s. No air conditioning then - the only breeze wafting among the 2,000 or so delegates was coming from a thousand hats, newspapers, whatever could be used as a fan.

Two or three nationally known characters had already canvassed the country and mobilised enough support to get their names before the convention.

There would also be some minor hopefuls - governors of states - who would be nominated because the bureaucrats they employed were too scared of losing their jobs not to pretend their boss would make a great president.

But by the Wednesday of that sweating July there were two main contestants who loathed each other and for whom the whole convention would vote state by state from Alabama to Wyoming.

There was a third man - a non-entity - a distinguished non-entity, lawyer, had been a congressman and Wilson's ambassador to Great Britain: name of John W Davis.

Anyway came the balloting, the gavel falls, the baritone intones one by one the states and records the ballots.

The main bout was between a handsome, rather swagger, Southerner, McAdoo - a lawyer, once secretary of the treasury, first chairman of the Federal Reserve.

Having political ambitions he had the sense to marry President Wilson's daughter and thereafter became known as the crown prince of the Democratic Party.

McAdoo would have been a shoo-in if he'd not been opposed by an American who in origins, in style, in character, was at the other end of the poll - the Brooklyn end - Al Smith, governor of New York State with an inimitable East Side accent, born very poor, little schooling, son of a truck driver who died young.

The boy went to work in the city fish market. Al Smith worked his way up in city and state politics. He improved life for the working poor. He became a fine governor.

He was a Catholic, the first ever proposed for president. And he wanted to have Prohibition repealed.

The South solidly backed McAdoo who was in favour of retaining prohibition and publicly, at least, shared the South's rampant fear that on the day of Smith's inauguration it would be the Pope and not the chief justice who would administer the oath.

On the first ballot McAdoo had 431 votes, Smith 241 and the distinguished ex-ambassador 31.

Now in those days the Democrats required for nomination not a simple majority but a two-thirds majority. It was a long way to 728.

On the balloting went, through the fourth day and night and the fifth and no recess. At night people can spin successful plots, so many delegates went to their hotels and left their alternates - every delegate has a stand-in - to vote through the night. But many stayed and brought in camp beds.

After the 38th ballot a venerable old Democrat, three times unsuccessful nominee for the presidency, got up to explain his vote - that you could do, which meant a little preliminary speech.

In the case of William Jennings Bryan it was an interminable, incoherent speech from an old man no longer the party's hypnotising orator.

Towards the end he was booed and hissed and he sat down saying all he wanted to say was "vote for McAdoo."

It went on. The 71st ballot: McAdoo way ahead with 528 votes, but still 200 short, that was his peak.

On the 72nd ballot some votes went over to Smith. On the 73rd ballot many more and poor ambassador Davis polled 50, 60, going up.

I came to know him later and asked him: "Was there any time when you thought it possible that things might move your way seriously?"

He was a gentle, modest man, he said: "Oh yes. After the 73rd ballot I thought it might happen."

It was - wait for it - the steady collapse of the votes for both Smith and McAdoo and the vote to nominate John W Davis on the 103rd ballot - 10 days and nights.

The delegates stumbled off to bed and next day slouched to Grand Central Station and scattered to their homes. Heroes or victims of the longest ballot in history.

The Northerners sad to know that spirituous liquids would still be prohibited. The Southerners relieved to know that the Pope would not come to live in the White House.

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