Jimmy Carter elected president - 12 November 1976

Well now how are Americans feeling about the election of Jimmy Carter? It seems a natural thing to ask and it's been put to me several times this week by visitors, Europeans just off the plane.

But it's really as naive a question as that other famous one that's usually put to me in England when I'm just off the plane "what is the weather like in America just now?" Well, the answer's simple: up in northern Vermont, where my daughter lives, they've just had seven inches of snow. Much further north and west in Great Falls, Montana, it's 62 degrees and way down yonder in New Orleans it's 62 degrees. In Syracuse, New York, eight degrees of frost, in Los Angeles, 96 degrees. In New York City, clear and 44 degrees; 4,000 miles north and west in Anchorage, Alaska, the same thing, a mile high in the shivering Rockies in Denver though it's 71 and in sunny Jacksonville, Florida, 42 degrees.

That's what the weather's like in America just now and what do people think about the election of Jimmy Carter is just about as improbable and contradictory. However, commentators wouldn't be commentators and pollsters wouldn't be pollsters if they hadn't all hastened to produce their coroner's inquests and I'll just list a few of them before we take a deep breath. Forget Mr Carter for the time being and await his ascension to the throne on 20 January.

This transition period, for the winner, is really an extension of his campaign. He can go on making promises and tell us how drastic and exhilarating he means to make the coming house cleaning and nobody can gainsay, but about one minute after noon on 20 January he will be in, and required to put up or shut up. It's a day, by the way, that some of us are aching for after the months of hearing not what America's like, but what a splendid, prosperous and compassionate nation it's going to be.

Well again, quite simply this is why Jimmy Carter won. The blacks who the pollsters predicted would stay home in unprecedented numbers turned out in unprecedented numbers and voted for Carter. He won because in the states where there are few blacks, there were lots of Poles and Hungarians who were furious at Mr Ford's fuzzy notion that Eastern Europe is not dominated by the Soviet Union. Carter also won because organised labour roused itself and drummed its members to the polls in the industrial states that count.

In California, which counts mightily in any election, Carter lost but that didn't matter because in New York City all the poor and the not-so-poor and the rich and the Catholics and the people mad at the rising tube fare, all of them got out and swamped the upstate Ford vote. Carter also won because southerners were dizzy with pride at the thought of having the first president to be born in the deep south and that was enough for them.

And then again, Carter won because the students voting for the first time got out in very small numbers; once they got the vote they gave up on it. If they'd all voted, a lot of them might have gone for Eugene McCarthy and taken votes away from Carter in touch-and-go states. Carter won be... I know 22 other reasons why he won, but there's not time to recite them and for another thing, it's unfair to the Republicans who maybe losers, but they're not stupid.

Far from it, as we saw from the administration of Mr Ford's predecessor, Nixon the king-maker, and the Republicans have their cogent reasons for the victory or rather for the defeat – they look on Carter's election as a fluke, a victory by default, a freakish stroke of luck and you know why, because if Ronald Reagan had been the nominee he'd have swept Texas as well as California and Ohio. He probably would too.

Carter won, the Republican's explain, because Mr Ford, Secretary of Agriculture, told a dirty joke on a plane. He also won because Mr Ford didn't pick John Connally of Texas as his running mate, which would have guaranteed a victory in Texas, in California and Ohio and almost certainly in Florida and Mississippi. It probably would have too.

Carter won because he had the cunning to apologise in the last debate for his sexy remarks in the Playboy interview, whereas Mr Ford, an un-cunning man, was too plain and honest to be able to unravel the knots he got tied up when he said what he didn't mean to say about Eastern Europe.

Carter won because Senator Dole, Ford's running mate, made insulting remarks about the cynicism of union labour and made them so mad that they went running and, out of spite, voted for a Southern Baptist.

The Republicans can go on and on too and their explanations are just as plausible, just as numerous and just as inconclusive as those of the Democrats. What, then, is the answer? There isn't one. No sociologist, no pollster, no political scientist, let alone the politicians and reporters, can sensibly attribute the result to a single factor or any constellation of them.

Dr Freud once said that, "When the patient gives more than one reason for doing anything, he's either confused or he's hiding from himself the prime motive". Well if an individual can never be sure why he bites his nails or why he quit his job or got married, who's going to know how and why 79 million people voted in 50 different states?

I saw a European headline on an editorial, which said "America votes for boldness", but it would have been better to say "40 millions voted for boldness, 38 and a half million voted for the old firm". That's the way of editorial writers who are no worse than the rest of us in being unable to bear, after some great event, saying, "I don't know why or how it happened".

The historians already have a set of pat reasons why Nixon swept the election in 1968, even though sweeping the election meant that he got 31 million votes whereas Hubert Humphrey got only 31 million votes. However – and that's a decisive word in historical writing – however, once a man is elected, the perquisites of the office descend on him maybe not as a halo, but as the equally impressive rights and privileges of a rich man.

And people, even people who loathe him begin to see him as a rail splitter from Illinois, Lincoln or the timekeeper on a railway construction gang, Truman or the manager of a peanut farm in a one-street town in Georgia. They see him as a man who has just acquired and deserves a button under his desk, which he can press to have the presidential helicopter descend on the White House lawn, both fire and air conditioning in the presidential study and a Secret Service man who accompanies him every morning when he goes to the bathroom.

It's a supremely glamorous variation on putting a humble man in uniform, which reminds me that last spring I was filming in Nevada and a doctor friend of mine was giving me a party in San Francisco on, say, the Thursday night. Well, in the manner of filming, we got delayed and delayed and I phoned my doctor and said, "I couldn't make the last plane from Reno, I was marooned". "Hell," he said "we'll pick you up".

"We" included a friend with a little private plane and they came down on the tablecloth of Carson's City almost non-existent airport and we squeezed into this little plane and I noticed the pilot friend had a shaking hand, the hand that didn't hold the trembling cigarette. He seemed to fumble at the controls and I was a pretty scared man, I can tell you. I leaned over to the doctor and hissed at him "How long has this man been flying?" and he hissed back casually "Oh about 49, 50 years. He was the admiral in charge of the Pacific Fleet Air Arm in the war". At once I saw the pilot in full dress uniform, enough medals blazing on his chest to make you sneeze, and I saw that his hand shook not from nerves but from experience. I never looked on him the same way again.

And now we've seen on the telly, Air Force One, the presidential jet, arrive and take Mr Carter off to his island retreat. We saw him being deferentially shown the fixings of Air Force One – the glistening kitchen, the monster deep freeze, the study for a deep presidential thought, the private bedroom as well as the sofa off the study for his majesty's siesta's aloft.

In only six weeks, Jimmy Carter will be President Carter and even though he says he's going to have a democratic presidency with a small "d", he can't help having an army of servants in white coats, a palace with 40-odd rooms to live in, Marine lieutenants to escort his guests into dinner, a spotlight flashing on when he enters the White House ballroom and a band to play Hail to the Chief every time he appears as the host.

To himself, he may still be little old Jimmy Carter, the Huckleberry Finn of Plains, Georgia, but to us he'll fall into line behind the other 38 magnificoes from Washington to Ford. There may not be a halo hovering over him, but he'll be, from now on, seen through the blinding soft focus the movie cameras reserve for their highest paid beauties who have bags under their eyes.

There is one thing about the election that the Democrats assert with enthusiasm and the Republicans concede with a sigh. Ford picked a bad running mate. More than 60% of the voters for Carter said that his choice of the gallant Senator Mondale had confirmed their presidential choice, so maybe after all there is an answer. Senator Mondale won the election for him and Mr Carter has promised to give Vice President Mondale powers never before used by a vice president.

Well, every president elect since Eisenhower has said the same thing. Roosevelt and Truman were cagey old-timers who knew the Constitution better than any of their successors, they knew what the successors had to find out that: in the American system, the vice president is a progressively fading figurehead. He has the Constitutional job of presiding over the Senate, but after a week or two of sitting up there and trying to stay awake through all those droning speeches he finds a deputy in the Senate and adjures the job for life and he goes back to his lonely office and waits for a call, and few calls ever come.

Mencken said that every man offered the vice presidency was puffed up at the prospect of his coming grandeur, but when he made it he found that the vice president is a man who sits in the outer office of the White House hoping to hear the president sneeze.

It's the truth. About the only special power and privilege the vice president acquires is that he gets to go to all the best funerals in Addis Ababa.

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