D) The conventions

Party conventions are held, once every four years, each time in a different city, amid the most enormous ballyhoo. They are the only full gatherings of the national parties, and these three days mark the beginning of a period of about three months, in which each national party has a visible existence and purpose - to get its chosen candidate.

After the candidates for the party's nomination have been proposed, with laudatory speeches and prolonged applause, the state delegations vote, usually but not necessarily as blocks. If the first ballot, with every individual delegate's vote counted, fails to give an overall majority to any candidate, a second ballot is held, then if necessary a third. One convention, long ago, needed thirty-four inconclusive ballots before it at last produced an overall majority, but in modern times, with the background of the opinion polls as well as the primaries, such a deadlock would be most unlikely. Once the party's candidate for the presidency has been chosen, the convention has three more tasks; to prepare and agree a statement of the party's policy, or 'platform'; to choose its candidate for the vice-presidency; and to proclaim its unity behind the candidates and their platform.

The platform needs to be vague enough to avoid annoyance to any of the sectional interests whose support the party hopes to get. The new presidential candidate nominates his vice-presidential running-mate for the convention to acclaim. He usually takes a day or so of thought and consultation before making his proposal, which is likely to be a person who has a substantial independent basis of support within the party - sometimes a defeated rival. Between the conventions and November the campaign is between the two parties, now each united against the other in support of its pair of candidates, who campaign all over the country themselves - still sometimes using the traditional campaign railway trains. Expenditure at this stage is limited by law, and partly financed by public funds.

The nature of the federal system has always tended to ensure that almost every new President lacks experience either of national and international politics (if he has been a governor) or of administration (if he has been in Congress). In other developed countries the usual way to the top office of the nation's affairs lies through national parliament and cabinet. In the American system a member of the Cabinet cannot be in Congress, and rarely comes from it or goes to it after holding office. A new President must obviously excel in the qualities of salesmanship and self-promotion, but takes up an office of whose nature he cannot know very much. If he has been Vice- President he may be better equipped - and the two-months interval between the election and the hand-over of power is now often used by the outgoing President, still in office as a 'lame duck', to give his successor some advice which may be useful.

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