Editorial / Ladies and Gentlemen, My Candidate
Tyrrell, R. Emmett Jr.
I t is not always the gaudy show under the klieg lights that directs the destiny of a nation. Thucydides, Tacitus, Henry Steele Commager-all the greats of the historical sciences will tell...
...Larry Pressler--1962 recipient of the National 4-H Citizenship Award, Rhodes Scholar, U.S...
...Pressler is Senator Pressler's mother...
...Papa Brezhnev, his armies swarming all over Afghanistan's bourgeois hordes, puckishly declares that the world sees the United States "as an absolutely unreliable partner in interstate ties, as a state whose leadership, prompted by some whim, caprice, or emotional outburst.., is capable at any moment of cancelling treaties and agreements signed by it...
...Look around Washington...
...He has botched so many things that the American people in their fathomless generosity will reelect him out of sympathy for his suffering...
...Does reckless abandon in economic management, military preparedness, diplomacy, social welfare, and all the other realms of governance ever eventuate in Weimar and ruin...
...Pressler's role in past campaigns has been to write contributors " a painstakingly written long-hand thank-you note...
...Howard Baker as running mate...
...Washington's sages now tell us that the Wonderboy will be invincible in 1980...
...Inflation, lawlessness, rising chaos--all such phenomena are, for our pols, the Mysteries of modern times...
...Cock your ear to the baby talk emitting from every source of eminence and power...
...Nor did the senior citizens in the Kremlin laugh when this unscotchable kid stepped forward...
...Thucydides, Tacitus, Henry Steele Commager-all the greats of the historical sciences will tell you that events seen in their time as matters of small moment often change the lives of nations and civilizations...
...The sleazy majority of pols practicing their black arts in the Great Republic have risen to prominence by saying things that are palpably untrue...
...President Pressler could choose a dozen cabinets and enough Supreme Court candidates for a century just by picking his Capitol Hill colleagues...
...If a PresslerBaker ticket is not pathetic enough, how about declaring the Hon...
...A gasohol still in every yard and farm," the prophet from Humboldt declaimed with his customary yelp, and the tumescent and pulsating Middle East shriveled to a more modest significance...
...and, if the New York Times is to be believed, Mrs...
...The pols apparently do not think so...
...Not that I harbor any malice for his mother, but the Presidential presence of this gigantic reductio ad absurdum of the modern pol would quite possibly have had a more salutary influence on the American polity than a coup d'dtat led by the ghosts of Lincoln, Madison, and Grover Cleveland...
...Senator, author of press releases, and prophet of gasohol--could prove to be such an event...
...Charles C. Diggs, J r . , as Attorney General...
...Let them laugh...
...in some far-off time, in some quiet, book-lined atelier, a forlorn Gibbon will weep...
...It is my view that the snickered-upon withdrawal from the Presidential race of the Hon...
...There is a neoconservative salvo against latter-day McGovernism for you...
...Let me assure you that the Iranians did not think Senator Pressler's candidacy very funny...
...The Rt...
...One wonders, had there been homosexual activists working in the American Embassy, would the Holy Man's agents have freed them too...
...George Hansen as Secretary of State...
...For, truth to tell, Senator Pressler is not all that different from many of the other Solons and Numas who have contrived to govern us...
...How about throwing in the Hon...
...So irresponsible and extravagant has been the dance of American policy in recent years that today the Great Republic is viewed with amazement and alarm by its friends...
...But that it came from Papa Brezhnev., in pursuit of whose favor so many of those obligations and treaties were violated, is a cruel twist...
...4 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MARCH 1980...
...How I would like to have seen Senator Pressler make it to the White Adapted from RET's Monday Column in the Washington Post...
...Yet if Americans are about to elect a man President because he is pathetic, I say the time is ripe for Senator Pressler to throw his hat back into the ring...
...The analysis is unusual, but I am in no position to doubt...
...Khomeini and his galoots exploit our weird hysteria over race, creed, and sex, treating women and black hostages as fellow Third World heroes while treating men hostages as criminals...
...They respond to them with oratory and policy gestures that amount to little more than ceremony...
...A successful Presidential bid by her unusual son could have killed her...
...The possibilities are endless...
...We live under a tyranny of Homo sapiens who are...well, who are incomplete as specimens of mankind go...
...House...
...Antone Pressler was not laughing either...
...Now as time rushes along, and the American condition worsens, it is becoming increasingly apparent that most of these effortless honeyfoglers simply have no idea that there exists such a thing as truth...
...And iust to insure that his campaign is more pathetic than that of our President I suggest he choose the Hon...
...For that matter, Mrs...
...Its enemies merely play with it, and its enemies are not thought of as playful fellows...
...The sages of the press corps laughed when Senator Pressler declared his candidacy, and they laughed again when he made his dignified retreat...
Vol. 13 • March 1980 • No. 3
