Editorials/Masked Politics/McGoo II
Tyrrell, R. Emmett Jr.
EDITORIALS MASKED POLITICS by R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr. A political philosophy has sunk to a very low estate when its most ardent practitioners do not dare to admit that politics is their game and...
...Were it not for the bad odor that he and his friends have brought to the word, McGovern would be saying that he is for liberalism...
...Which leaves us with the question, is candidate Glenn boring because he is empty of the old virtues of the statesman...
...Not at all...
...Then the Wall Street Journal ran a long article on his candidacy abundant with bouquets...
...Only history cares, and by the time history has answered the question it will be too late for us.it will be too late for us...
...If the luck of the masked pols holds out, perhaps next summer the President's advisers will persuade him to go about claiming that he is a liberal or a socialist...
...All summer they were spooked by the liberals in feminist clothing and by those liberals who call themselves minority spokesmen...
...To see the heirs to the party of Franklin Roosevelt in false face and wigs leaves me melancholy, though the liberals cannot say that I did not warn them...
...Witness the absurd incense now being burnt around the name Jesse Jackson...
...He is not a fanatic, and going back to 1968 fanatics have shaped national Democratic conventions...
...That would be undignified...
...McGOO II Last month was a felicitous one for Democratic presidential candidate John Glenn...
...Naturally when it comes to acquainting us with his far-sighted and audacious positions today he is coy...
...Yet each year they grow ever snootier toward the middle-class American way of life...
...By rite and custom both of our great political parties insist that their presidential nominees be sanctified by the huzza-huzzas of a party convention, and for Democrat Glenn this could present a problem...
...The fact is that he is running because he has celebrity, and that is quite enough in this glorious age to be thought of as qualifed to labor in Lincoln's house...
...He had never shown any marks of statesmanship before he entered the Senate, and he has hardly shown any since...
...I side with him...
...More often, however, the liberal orgies on Capitol Hill have nearly bankrupted the country- assuming that a national debt of nearly a trillion dollars and our colossal yearly deficits do not already amount to national bankruptcy...
...Name recognition and a familiarity with the buzz words of the celebrity circuit are quite enough...
...indeed, I recall no utterance by him on gay rights or the fate of the snail darter...
...Then too, they have failed utterly to accomplish their alleged ends...
...He just might sneak through a snoozing assemblage...
...They grow more extreme...
...Today's political giants do not really care...
...For over a decade I have reproached them, and in the most gentlemanly tones, for their increasing radicalism...
...And when they duck democratic process by sneaking their policies through the bureaucracies and the courts, they are the most devious masked pols of all...
...For some 20 years the liberals have pretty much gotten all they wanted...
...A political philosophy has sunk to a very low estate when its most ardent practitioners do not dare to admit that politics is their game and power their aim...
...Of course, no politico ever wants to admit that he goes through the hoops of kissing babies and cosseting interest groups merely so that he might get nearer to the levers of power...
...He is boring...
...So most of our Caesars claim some patriotic or public purpose: yet another water project for Bull Snort, Georgia, Social Security disability payments for the morose...
...Well, now their magic potions and anti-bourgeois crusades are decidedly out of odor with the average American who wants only to get through life with a little peace of mind, a bit of freedom, and some disposable income free from the tax collector's rapacious grasp...
...Agreed...
...McGovern, of course, is right at home with fanatics...
...That is the present condition of the Founding Fathers' bequest...
...He declares that he is for "realism and common sense," by gum...
...McGovern gets whoops and applause with such stuff as "it is better for old men to lose their tempers at the conference table than for young men to lose their lives on the battlefield...
...The liberals have dragged politics into every aspect of American life and the ordinary American is not happy about it...
...Experience has taught McGovern and the faithful to change their labels but not their catastrophic principles...
...Adapted from RET's weekly Washington Post column syndicated by King Features...
...Indeed, he has massaged the fanatics who afflict his party as assiduously as has Walter Mondale...
...Rather, they conceal their true natures by claiming the noble cause, the arcane insight, and the higher virtue...
...Let us identify those behind the masks...
...They induced the President to go about sympathizing with the feminists and those other "activists" whose goal is more government spending and a liberal in the White House...
...Throughout our wild and glorious political history, however, most pols have at least admitted to being pols...
...But then George McGovern declared his candidacy for the Democratic nomination, and as he intoned his New Age flumdiddle in those curiously impassive tones so characteristic of him premonition stabbed at the hearts of the Democratic old guard who see the Hon...
...Sometimes that has been for the best, as in the case of the civil rights legislation that extended the Bill of Rights to minorities...
...Their expectations were melodramatic, psychoanalytical, and steeped in orphic gibbering...
...Unmasked and unfragranced, McGovern is for more taxes and inflation to support still more leaps into social engineering at home and appeasement abroad-the kind of policies that have brought fiscal insolvency and social resentment to America and Vietnam-type warfare practically to our borders...
...Dignity, civic virtue, an understanding of history and of the historic purpose of politics are not requisites for high office in America...
...As the eminent British political philosopher Maurice Cranston has again observed, the American welfare state is more intrusive and expensive than that of France's Socialist government, and what has it achieved...
...Yet now Glenn has another asset that in combination with his fame might get him past the fanatics of a Democratic convention...
...A commemoration of Martin Luther King, Jr...
...But ordinary Americans have had enough...
...This is masked politics, and I suggest that the political scientists define it in their learned texts as the concealment of one's true identity and purpose behind the mask and fancy costume of some idealistic endeavor, for instance: environmental-ism, civil rights, feminism, the nuclear freeze...
...Yet if the masked liberals in their artfulness gave us a few laughs this past summer they also gave us cause for sadness...
...W hy is he running, the pundits were asking last month, perhaps sensing the indignity of it all, the futility, the emptiness of the man and his cause...
...His stock rises...
...There the liberals stood, fancily disguised as civil rights activists, environmentalists, peace marchers, advocates of gay rights...
...Once in office, leave the business of government to aides and to bureaucrats, and continue to solemnize pishposh...
...The Hon...
...Today we are faced with many pols so devious that they will not even identify themselves...
...The postwar trend of steadily diminishing numbers in poverty ended abruptly with the rise of the Great Society, and throughout the 1970s, despite all the taxpayers' monies that were lavished on social spending, poverty increased...
...Celebrity was Glenn's original asset...
...Certainly, the press has yet to recognize the deception...
...He finished first in a straw poll of delegates to the state convention of the New Jersey Democratic party...
...A few days before the Soviet attack on KAL 7 he told a Washington Post reporter that Ronald Reagan is dangerous, but "we ought to be very thankful that this man Andropov seems to be a reasonable guy and somewhat restrained...
...All this honeyfogling, once again, amounts to masked politics...
...And it is a matter of public record that he founded some sort of political group called "Americans for Common Sense" once South Dakotans had done with him in 1980...
...All are lovely ideals, but more to the point they seem to be effective costumes for covering up the fact that one is au fond a liberal lusting for power and the White House...
...He would cut military spending, throttle Israel, embrace Castro, and avoid interfering with the "revolutionary currents" abroad...
...If their highfalutin demands and promises call for more bureaucracy and judge-made law, they are liberals...
...Hence the poor liberals have to claim that they are something else, as they did at last August's Washington march...
...Two weeks later, 269 innocents now dead at sea and the Soviets having once again shown that they are one of the most dangerous regimes in history, McGovern was blubbering at his announcement ceremony that the slaughter "underscores the folly of the present cold war tension...
...Yet that is precisely the condition in which many of the liberal brethren find themselves today...
...and were he candid he would be saying that he is for radicalized liberalism...
...I have even met a few who considered politics a high calling...
...Glenn as their 1984 meal ticket...
...George McGovern's very name has served as an eponym for Democratic fanaticism, and for some 20 years he has propounded every left-wing program that does not require acuity and wit...
...Thus it reports almost any feminist shriek as the cry of American womanhood rather than the shriek of a lady liberal...
...They do not want their lives any further politicized and they do not want to carry any heavier tax burdens...
...Even the political advisers to our President remain fooled...
...Have these unedifying results induced our liberals to rethink their magic potions...
Vol. 16 • November 1983 • No. 11
