Editorial

...By that time, last fall, when the New York Times deemed it inadvisable for the President to leave the White House and felonious for him to show his face in California, America had lost much of its old brag and bounce...

...Morale had sunk to its lowest level since the Depression, and there it remains...

...They would with laughter the minute the election turns were in...

...It is hard to say which party is more vacant of ideas, principles, or dramatis personae...

...Unfortunately, we can expect little assistance from any quarter other than the political nowadays, for as government has intruded into every aspect of American life, politicians have pre-empted all other notables as sources of amusement, interest, inspiration, or even strength...

...And once we have foul candidate with the chemistry of the foon, what if he becomes coy about er ing the race...

...rolled in...

...What Americans must work for today is the election of a genuine and conscious clown...

...Instead we should work to elect a new kind of President, a President capable of ministering to our national drear...

...He is 45 years old, a nember of the Unitarian-Universalist Church, a failed trailer camp magnate, and when he married he took Miss Fur Rendezvous of 1958 for his lawful wedded wife...

...He is the clown who should be President, and if we can ever discover who that Congressman is who sat through his moronic readings, I believe we shall have our nominee for the Vice Presidency...

...In 1972 he actually ran for the Vice Presiiency, and made an incomparable aughingstock of himself by commandeerng the podium at the Democratic Conrention and earnestly seconding himself n the most ridiculous speech ever heard m prime-time national television...

...Yet Lizzie edified the national conscience for years while poor Richard was good for but a few months before being rudely elbowed off the stage by herds of politicians, all sweating to save us from reality and to arrogate a little more authority and a lot more loot...

...Doubtless all will perform prodi but I suspect that one in particular wi tract a larger, merrier constituency the rest...

...put wings to our spirits it will almost have to be a politician, and he most probably will have to be running for the Presidency—so statist has our society become...

...Ser Charles Mathias raised chickens in hi flee and the press corps ignored Senator Lowell Weicker's daily n dramas go unremarked...

...His campaign elicited many har bars, but it ended as all good things do, and soon we were wincing through the lurid spectacle of Watergate, the economic swoon, Mr...

...The fact that Richard Nixon is again playing golf and tantalizing us with the prospect of further personal contributions to the commonweal only adds anxiety to our drear...

...One looks wistfully to the glory days of the Know-Nothings...

...It seems to me that answers suggest themselves almost fore the questions have been as Where to find a clown with the n identification to run for high office...

...Such notifications sadden us, and not even the profundities enunciated by the public-spirited Betty Ford are apt to cheer us up...

...A conscious clown we feel no embarrassment as the heeh...

...Consider Milton Shapp...

...Never again would voters fer an agonized period of indecision ( the propriety of laughing out loud at State of the Union message...

...Four more years of j erry Ford are certainly not going to raise our morale, and the vision of almost any of the Democratic hopefuls in the White House is a vision of Hell...

...They would laugh ashamedly right down to their lead last gaffe in office...

...There is nothing in this tale to gladden the spirit...

...Obviously no Hollywood personage, no athlete, no adventurer, tycoon, evangelist, or nationally acclaimed murderer can compete for attention with the politicians—the cards are stacked against him...

...The Republicans offer us no politics at all...

...No longer should we dream of palmy days presided over by a great man in the White House or even a prudent man, No such creatures are at hand...

...He is also a man of compassion and vision whose imaginative conscience made him an instant celebrity when on the evening of June 29, 1971 he sat in the Capitol and blubbered through a public reading of the purloined Pentagon Papers...

...The Man Who Should Be President From the politicians and the pundits one gets the sense that America is the most ignorant, inept, belligerent, hypocritical, and niggardly nation on earth...

...he began to sense that even his friends were playing him the fool, and it was too much for him...

...The old enthusi for today and tomorrow would return But, one asks, what national figut possessed of the requisite talents for 5 a campaign...

...Lizzie Borden's butcherings were comparative misdemeanors when placed alongside the ghastly achievements of Richard Speck or of Elmer Wayne Henley...

...Harding was, of course, a clown, but few Americans realized this even while he was launching those tortured sonorities from his front porch back in Marion...

...We felt drear in the 1960s but the abominations of the 1970s leave the 1960s looking blithesome and elegant...

...When, at 1:00 a.m., he admitted to being "physically incapable of continuing any longer," his uneasy aides rushed him from the scene as though he were a dead fish left too long in the sun...

...I speak of Maurice Robert (Mike) Gravel (pronounced, gruh-Vel...

...So it seems to me that if we are to get over the mulligrubs, Americans must embrace an entirely different concept in Presidential leadership...

...He is hardly new to national politics...

...Tears streaked his handsome face, he paused occasionally to interject public declarations of Angst to a tiny audience composed of agape newsmen and one mesmerized Congressman all sitting in the chamber of the—brace yourself—Senate Subcommittee on Capitol Buildings and Grounds...

...Today, Lindbergh would be but one more forgotten astronaut, Edison would be lost from sight in the vastness of IBM, and Valentino would be just another Hollywood notable urgently exposing his pudenda in a vain attempt to grasp lasting renown from the whirl of modern events...

...5. reid, pronounce that what America n and wants is a deeply committed clove President, and every fool on the Hill be disclaiming his Presidential ambi and otherwise making the idiotic tacle of himself that Presidential c: dacy demands...

...But then at midterm he paused and heard chortles from the sidelines...

...He is a liberal, an advocate of peace, and—except for his marriage to Miss Fur Rendezvous of 1958—he is in good odor on the environment issue...

...The Democrats promise us a politics that is sensuous and juvenile...

...United States Senate abounds with characters, and connoisseurs of ridiculous who are not fetched by floppy-shoed clarabelles of the Se can turn to the House of Representa: for an even richer deposit of absur Once one considers those juggling b ing pins in the Senate and those disj ing with animal bladders in the He the second question is easily dispatc The clowns of Capitol Hill are jus ravenously ambitious as the other po residence there...

...Agreed, his aides are a humorless bunch, but he is a wonderful clown...

...Consider "Mo" Udall...

...Think this over, and when you hear Senator Gravel disclaiming any interest whatsoever in 1976, sit back and enjoy...

...Consider Fred Harris, -solemnly bribing his oddball supporters with promises of an overnight stay in the White House...

...It is just that until no one has ever boomed arrant clow, ness as a political attribute...

...Alas, not one of the likely candidates for the 1976 Presidential election possesses the arcane formula to engage our attentions and to send spirits soaring...

...How different it would be with a c scious clown...

...Something must be done to bring back the smiling, enthusiastic Yank of yesteryear...

...Our most industrious killers do not even interest us for long...

...His campaign and subset Administration will be certain to do us from the mulligrubs, and at the whiff of interest he will be off (continued on page 39) 4 The Alternative: An American Spectator March EDITORIAL (continued from page 4) running and filling the nation with merrinent...

...be Alternative: An American-Spectator March 1976 39...

...Government is where the celebrity is, and if anyone is going to attract our attention and...

...Taking the candidates, announced and unannounced, as an aggregate, it is my measured opinion that they are the most moth-eaten crowd since the days of Reconstruction...

...The whole campaign would be sleep-inducing were its cast not so insipidly asinine...

...They Ix( not feel stunned by or indignant Presidential high jinks...

...He s possibly the Senate's staunchest sup>orter of transcendental meditation and le authored Senate Resolution 64 "to ncrease public awareness of trans:endental meditation" and to make the .econd week of November "World Plan Week—U.S.A...

...These are gloomy times, and it is to Senator George McGovern's enduring credit that he devoted most of 1972 to crisscrossing the country, attempting to restore the horse laugh to its former eminence...

...to the contrary, he would the flush of accomplishment and striv new heights—perhaps a round of culn exchanges between the United States Idi Amin's Uganda, perhaps a natic prohibition against the villainous c rette, perhaps a toney uniform for President...

...During his early years in office he was full of high purpose and played the Presidential 'role with great assiduity...

...Nixon's shabby exit, and the ultimate discrediting of what the profs had long ago christened the "discredited domino theory...

...Consider Stanley Arnold...

...The national mo would be lofty again...

...Let one of th tellectuals of the Potomac, say Dr...

...He akes pride in being the first Senator ever o have placed himself under the myserious needles of the acupuncturist...

...According to the current wisdom, America has become a veritable melting pot of atrocities, and, at least for those Ametican's who do not subscribe to the New York Review of Books, these are not Glad Tidings...

...Agreed, in the past we have raised a clown or two to the White House, but always to our surprise and often to the surprise of the President-elect...

...He went to San Francisco and died, a clown with a broken heart...