Editorial/The Race Begins
Tyrrell, R. Emmett Jr.
EDITORIAL THE RACE BEGINS by R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr. I once made bold to say that the present inhabitant of Harding' s bathtub was the most inept man to hold our nation's highest office in this...
...The spectacle of these two Puritanical gasbags struggling for the Democratic presidential nomination might live in the annals of ribaldry for many a moon...
...Of course I, as a child of the liberal enlightenment, am given to more humane and sensitive judgments...
...One really cannot see Reagan feverishly heaving up the grand and imbecilic policies or the ludicrous solemnities of men like Carter and Brown...
...True, he is as short on dignity as he is on clean shirts...
...Remember when he suddenly discovered free Poland...
...His ideas are conservative, yet compared to the zaniness of our last four administrations a Reagan administration is apt to appear more reminiscent of the Kennedy days than anything since...
...What does the Wonderboy lack...
...Postal Service...
...Reagan's gentle smile would be a soporific for all those lunatics amongst the intelligentsia who see dark plots emanating from 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, even during the reign of the buffoon Carter...
...The dimensions and other particulars of Teddy's wall have yet to be unveiled...
...Jimmy grows ever more implausible...
...Reagan is quite possibly the nicest man to run for the Presidency since Al Smith...
...He would make the Department of Energy more expensive and more meddlesome...
...The dollar might sink into the neighborhood of the Italian lira, but it would be worth the plunge...
...His would be a dignified presence and a boring one...
...There is Harold Stassen, a man who elicits laughs from all sides, notwithstanding the fact that his sermons are not markedly dissimilar to those of his colleagues...
...Think of how he would tear into the Democrats' record on inflation: "My administration was the first to resort to Whip Inflation Now buttons and songs and jingles...
...More opportunities to witness his great lumpy brow undulating in cogitation during presidential TV debates would be a wow...
...It is enough to make even the merriest citizen end his laughing and contemplate 1980 with unusual care...
...Be that as it may, I shall now render my final judgment of the 39th President of the United States...
...Having been barred from many of the country clubs of the land, I have always wanted to know more about the arcane sociology of those grassy places, and Jerry's brief Presidency taught me a lot...
...Surely we could coax him into another try...
...Let us bear in mind that if the Constitution provided for presidential terms of six months Jimmy would have left office hailed as the greatest President since FDR-even greater in the judgment of a certain venerable eastern newspaper...
...One sees him late at night forlornly padding the worn carpets of his study in troubled meditation upon the moral colossus that might have been if only Teddy had waited a while longer before reporting his accident or left more people in the car...
...To be sure there would be hijinks and there would be ineptitude, but it would be limited...
...The "capability and calculability" of leadership ir...
...continued on page 23) EDITORIAL (continued from page 5) Senator Baker, well-scrubbed and earnest, would be diverting...
...But all the world knows that he is abundant with ideas and with vision...
...There is also the scowling young governor of California...
...Consequently, the brayings from the press gallery were merciless...
...Professor Schlesinger made this observation in 1970, and as the years pass those memorable hours Teddy spent at xvfartha's Vineyard grow ever more ennobling...
...Yet you can be sure that his wall will embrace the latest technology, and it will surely be more effective in barring greedy marauders', for Teddy's domestic policies would quickly bankrupt the country, leaving very little for marauders to covet...
...To my eyes all Jimmy lacks is dignity, character, vision, ideas, and a short term...
...Yet perhaps-at least in matters of foreign policy-it is no longer prudent for civilized Americans merely to laugh and enjoy the Washington pols' ludicrous performances...
...Two drunken Bryans readings lines from the Marx Brothers could not transcend it...
...He is utterly conventional, good-natured, honest, and bourgeois...
...But the pundits keep pumping life into him, and in this they perform a public service...
...For the amusement of seeing him exchange whoppers with Jimmy I personally would set aside those few worldly pleasures that, after Jimmy's July energy homily, I still allow myself...
...It was during Chappaquiddick, the learned Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., maintains, that "the iron went into Edward Kennedy's soul...
...With him there will be few shrieks and roars of moral indignation...
...Most likely this is why so tiiany of the pundits are now whispering the name of Massachusetts' Singing Bartender...
...Ethelred improved with years...
...Perhaps he has few ideas, but he has enormous dignity and strength of character, matters his supporters are wont to point out, adducing as evidence no less an event' than the agony of Chappaquiddick...
...I once made bold to say that the present inhabitant of Harding' s bathtub was the most inept man to hold our nation's highest office in this century...
...There is John Connally, a kind of gringo Somoza...
...The thing could inspire great literature...
...Think of him extolling the great navigational feats of the Vietnamese boat people and urging the New York Yacht Club to take note...
...The Europeans are alarmed by our leaders' vagaries and apparent ineffectiveness...
...Machiavelli would have regarded Jimmy more charitably...
...Then, too, think of all the candidates with no Chappaquiddick experience whatsoever, men about whose characters we know nothing...
...A Christian Democratic member of the West German parliament, Herr Alois Mertes, spoke for a wide spectrum of Europeans when he said that Mr...
...He is my favorite, and the fact that Betty has taken the cure and now looks like a temptress from the sopho e class of the University of Minnesota's Duluth campujs only confirms my leanings...
...Never in American history would a President's domestic policy have so neatly complemented his foreign policy...
...Imagine him hiding in the White House from what by the 1980s may amount to armies of dissidents, not only from Mother Russia, but from Africa, the Far East, the Middle East, and Latin America...
...Jimmy is the most ill-equipped clod to lead a Christian nation since Ethelred the Unready...
...But what of his ideas...
...The loss will be incalculable...
...Were-Jimmy sitting in Brezhnev's place he would be a force to conjure with, and the laughs'would be muted...
...The reports coming in from Europe claim that our NATO allies are nervous over the instability of American government...
...This singular test of character can be applied to no other potential candidate, a grim thought that must leave a patriot like Professor Schlesinger with much to fret over...
...Ronald Reagan-a very depressing prospect...
...Carter's behavior was "endangering the life" of NATO...
...His character is an impenetrable miasma of Zen-Romanism and California bizarrerie...
...Our European allies might take heart, but I would not...
...That Senator Lowell Weicker's appearance was so brief and quiet was a sad surprise...
...And he would adopt a foreign policy similar to that of the redoubtable Ch'in Dynasty, which, ending years of unnecessary bloodshed, constructed China's Great Wall...
...All three of them are soundly grounded in the past...
...Truth to tell, the ideas are briskly incoherent and the visions slide off toward the hallucinatory...
...Teddy would reorganize our health care system along the tried and true lines of the U.S...
...One sees the Florentine progressive declaring that Jimmy lacks but one thing: a nation of low-grade morons to govern...
...Today our President's reign has 16 months of demented life left in it, and in the Washington press corps there still remain two drunks full of hope...
...But then Aristotle was a, sniffy fellow who, were he upright today, would doubtless be schmoozing with Norman Podhoretz and Irving Kristol...
...Perhaps the grandees of the Supreme Court will make up for it, but I am not optimistic...
...If I have read Aristotle's Politics per-cipiently, the old Greek would merely have said that Jimmy lacks everything and passed on...
...The Republicans too have their worthies...
...Washington are increasingly in doubt, and if the condition persists "the constant insecurities and uncertainties" will imperil the Atlantic alliance...
...And there is the amiable Jerry Ford...
...Yes, the iron-souled Teddy has character and dignity...
...Nevertheless, in the fullness of time I was again stirred by Washington's populist proceedings to issue a judgment: "Harding drunk was more competent than Jimmy sober and full of Vitamin C." This time the pundits put my utterance down as high pasquinade, and continued pondering the bulk and beam of the Wonderboy's politique...
...In the August 1979 Mc-Call's Professor Schlesinger declares that "if Teddy Kennedy were to run, it would make him a better President...
...I tendered this scholarly estimate early in the glad and confident morn of the Wonderboy's reign, at a time when the pundits were still pensive and given to murmuring "enigmatic," "inscrutable," "decent," as Jimmy passed by...
...And I have no doubt that there are dozens of others who will peek out from behind the arras coyly suggesting their supernatural qualities...
...It could turn Mailer into a Cervantes and Heller in a Rabelais, I assure you...
...Still, Teddy is not our only available Messiah...
...Yet the outcome of the Republican festivities is apt to be distressing, for the candidate most likely to walk off with the party's war whoops ringing in his ears is the Hon...
Vol. 12 • September 1979 • No. 9
