VERSE
Neylon, James
many to discern increasing political "independence" on the part of blacks, which, may mean a slide to indifference or a movement to more aggressive single-issue politics outside the major...
...Kansas City in December is its opportunity to redress itself--and, failing this, to suffer at the polls two years hence...
...Also footloose, in terms of political alignment, are many of the 25-million young people who beeame eligible to vote as of two years ago...
...Status-quo political brokers, set in their ways, can't accommodate...
...One example is the "Cheekers" speech of Richard Nixon in 1952, the response to which helped keep him as General Eisenhower's Vice Presidential nominee...
...but not more than it softens and brings the eyes to a pin-fine focus and fills them with the mist of thought...
...It has strummed the voters' aspirations and hopes for far too long, without delivering sufficiently...
...Such concentration moves through confusions of its own undoing head first like a polar icebreaker...
...The appeal of the major parties is now low enough, so the polls report, that there may exist insufficent institutional energy for each to redress itself so as to send strong, appealing signals to voters, whatever their political tendencies...
...Can it be tolerant if it hears no tolerance...
...In one writing of his, he commented: "So long as we lack strong national parties operating as catalysts in the Congress, the Executive Branch and the national government as a whole, and between the national government and state and local governments, power will continue to be dangerously diffused---or, perhaps what is worse, will whip-saw between diffusion and Presidential dictatorship...
...Republican and Democratic parties have shown some effort to bring to their conventions other than professional pols and their acolytes...
...After tracking America, Bill Moyers asked: "Can the country be wise if it hears no wisdom...
...SISYPHUS 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 000 JAMES NEYLON DEEP THINKER Whether the head fills the tooth with an ache, or the tooth fills the head, the thought of pain throbs and waters the mouth until speech is slurred and pain is thought to be wet and is not felt to be thought, but is a mental jaw breaker the tongue works in the cave of the mind...
...The wilder the delegate the more spectacular the interview...
...Are we due for more drift...
...They've more thoroughly reformed their delegate-selection process and their convention procedures---although Bourbon Democrats, through their cover group, the Coalition for a Democratic Majority (CDM), are persistently seeking to roll-back those accomplishments...
...A new national party with constructive aims to speak fiercely to the issues of income-redistribution, sanity in foreign policy and decent minimum shelters of healthcare...
...In addition, nearly half their elders have told pollsters that they have become "independents," although that is not a sufficiently precise term upon which to suggest their potential political conduct and attitudes...
...Another factor has altered, if not loosened, party affiliation: television...
...Another example is that of television reporters' being able to freely walk around convention halls interviewing delegates to Presidential nominating conventions...
...In the Sixties, Stephen Bailey observed that the closer one gets to national political parties the harder it is to see them...
...It has traded on its New Deal reputation for far too long...
...A re-alignment of parties...
...28 June 1974:350...
...The needs are there for such a responsive new party...
...A bitter clash over party policy and attitudes will be fought this December when a "mid-term" convention will be held at Kansas City, Mo...
...It has at times by-passed and at times overwhelmed conventional political communication between leaders and voters...
...And it becomes the purest preoccupation...
...Apathy toward the current crop of potential Presidential nominees of both parties reflects this...
...The problem of an ineffective political-party system persists, while an urgency for change grows...
...The Democrats have been more responsive in trying to drain off dissatisfaction...
...Can the people I met escape their isolation, if no one listens...
...Its grey-flannel, middle-class perspective does not appear to include within its ambit tough issues such as maldistribution of wealth, substantial tax reform and other bread-and-butter issues...
...many to discern increasing political "independence" on the part of blacks, which, may mean a slide to indifference or a movement to more aggressive single-issue politics outside the major parties, although Charles Evers discounts this...
...The nation asks to be spoken to, not simply by isolated individuals but by those with organizations capable of delivering on the fine words...
...Nevertheless, political parties find themselves without much traction on a slippery slope...
...The Democratic party is specially accountable...
...It was unfathomable to him that people want not only a piece of the pie--"serving docility with the doughnuts"--but also a piece of the action...
...One goes in there like entering an iceberg to trap seals when one has no need of sealskins or furs, when there is no iceberg and are no seals, when one cannot even imagine these existing not even as metaphysicals...
...Lyndon Johnson found many Democrats unappreciative of his accomplishments in the field of domestic legislation...
...Common Cause, perhaps the major new non-partisan grouping of citizens, appears not completely adequate...
Vol. 100 • June 1974 • No. 15
