EDITORIAL
THE DEMOCRATIC TICKET For Jimmy Carter, the once lonesome runner, the race is won-and begun all over again. The Democratic party's most orderly and anti-climactic national convention since perhaps...
...One of the nation's ablest senators, Mondale has solid liberal credentials in those areas of legislative and social concern that have been announced as principal objectives of a Carter presidency, such as tax reform, a national health plan, welfare reform and government reorganization...
...Indeed, Mondale's strengths so complement Carter's weaknesses, especially with respect to positionings, that it is surprising there could have been so much speculation, once the field had been narrowed, on whom Carter would settle...
...In this context, one breathes easier that Carter did not round out the ticket with Senator Jackson...
...There will be backlashes to the choice of Mondale, but it was an honest and good one...
...In selecting Senator Walter Mondale of Minnesota as his vice-presidential running mate, Jimmy Carter has tapped the strength of his Democratic possibilities, and produced for the Democratic party a strong, attractive ticket...
...Carter and Mondale have their work cut out for them, in more ways than one...
...They can seek more mileage from the evangelistic pieties that struck such responsive chords among people during the Carter primaries...
...Messrs...
...Similarily, it is wise that Carter did not go to Senator Muskie, although, with the exception of Senator Church, there was more to commend him than any of the other also-rans...
...Yet, to the extent that there is a hard-core Catholic anti-abortionist vote, it is doubtful that Muskie could deliver it, so intransigent and impossible in a pluralistic society are the demands of this bloc...
...More particularly, the Mondale record is extensive and measurable-in ways that Carter's is not-and accordingly provides reassurance, for those for whom Carter remains something of an enigma, that the Carter ideological thrusts are basically liberal, some conservative leanings notwithstanding, and that there is not likely to be any contrived gap between the promises of the campaign and the agendas of a Carter administration...
...The Democratic party's most orderly and anti-climactic national convention since perhaps the Franklin Roosevelt renominations has produced for him the goal of his 19-month striving . . . and a running mate...
...Carter and Mondale can run against the ghosts of Republican pasts, reel off the travesties of Republicans current, and titillate millions in the process, as the Democratic conventioneers were themselves titillated by Watergate and Nixon-Ford references...
...A Muskie choice would have been made, presumably, out of consideration for the Catholic vote-or, more specifically, the Catholic anti-abortion vote, as if there were no appreciable numbers of anti-abortionists of other persuasions...
...Now it is up to the two of them, Carter and Mondale, to take the skeletons of promise and flesh out the details of program that will persuade the electorate that the answers to the challenges facing the country rest best with a progressive Democratic administration...
...The chase now is after the presidency itself, over a course by which the primaries are almost certain to seem a lope...
...it could have been a disastrous choice for it could have bespoken a continuity with the fire-and-brimstone foreign policies of recent decades...
...Even broadening the "Catholic" considerations, Carter would have been making a useless gesture in choosing Muskie...
...One of the most disconcerting happenings of Democratic Convention week was the drubbing that convention events received in television ratings when up against the All-Star baseball game...
...But it is in the substance of program that victory is to be gained-that, and the awakening of the electorate to the importance of the presidential election process for each of them individually...
Vol. 103 • July 1976 • No. 16
