THE CASE FOR McCARTHY
Whittemore, Reed
THE CASE FOB McCARTHY REED WHITTEMORE A protest against the freezing of the election process With the election little more than a month away as this is written, Eugene McCarthy does not yet know...
...He argues that Ford and Carter are essentially Tweedledum and Tweedledee...
...We still have for instance a Senate so fearful for American security that they will vote for almost anything the Pentagon sends over...
...He is an institutional man at heart, searching for ways of restoring institutional integrity to a variety of governmental institutions in' eluding the Senate...
...How strange a campaign his is, where winning is so defined...
...So it is on the simple issue of the importance of independent candidates that McCarthy is making his big stand, and he is certainly showing his own character as he does so...
...In other words he is still on his 1968 tack, still going after what took him into New Hampshire...
...All year he has been fighting that 'law,' which has emerged to frustrate him at both the state and federal levels...
...His jokes about the first Ford-Carter debate were as good as any...
...On health: "I've been for national health insurance since 1948," but "what we ought to be advocating now, what we could get, in my opinion, would be a national health program for what's called major medical expenses . . . and work out the other problems somewhat more closely within the context of medical practice and medical insurance such as we now have...
...For all of them McCarthy is a monkey wrench in the works-and is frequently described as that...
...On amnesty: he thinks we should have it, arid have it now...
...Indeed he attributes the mess we are in to the failure of the various parts of the government to properly assume the powers they were invested with, a failure that has left us with either no rule or with rule by the wrong parties...
...On abortion: "the government should remain neutral on the question of abortion . . . except within the limits of the 1973 Supreme Court Decision...
...He thinks it's a good kite too, and he may be right...
...We kept needing basic political decisions but getting instead military temporizing...
...He described that issue recently (to Washington Star reporter Lyle Denniston) as a freezing of the election process by the Democrats and Republicans...
...The restoration of institutional integrity in a governmental complex that has lost its bearings is hardly a radical aim, but it seems radical now, seems radical, that is, in a political climate where the various consensus forces assumed command from the institutions...
...And since 70-80 percent of the control of our economy is through corporations, the time has come for us to look at the way the corporations are directing the economy of the country...
...We are way behind the Indians of the Amazon in blow-guns and poison darts...
...The alien element would take votes away from nobody but bring out voters who would otherwise stay home...
...And he believes that we are still getting the latter...
...He said that it was "like a bad baseball game when the lights went out in the seventh inning and everybody went home...
...And if by some chance he were to become president he would have a go at restoring the institutional properties of the presidency as well, a job that would involve weakening that office in the sense of recognizing the limits of that office's power (his modern hero here is Harry Truman, the one who of all recent presidents had, he says, the "purest concept" of his responsibility to the office itself...
...Policy has become an emanation of that curious modern phenomenon, consensus, and when the emanation is busy emanating there is little to be done by either party but to think up clever tactical ploys to earn its allegiance...
...The question of abortion is essentially one for the individual's moral decision...
...On corporations: "The time has come for us to raise some questions about how the economy is operating...
...THE CASE FOB McCARTHY REED WHITTEMORE A protest against the freezing of the election process With the election little more than a month away as this is written, Eugene McCarthy does not yet know how many states will have him on their ballots but expects to make it in 35-40...
...He might change our political life...
...He has a number of illustrations of the Ford-Carter uniformity, but his chief one is their uniform docility about American militarism...
...How great is his commitment to his strange campaign...
...It acted as it acted, he thinks, because it was not given reason to suppose that anyone else would point to "a clear political direction...
...It says, 'We will forget and not bold anyone responsible, those who acted on one side or the other...
...and added that when the sound went off he hardly noticed...
...The Power Experts He might have added that the tendency to think exclusively in power terms, and then to turn to power experts for advice, is also the primary mode of thought of the two-party apologists he is up against right now...
...On unemployment: "We should redistribute the work by shortening the work day, week or year by roughly seven percent...
...Looking back on Vietnam he does not blame the military, or the military only, for gathering power unto itself...
...The Senators are so full, he says, of security hang-ups that he doesn't even like to mention weapons gaps in their presence, lest they rush through legislation to close them...
...A strong independent might change all that, or so McCarthy thinks, and if he could effect such a change he would hardly be the negative force in the election he is now commonly accused of being...
...All of them are, in belief and practice, dedicated temporizers, students of the expedient of such an earnestness that they have ceased to imagine any other form of political thought or action...
...On poverty: "The time has come for us to acknowledge that we have let poverty become an institution in this country . . . there will not be nearly enough jobs available until we redistribute work by shortening the work week . . . and we must provide adequate income support for poor people who cannot work-including mothers who are heads of households but cannot work because they must care for young children...
...That's essentially what we did when we passed the 40-hour work week and eight-hour day during the Depression...
...The two-party system is run by arithmetic now rather than by ideological difference...
...In other words, I don't favor, on practical grounds, the so-called total health insurance program which is now being talked about...
...His stand on particular issues is thus not nearly as important to him as his feeling that the appropriate institutions have an obligation to think their way to stands, and because he places the emphasis there he is frequently accused of not facing up to issues himself...
...Moreover we are short of catapults, crossbows, pikes, shields, cauldrons for boiling oil...
...The two parties," he said, "have formalized the two-party system into law...
...Perhaps in the last weeks he will be able to shift his energies to other issues, but the main issue of the campaign for him will clearly remain what it has been...
...The worst welfare proposals are those which try to force mothers of young children to leave their homes and take jobs...
...Nobody thinks policy...
...He compares the situation during that war to that of "clergy who are trying to operate without theology," and he says that it was this vacuum at the top that led us through the war's tragic series of posturings, from simply trying to stabilize the government of South Vietnam, to preventing invasion from the north, to saving "all of Southeast Asia from Communism," to preserving "our national honor, and the future of the free world...
...But McCarthy contends that they are not...
...The Defense Department," he says, "has become the strongest independent power in world affairs," and it is independent because its "actions are to a large extent beyond the effective control of Congress...
...He might have added that the 'law' is not only on the books of the various governments but also in the minds of the party hacks and of the journalists reporting on the campaigns, who have all frozen up on the subject, believing firmly that two parties are God's plenty and that threats to their dominance endanger national stability...
...but now his sentiments are hardly those of an ex-kitist...
...In 1968 after the debacle he wanted out, and he even wrote a poem to that effect about a kite flier who was letting go of the line...
...The foreign-policy tendency of both parties is, as he puts it in his recent book The Hard Years, "to look at political problems in military terms," with the result that both parties turn over decision-making powers to the Pentagon that should not rest there...
...But for what it's worth his stands on some of the recent issues (those not yet mentioned) have been recently expressed as follows...
...Basic to that is the need to raise the issue of moral and political and social responsibilities of corporate power...
...Whether the consensus is worth listening to, or whether it is being accurately represented by the polls and the media (or worse, whether the polls and the media are delivering the consensus)-these are matters that simply don't come up...
...The Vietnam war was run that way too...
...We could have done it if we'd started with it back in 1948...
...McCarthy wants to know whom a voter can vote for in the two parties who has any interest in changing that arrangement...
...Just as the military has taken over in foreign affairs because the Congress and the Executive have failed to do so, so the courts have taken over in the matter of busing because the Congress has been unable to enact appropriate legislation, the sales tax motif (essentially, taxation of the poor) has taken over our tax system because the Income Tax as now writ is legislation by lobby rather than by Congress, the automobile has been allowed "to consume our environment" because nobody but the automobile and oil people are in charge of it-and so on...
...CM course the arguments in favor of the two-party system are many, mighty and, by now, antique, and it would be a shame to disturb them if the two parties were performing their proper theoretical role of providing voters with serious choices...
...Particularly if California and New York should be "won"-among those that are still possible-he would at this date be reasonably content...
...His former Senatorial colleagues mostly think of him as so independent as to be out of politics altogether, and it is true that he has no love for them...
...He thinks that only by introducing an alien element to the frozen election can November 2 be made a day worth getting up for...
...and I think it's amnesty-not pardon...
...Even the Republicans, though they can imagine him weakening Carter as he is assumed (Continued on page 691) to have weakened Humphrey in 1968, are not happy at the thought of a serious independent...
...it has long standing...
...By them the two-party system is inevitably justified as the way to prevent fragmentation of power, and the justification serves to make the gaining or keeping of power the main party industry...
...Yet essentially what he is standing for is thoroughly mainline...
...Policy-makers are no more needed for such ploys than they are needed for adding up a Defense Department budget...
...As a result the basic matters of political direction are always put into the hands of pollsters and the like...
...He is flying his kite hard, and every time the unfriendly press suggests that he should want out, he just flies the kite harder...
...I mean, amnesty is a good word...
...Instead he 1 would be the one putting our election machine back on the right track, demanding of politicians that they speak their minds...
...An independent is politically unAmerican somehow...
Vol. 103 • October 1976 • No. 22
