EDITORIAL
THE ELECTION As the presidential campaign winds down to its final days, it must be said that Eugene McCarthy loses none of his attractiveness. He can be accused, as he is by some, of ego-tripping....
...We like Carter's promise of toughness of controls...
...With six nations already in the nuclear arms race, and with some twenty more capable of nuclear development, a strict nuclear-export policy is closely linked to the survival of civilization as the world knows it...
...He remains, however, a wise and witty politician with unique Christian and democratic insights into the problems of weapons, social reform, health care, unemployment, even that pestilential appendage to American life-the automobile...
...If the Democratic party of which he is now the leader is true to itself, and if Carter exemplifies its best social and political ideals, he should represent an improvement over what the country has at present...
...However real or unreal his chances of election, McCarthy would certainly have had something worthwhile to say to an audience which theoretically shares concern over the moral and social emphases of the country...
...By every measurement, the Republican party remains the party of vested interests...
...We would like to think that Jimmy Carter would be a completely different president than Gerald Ford has been, and for this reason we lean to him...
...One thinks especially of his determination to regulate sales abroad of nuclear components so that these cannot be converted to weapons' usages...
...As this editorial is written, for instance, it is not at all certain that McCarthy can get on the ballot in enough states with sufficient electoral votes to make him president, even if he swept every one of those states...
...Gerald Ford, by the same token, is less a leader than a functionary of almost caricature proportions...
...Our tilt is to Jimmy Carter and the Democratic party, despite the blatant and unsettling Carter demagoguery of the second presidential debate...
...If these have not always translated effectively to program outline, they are at least indicative of his instincts for action, and they relate infinitely more to the common good than anything being articulated by Ford and the Republican party...
...If, at the same time, these hopes are disappointed- if Carter does give the country more of the same, or, God forbid, less-then the electorate may have no alternative but to look to the cracking of the monopoly of the political system by two parties, -so that third-party possibilities, such as that broached this election by Eugene McCarthy, will no longer be visionary or impractical...
...It is regrettable, for instance, that the National Conference of Catholic Charities-which was so anxious to get Ford and Carter to its convention in Denver, succeeding in the case of Carter -should have rejected McCarthy as a speaker...
...But when all is totaled up, probably what attracts us most towards Carter is the fact that he would arrive in the White House unfettered by so many of the strings, visible and invisible, that tie a president to a pre-deter-mined set of circumstances, loyalties, traditions, or mean political obligations...
...As a long-shot winner, and as a person from a new political current, far removed from the mainstream, Carter would come to Washington with fewer "beholdens" than any president in recent American history, and therefore would presumably be freer to proceed about the reforms sketched in his campaign...
...But it assuredly made itself seem such in shutting its doors to McCarthy...
...He can be faulted for his political idiosyncrasies, of which he surely has his share...
...But on some very crucial points, change is promised, and on these it is possible to build some hope in a Carter presidency...
...The so-called two-party system amounts virtually to a political monopoly-to such an extent, in fact, that almost any third-party challenge is rendered quixotic, including, we hate to admit, McCarthy's...
...He was likewise denied hearings in forums that should have welcomed his availability...
...Ford's reluctant handling-of the most recent controversy surrounding the Secretary of Agriculture, now ex-, was only barely less offensive than the obscene and scatological remarks that made Bute's continuation in the Cabinet unthinkable...
...It is not as if the National Conference of Catholic £harities were some closed quasi-political organization, like the League of Women Voters...
...He was unfairly blocked out of the presidential debates, which he would have won hands-down...
...Thus, though Commonweal is anxious to present the case for McCarthy, and does so with Reed Whittemare's article elsewhere in this issue, at the same time we are forced by the mathematical pragmatics of his situation to look in another direction for the candidate we prefer in the upcoming election...
...Sorry as that was, the Denver rebuff did however point up the difficulties a serious independent third-party presidential candidate has in the United States...
...Still, there are things over which one can be enthusiastic, beginning with the deep wells of compassion in the man...
...Unfortunately, Eugene McCarthy has not received a satisfactory heating in this campaign...
...The proof was in the pudding named Earl Butz...
...We would be less than candid if we did not say that part of this tilt towards Carter is due to the alternative to his election...
...On certain aspects of foreign policy he was shallow and chauvinistic...
...Besides, for all the talk about his alleged "decency," this "decency" is a quality reserved for the club, not the country...
...In several areas of foreign policy, it is still to be demonstrated that the Carter course will be markedly different from that of a succession of administrations...
Vol. 103 • October 1976 • No. 22
