CAMPAIGN '76-CRISIS AHEAD

...Having set back Republican growth in the South, why should Carter create problems for himself by upsetting genuine conservatives of both parties...

...As a Nixon lieutenant, Ford was not anxious to discuss Watergate but Carter also had surprisingly little to say about it...

...Other significant indicators of the malfunctioning of the party system could be cited but even these few suggest that something has gone awry...

...The Turned-Off: a different category than the undecided...

...Please note: I am concerned only with national, not state or local, politics...

...Admittedly the circumstances were special: a non-elected incumbent President pitted against a relatively unknown politician from a Southern state...

...A slicker product would have been less convincing, I wish him well...

...Primaries have become media events...

...Nowadays the networks commission polls and then tell us what the polls mean and the polls do not always raise issues in a meaningful way...

...But the fact that the better choice was made under these circumstances should not blind us to the dimensions of the crisis that confronts the American political system, a crisis which this election has not resolved...

...both are heavy arms-spending advocates...

...With Reaganites in control of the national apparatus of the G.O.P...

...None of the Above" would probably elicit an "X" from most of them or, as Thomas Bailey, emeritus professor of History at Stanford said of this year's two major party nominees: "I hope they both lose...

...His concession statement to Carter was gracious and moving...

...In the fall of 1951 President Truman delivered an address to mark the opening of the first transcontinental nationwide telecast via the newly installed network of 107 microwave relay towers...

...Both Ford and Carter supported the war in Vietnam...

...The existence of such special constituencies creates difficulties for responsible politicians and makes it hard to build broad coalitions aimed at carrying out integrated programs for reform...

...The personal qualities of a candidate are stressed in a manner that has become both absurd and humiliating...

...Even more distressing, neither candidate seemed willing or capable of presenting a coherent statement of what he thought the United States should be doing in the world in the last quarter of this century...

...The novelist Walker Percy put it this way: "We've come to the end of an age and don't know it, and entered a new age and don't understand it...

...it was time that a Southerner of Carter's persuasion-that is, a "liberal" on the racial issue-should occupy the White House...

...Did "Scoop" Jackson manage to look less grim after that operation on a drooping eyelid...

...Sheldon Wolin, the Princeton political scientist, offers this comment: "We have moved from a society of free choice and opportunity to a society shaped by necessity...

...When Carter got 23 percent of the vote in the Iowa primary he became the front runner because the media said he was the front runner, whereas Jackson's strong showing in Massachusetts was dismissed as meaningless...

...Three brief quotes suggest the odd position in which we find ourselves at the moment...

...It is also possible that organized labor may regain some of its old social idealism but there are only a few such signs at the moment...

...Of course Woodrow Wilson was of the South but Carter is certifiably Southern in every respect: a peanut farmer from Georgia with the accent, manners, and style of a Southern gentleman...

...Campaign schedules are dictated by television requirements...

...In 1964, 77 percent expressed a fairly strong sense of identification with one or the other of the two major parties...

...Manipulation The real difficulty with the parties, however, is that the party system has become, to a degree that was not true in the past, a mechanism for manipulating the consent of the electorate rather than investing government with legitimacy by expressing popular discontents...

...Just when such a movement will emerge it is difficult to say but it must, sooner or later, and there are signs that one may be shaping up for the near future...

...This year we observed--without much awareness of the significance-the twenty-fifth anniversary of the advent of network television in national politics...

...How often, for example, have questions about arms cuts been linked with non-defense spending for social purposes...

...No doubt Watergate and Vietnam deepened this feeling but there was evidence of rot in the system at an earlier date...

...On arms spending, Carter did advocate some cuts while Ford wanted more funds appropriated but the difference was one of emphasis rather than substance...

...Parties do have their uses and one of them is to control politicians...

...Voters, as James M. Naughton notes (New York Times Nov...

...The rhetoric under this heading was not only stale, trite and dreary but at an intellectual level that suggested try-outs for a high school debate...

...by 1974 the figure had dropped to 64 percent or less Some 57 percent, by one poll, believe that big business dominates both parties...

...In the process we have created the dangerous possibility that an individual with enough money-now that we limit campaign contributions- just might stampede the national electorate with consequences that could be dangerous...

...but what we have won is a reprieve, not a rebirth of freedom...

...Of the votes cast, Nixon got 31 percent, McGovern 21 percent, but 45 percent of the electorate did not vote...

...In part the malfunctioning of the political system is due to the fact that we are at the moment between generations...

...Jack Nelson of the Los Angeles Times asked the only questions at the televised "debates" aimed at testing the commitment of Ford and Carter to civil liberties and finding out what criteria they would use in making nominations to the Supreme Court...

...In effect the parties have became agencies designed to suppress and regulate politics, a means of governing the governed rather than representing them...

...Dropouts: Between 1962 and 1973 slightly more than 10 million voters exited from the two major parties...

...Nationally the center or conse-vative position has tended to prevail in American politics except at critical intervals when revitalization has been achieved through a significant realignment of the kind that surfaced with the New Deal...

...A last minute flurry of interest created the impression of a "surprising" turn-out on November 2nd but the fact is that the number of persons eligible to vote who actually voted was only two or three percentage points higher than the 51 percent of 1948, the lowest turnout of recent times (Richard D. Lyons, New York Times...

...Candidates practice gestures before mirrors...

...Elected by a thin margin of support, Carter will not be in a position as Roosevelt was in 1932 to push through a strong reform program...

...A friend of mine once said that sincerity like virtue is one of the arts...

...Nor did they have much to say about Watergate and the cluster of issues it represents...

...So the easy explanations of dissatisfaction and distrust are not satisfactory...

...Even so the electorate made the better choice despite a wretched campaign and for this we should be thankful...

...New Hampshire was not that important but as one commentator put it, it received intensive coverage because it was "first," "cover-able," that is, a small state in area, and "colorful...

...Yet in 1972 only 2 percent of network news dealt with issues...

...at times he acted as though he had not read the platform...

...He is indeed "a good and decent" man and unlike most politicians he projects an image which is unmistakably the man...

...Also we are between eras-"between worlds"-just as we are between generations...

...Television, we are told, is a great "revealer...

...Today's dissatisfaction and distrust reflect a growing public concern, not apathy or boredom per se...

...Neither candidate had much to say about corporate corruption, an issue of perhaps greater long-term significance than the Watergate scandals...

...In the first place, the disaffection they reveal is not to be explained, as so much of the commentary suggests, as a reaction to the debacle in Vietnam and the Watergate scandals...

...What, then, is the evidence that such a crisis exists...

...We have many young activists working with environmental and other groups, including Nader task forces, and legal assistance projects...

...Nowadays 65 percent of the public gets most of its news via the networks but, more important, an estimated 36 percent rely entirely on the tube...

...As history's spoiled children, we find it difficult to confront this new situation...

...And he deserves our thanks: he performed fairly well in a difficult situation in which his bumbling manner and lack of finesse may have helped...

...It thus removed a Democratic Senator, with some seniority, who would have been in a position to aid the state in many ways through entry at the White House and influence in Congress...

...the critical sense is exceptionally strong...

...As a postscript I would like to tip my hat in the direction of President Ford...

...Their handlers replay network programs of the day's campaigning the better to make adjustments in appearance, voice, gestures and mannerisms of their candidates...

...And with candidates relying increasingly on polk-as they have done since 1960-we, have spawned a generation of political "popularizers," not Populists, who strive frantically to project the kind of image they are told will win the most votes...

...On the eve of the November 2nd election it would seem, from some of the polls, that 1 out of every 5 voters felt some measure of indecision...

...Cross-Overs: A very high percentage of voters, particularly in the 18-34 age category, are largely indifferent to party labels, which is far from being a sign of good health for the political system...

...For the moment the "old" generation, implicated in Watergate, Vietnam and the Cold War on a bipartisan basis, is still in power, but not for long...

...President Ford was baited a bit about his golfing weekends but neither he or his challenger had anything to say about corporate bribes, illegal campaign contributions, rip-offs and payoffs to procurement agents which now total more than $10 billion annually...

...In Concord, New Hampshire, at one of his meetings, network personnel constituted a third of the audience...

...Without a major restructuring of power, the Democrats under Carter will find it difficult to accomplish even his limited stated objectives...

...A new post-Watergate, post-Vietnam generation is emerging but it has not yet come to power...

...Just as it was high time in 1960 that a Catholic who had the necessary qualifications should occupy the White House, so symbolically the time had come for a Deep South candidate capable of winning the Black vote from coast to coast by a 5 to 1 margin, to hold the office...

...Before turning to causes, two points should be made about the significance of the indicators cited above...

...Dixie" may not be played at the inaugural but the strains echoed clear and loud in the wake of the election...

...Ford accepted a platform eve-y plank of which was dictated by the right or Reagan wing of the party and selected as a running mate a man know a to be acceptable to these elements...

...There are the jobless...

...The campaign is what gets on the tube, or, as Peter Sourian has noted, we now watch TV watching politics almost as much as we watch the events...

...As the vote shows, he commands the loyalty of virtually the entire South and border states (nowadays Virginia and Oklahoma are not typical of the Southern or border states), including such deviant entities as Florida and Texas, and the Old South-Deep South enclaves of South Carolina, Louisiana, and Mississippi...

...I shall mention only a few...

...Now that the Democrats control the Executive as well as the Congress they can in theory initiate and implement reform programs, but will they...

...Under the circumstances this is a minor miracle...

...It won't do to say that "inflation" and "jobs," "foreign policy" and the "economy" were the key issues and that they were discussed...

...CAMPAIGN 76-CRISIS AHEAD CAREY McWILLIAMS A crisis of confidence, of credibility, of legitimacy Glorious it would have been if these United States had experienced a rebirth of freedom in the Bicentennial election of 1976...

...But some negative conclusions are justified...

...It is estimated that half of the Democrats are activists and issue-oriented...

...So even if Carter received a lesser percentage of the Black vote nationally than either McGovern or Humphrey, he is more beholden to this constituency than to any other which is, in itself, a good omen for significant improvement in the area of civil rights...

...the whole social and cultural scene has changed...

...after the primaries he began to campaign as a pseudo-regular Democrat but with only qualified success...

...We really do not know, with any certainty, what the President-elect will do or what kind of President he will make but he was the better choice in an election in which there was no "best...

...But for the time being, the crisis continues, it has not been resolved and it will get worse before we experience the next big upheaval which is so clearly foreseeable...

...But just as we could not celebrate the Bicentennial with unfettered exuberance-Watergate and Vietnam had cast a pall on the proceedings-so the results of Campaign '76 were less than thrilling...

...In part-but only in part-the malfunction of the political system can be traced to the impact of television...

...The fact is that the real issues were simply not flushed out...

...Lack of confidence in the political system dates from 1960 and has been steadily increasing...

...He does offer the prospect of change, however marginal, and hope, however qualified...

...Carter did not receive a mandate to restructure power in Washington...

...There was in fact more consensus than disagreement in the views expressed by the candidates...

...And as Margaret Mead correctly reminds us (New York Times October 25): "the rising tide of turned-off voters in America is ominous...

...Conditions have changed since 1932...

...If the South is to stay "solid," Carter will be forced to take a pretty strong pro-big-business heavy-arms-spending conservative line...

...There is no reason to think that it has been arrested, much less reversed...

...Indeed he nearly blew his early lead-never as great as the media made it out to be-in his efforts to keep the party together during the campaign...

...That the turnout of voters was heavier in the South than elsewhere reflects the region's sense of relief and pride that the "cloud" of secession has finally lifted and that it may now rejoin the Union, in spirit as well as fact, with enthusiasm, without reservation...

...Crime" was a major issue in 1968 and 1972 but not in 1976 although the prison population stands at 249,000 and most of the inmates are under thirty years of age...

...The dodge of having a Republican in the White House with a majority of Democrats in the Congress creates the appearance of government by the consent of the governed but it has, for years now, kept significant change at a minimum and both parties on dead center...

...indeed if only "white" America had voted President Ford would have been elected by a 51 to 48 margin (Robert Reinhold, New York Times Nov...

...And any number of major issues were largely if not wholly ignored...

...Neither had much by way of an answer...

...In the last of the televised "debates," Robert Maynard reminded both candidates that a great many Americans thought the campaign was shamefully inadequate and asked each to assess his degree of responsibility for its low level of interest and intelligence...

...If most of the people are bored, anything can happen...

...In the final weeks of this year's campaign residual party loyalties seemed to reassert themselves but this was more appearance than reality...

...it tells us much about candidates we would not otherwise learn...

...carey mcwilliams, whose numerous books include Ambrose Bierce: A Biography and Witchhunt: The Revival of Heresy, recently retired as Editor of The Nation...

...Nor does the vote in 1976 indicate or warrant the conclusion that the old New Deal coalition has been reconstituted...

...As to foreign policy, Stanley Hoffman of Harvard properly charged both candidates with making appeals to blocs ok voters rather than discussing the real issues...

...Some adjustments become more, not less difficult to make with the passage of time...

...But the longer the new realities are ignored, the greater the hazard, for it is dangerous to delay change too long...

...In part the emergence of these constituencies reflects the failure or unwillingness of the two major parties to deal with new issues, particularly those with a strong emotional content...

...there were 20 camera crews in the state with 400 TV personnel...

...The Democrats are better organized and have more coherence as a party and the margin of their control of both houses of Congress has not been disturbed but it remains to be seen how long the precarious "unity" Carter has achieved will last...

...It is not lack of interest or a lower level of understanding that turns off so many voters nowadays...

...Admittedly the subject is full of complexities...

...So just as we finally put a morbid fear of "Papists" and related historical debris behind us in 1960, so the ghostly presence of Jefferson Davis has at long last been exorcised from American politics...

...Since then the influence of television has steadily increased...

...But for us change will be difficult-much more so than in 1932-because of the way power is concentrated today...

...Nor did either candidate have anything to say about the CIA that might suggest a truly critical attitude toward that excrescence of our constitutional system...

...Non-Voters: Non-Voters won the 1972 election...

...Both apparently accept the assumptions on which the Cold War of the last thirty years has been based...

...Party labels are apt to become more important when voters exhibit little enthusiasm for either nominee...

...What have been some of the consequences to date...

...We are told that 2,000,000 Americans, mostly young Americans, protested the war in Vietnam...

...Some of our largest cities are in desperate shape yet neither candidate really offered any new ideas or programs which might offer some hope of immediate relief or long-term revitalization for needed services...

...Many special issues are important-Proposition 14 certainly was-but they present problems in a nominally two-party system in which politicians try to sidestep emotional single issues, or seek to use them to embarrass their opposition...

...It is the political system's malfunctioning that has created the crisis...

...Throughout the campaign no effort was made to examine the assumptions on which Cold War policies rest nor to take a look at new realities in international affairs...

...There are some strong leaders in this wing of the party: James Thompson of Illinois, Mayor Pete Wilson of San Diego, Senators-elect Heinz and Danforth, Senators Percy, Mathias, Brooke, Hatfield, and the others but unless they can take over control of the party, it will cease to function as a viable opposition...

...George Wald, the distinguished scientist, expressed a widely held feeling when he said of this election: "People are numbed, dazed, punch drunk, angry, distrustful, and deeply worried...

...In the recent Swedish elections approximately 90 percent of those eligible voted...

...Cultural change has been a great leavening force in politics since the 1960s and cultural changes are not readily reversed...

...The "old" politics still prevail but a "new" politics is emerging...

...Today candidates chase media personnel in a mad scramble for free time...

...In one regional survey, three out of every five Democrats who had voted for Nixon in 1972 cast ballots for Carter but this hardly indicates that masses of Democrats are "returning" to the party...

...They should, for example, have talked about the Vietnam wai and examined the lessons but neither did...

...Carter, of course, started as an "outsider...

...This was, as William Shannon has noted, the campaign in which the "long developing dry rot of the two-party system" became painfully visible...

...Another sign of the malfunctioning of the party system is the rise of single-issue constituencies...

...We have a nucleus of 78 or so young freshmen Representatives, all but two of whom were apparently re-elected...

...While television has many plusses, it has greatly weakened party structures...

...everyone feels grateful to Edward R. Murrow for his March 9, 1954, CBS look at Senator Joe McCarthy, not to mention the televised Watergate hearings...

...What are some of the causes...

...Carter said that the media would magnify the impact of the early primaries by 100 percent and he was right...

...We are at one of those decisive turning points in history," Hannah Arendt wrote shortly before her death, "which" separate whole eras from each other...

...Nor can it be attributed to "apathy...

...Yet given the present balance on the Burger Court, the next one, two, or three appointments will be of crucial importance...

...Indeed I would agree with Howard Zinn that the level of interest and understanding is higher than it has ever been...

...True, the Democrats are more representative than the Republicans: they have more Blacks, ethnics...

...But with no significant organized pressure from the left, the Democrats will preempt the center position...

...What Earl Butz said to John Dean on the airliner was indeed revolting but it was trivial by comparison with "benign neglect" and what Ford has to say about busing...

...It would take a movement more powerful than the New Deal to move us off dead center and no such movement exists today although I expect one to emerge in the future...

...Proposition 14-the farm labor initiative in California-which lost by a 3 to 2 margin, probably cost Carter California's electoral votes and John Tunney his seat in the Senate...

...Without the Black vote, ironically, Carter would not have carried South Carolina, Louisiana and Mississippi...

...Most Americans seem to feel that they have a constitutional, perhaps even a divine, right to be wasteful...

...On November 2nd the partisan division was: Democrats 44 percent, Republicans 21 percent, Independents 37 percent...

...But the longer parties ignore new issues of the kind indicated, the more special constituencies are likely to surface...

...Clarence Kelley should not, of course, have accepted gifts from conniving FBI personnel but this was a trivial issue by contrast with the demonstrated waste and inefficiency of the agency, not to mention its serious infractions of civil liberties...

...not voter indifference...

...It is also a great "concealer" or "deceiver...

...But at the moment there is no pressure from the left, of an organized kind, that might force the Democrats to assert a more aggressive leadership...

...Recently I heard James Reston say that voters 28 years of age and younger now constitute one-half of the population of voting age...

...That Campaign '76 was a disgrace by any standard reflects the sad state of the party system...

...The prime function of the parties today is to keep discontent within reasonable, that is, "safe" bounds...

...Abortion and amnesty are prime examples of special-interest constituencies which cut across party lines...

...It is also possible that minor parties and special single-issue constituencies may force the two major parties off dead center...

...And what are the prospects for the future...

...In historical terms, the nation has turned a corner...

...4th...

...Just as President Kennedy amply justified the confidence of non-Catholics in his fairness and respect for religious freedom, so there is every reason to believe that Carter will honor his commitment to civil rights...

...managements are far more sophisticated politically than they were in 1932...

...Even these concessions won only lip-service support from Reagan and his crew in part because Ford was compelled to appeal to Independents and Demo-ratic voters...

...more unimpressed than dispirited...

...4th) are...

...It was the one question that made both of them visibly wince...

...Does Ronald Reagan dye his hair...

...These are the kinds of Democrats who would readily defect in the future...

...Economic power is highly-concentrated...

...blue-collar workers, urban dwellers, dirt farmers, and farm laborers-and relatively more younger voters-but they are also a divided party on class lines...

...the turned-off are disgusted with the system and its results...

...Such a realignment is overdue but it has not emerged with Carter's victory...

...it is a long-term trend...

...But more important than these and similar potentials is the hard fact that realities always surface sooner or later in politics and we are long overdue for a shake-up...

...With Ford's defeat, the liberal Republicans, who make up its best talent pool, face a serious problem...

...His questions were not answered...

...I don't know myself where to turn politically...

...But let it be said at the outset that there is at least one good clear reason to cheer Carter's victory...

...The re-election of President Ford would have meant more of the same only worse, in the sense, that is, that popular political considerations would have been less influential...

...As he put it: "these are our children" and indeed they are but they have not yet come to power...

...the Democrats automatically become the party of the "moderates" or the center conservatives...

...indeed for most Americans it is an unacceptable reality...

...True, they were discussed but in generalities so broad as to be virtually meaningless...

...They are neither audible nor visible at the moment but they are out there, somewhere, more mature, more sophisticated, more experienced, marking time, "doing their thing," whatever it may be, waiting for D-Day...

...The national apparatus of the Republican Party is now firmly in the control of the right wing which was perhaps its real objective this year...

...But much as we may be inclined to offer "two cheers" for Carter's victory we should not ignore the crisis that confronts the American political system, a crisis of confidence, of credibility, of legitimacy, a crisis that Walter Dean Burnham has described as "pervasive and intractable...

...The Undecided: In the period from 1968 to 1972, the percentage of undecided more than doubled...

...A wealth of political "indicators" point to the conclusion that the American political system is caught up in a crisis that has been in the making for several decades...

...The George Wallaces belong to the past...

...They vote but feel cheated...