WASHINGTON REPORT: Not Who, But What
Sisyphus
WASHINGTON REPORT NOT WHO, BUT WHAT The road to the White House is paved with good intentions. This presidential year is no exception. The Republicans will be offered a choice of a non-elected...
...Presidential power-grabbing, culminating in the worst offender of all, Mr...
...However, Mathias, in the way of other "liberal" beleaguered Republicans in the Congress, is elected with the indispensable help of Democratic voters-a fact not endearing to hardline Toryism of Republican Party leaders...
...In this election year, this vulnerability becomes particularly more hazardous...
...Correspondingly, the cost of government rises...
...As the economy continues to dis-improve, Americans become vulnerable to brute proposals for repairs...
...He compared government to a pump...
...This has resulted in a burgeoning cry that all sorts of powers, now accrued or assigned to the Feds, should be reassigned to state and/or local governments...
...Jefferson seemed to be putting forward the view that government is not to be relied upon to achieve an open and just society...
...Then there is the Democratic party...
...Each nominee, in other words, will have more ties to the past than to the future, a condition substantially changing in the Congress with each biennial election...
...Twenty years ago or so, Adlai Stevenson suggested that we insult our democratic system, with all its imperfections, when we adopt such a view...
...It would be helpful if the competitors for the presidential nominations would have a few wise words to say on this and related subjects, domestic or foreign...
...The goad to this activism was, of course, the Great Depression at the depth of which 25 million were without jobs...
...Such a society is achieved, he argued, by "social forces" exerted by free men...
...Nixon, forced in disgrace from the presidency more than two years ago, has weakened Americans' faith in even the legitimate functions of government-prevent crime and enforce contracts, for example...
...Republican Senator Mathias of Maryland, atypical of the predominant thinking in his party, has suggested recently that the party will fall apart, as did the Whigs in the mid-nineteenth century over slavery, unless it mends its backward ways...
...We even make it vulnerable, he said, to that man-on-horseback...
...The more, the hairier, even if most are quite competent...
...sisyphus...
...We have lost faith in everything we fight . and stand for," Stevenson said when we do this...
...Revenue-sharing is a recent example of a trend in this direction, although there is consistent evidence that state and local governments are not living up to their advance billing as more efficient and effective dispensers of tax-funds...
...As someone has written, we could reach the point, ideal for Organizational Man, wherein everything that is not forbidden should be made mandatory...
...Party affiliation to the contrary, the presidential nominees, who'll be chosen at the party conventions this summer, are most likely to share one characteristic- conventionality...
...Both Ford and Reagan are political descendants of Senator Robert Taft...
...The "now," too, of raising funds and dealing with the press, as well as scheduling and other mechanics of a campaign...
...Not that efforts haven't been made...
...Relatively speaking, we're back at work, but at the expense of a governmental bureaucracy, at federal, state and local levels, wherein decisions are most difficult to carry out...
...Is Jeffer-sonianism more of a hindrance than a help...
...Evidence of abuse of the law by the FBI and CIA, brought to light by congressional investigations, reinforces the disillusionment with the federal government...
...There's apt to be a baker's dozen of them by ground-hog's day...
...With inflation and unemployment prime characteristics of the economy, the need for responsible federal managers is compelling...
...Let government insist that all citizens be treatedly fairly and the good society would come about...
...what it pumps up is just what we are . . . no better, no worse," One problem is now that we have entered a presidential year, it is almost impossible to wrest from each candidate responses as to the "what" of things rather than the "how" of convincing party workers and voters that he should receive the nomination...
...He's not apt to be a variant of a latter-day Wendell Wilkie, even if for no other reason than the circumstances aren't comparable...
...Morris Udall of Arizona is one example...
...But John Calhoun and others looked differently at how society should be structured and a civil war was fought, in part against slavery, and a century later, today, our government has yet to provide a condition of fair play to its "free" citizens...
...Let us hope this year will be different from other recent presidential election years...
...Beginning in the 1930s, most noticeably, the federal government became a participant, rather than an umpire, in domestic affairs...
...But an older, Humphrey-esque competitor is more apt to become the nominee...
...Among the numerous competing Democrats for the nomination there are a couple who might be called transitional candidates -as Robert Kennedy would have been had he lived and been nominated...
...Democrats have been announcing their candidates for their party's nomination at the rate of one a month...
...Arthur Burns, chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, indicated in a speech the other day that structural reform is needed in the economy- a rather bold statement for him...
...Mathias even said he's willing to run for President as candidate of a sort of "citizens' coalition...
...The "what" of things is deeper and broader...
...Parkinson's Law prevails in that government tries to spread its authority and operations...
...About one in every six Americans works for government of some form...
...This is not to contend that there is a need for a candidate of either party who is a non-politician running against the system...
...most of the contesting Democrats are political descendants of FDR...
...The Republicans will be offered a choice of a non-elected President, Gerald Ford, the first time this has been the case because he was appointed to the Vice Presidency as well, and Ronald Reagan, former Governor of California who wants to come East...
Vol. 103 • January 1976 • No. 2
