WASHINGTON REPORT: The More It Changes

...Instead, we stand still, dead on center...

...In the light of all this, it is clear why Nelson Rockefeller never made it to the presidency: it would have been redundant...

...Which is why nothing much gets done in either direction: we do not become the Ronald Reagan-John Wayne ruggedly individual state, leaving those who can't keep up to die along the trail, nor yet the socially ameliorative state of Michael Harrington, or Izzy Stone...

...The Carter administration searches for means to inspire "business confidence," much as the early Kennedy administration searched for its "mandate...

...there was nothing in his history to call for rational statesmanship on this or any other issue...

...Still, Nixon did do it, and he didn't have to...

...frank getlein...

...Neither issue really has much to do with things that are affecting and will affect all of us in our daily lives, our annual tallying of accounts, our hopes and dreams...

...I see," said Wintergreen, which is more than a lot of people were able to do then, are able to do now...

...Our affairs are managed by Democrats passing themselves off as Republicans, and vice versa...

...There, the world of Francis X. Gilhooley imposes itself...

...The problem for Republicans bidding for black votes is that the bid has to be something: to get, you have to give and big Republican supporters don't want to give very much...

...it is rather that blacks should not be the captives of one party, will make out infinitely better if they can convincingly present themselves as up for bidding, what do I hear...

...It's the same problem this country faces in the Third World...

...What those blacks ignored was that the real Republican party didn't come into existence until the Gilded Age, notably in the bought election of 1876 with its repeal of Reconstruction and revival of slavery without the security...

...Therefore we are hurt and surprised when they turn to the left as the only force likely to so deliver them...

...Suppressing historic echoes of other occasions of rich white Americans bidding for blacks, we cannot ignore the fact that until the New Deal, blacks who were allowed to vote at all did vote Republican, for the obvious historical reason of the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln, and all that...

...Carter's presumably Democratic budget has had no serious opposition from Republicans, and there is no apparent reason why it should...

...All this seems to point to a political second act staged by Harold Prince in the style he perfected in Pacific Overtures...

...Yet, Gilhooley was demonstrably right then, continues correct despite marginal changes...

...In this, Carter is in the central tradition of recent Presidents...

...Franklin D. Roosevelt, for all that he was decried and denounced by all those members of the Union League Club who used to troop down to the Trans-Lux to boo him, nevertheless all but single-handedly saved capitalism in America...

...Granted the overwhelming support the business community gave to Gerald Ford, as it had previously given the same support to his creator, the infamous Nixon, the question of "business confidence" ought to be why anyone should have any political confidence in business, not how to evoke the confidence of the business community in any aspect of the political process that community clearly neither understands nor approves of...

...Another" example of this curious kind of attraction of opposites is the recent flutter of interest in higher Republican circles in capturing the black votes...

...True, this was partly because any other American President making such openings would have had Richard Nixon calling him a Commie...

...Richard M. Nixon, whose whole career, his very being, one would have thought, sprang from an uncompromising rock-headed anti-Communism, was uniquely able to make openings toward Communist China and Communist Russia...

...We want those new nations to be anti-Communist, but we don't want to deliver them from the thrall of the American-based multinational corporation...

...Opposites attract and in attracting cancel out the hope of action that non-attraction of opposites might bring off...

...Jesse Jackson, who has grown into—of perhaps always was—a new generation Bayard Rustin, tantalized GOP biggies with visions of carrying inner-city wards, thus destroying the heart of Democratic strength...

...Well," said Committeeman Francis X. Gilhooley, "in the South we're the Democrats and in the North we're the Republicans...

...From Jackson's point of view, it isn't just that Carter has not delivered to one of his crucial support blocs...

...The State of the Union and the Budget have slipped into Congress and consciousness without arousing either violent opposition or enthusiastic support...

...If the opposition had a brain in its head—any opposition—it would abandon its own party, support its opposition on the grounds that the opposition would be more likely to carry out legislation, administrative action, whatever, than one's own party, since one's own would naturally incline toward its own opposition...

...They keep turning on themselves, or perhaps taking their basic support for granted and reaching out toward the opposition...

...John F. Kennedy, the first Roman Catholic President, was also the first President able to make a firm stand against official Roman Catholic efforts to nuzzle their 17 February 1978:102 way into the trough of public education funds...

...Given the facts of Kennedy's election, the mandate should have been for improved living conditions in the graveyards of Cook County, Illinois, where his winning plurality emerged like Dracula in the dark of the moon...

...That crisp rhythmic climax would be a great improvement over shaggy, sloppy, mutedly cacophonic reality...

...The issues, if so they can be called, that stir up the most expressive and/or support these days are Abortion for the Poor and the Panama Canal...

...If, by some not quite imaginable process, Hoover could have been re-elected in 1932, he probably would have been too self-conscious to hand the capitalists any more than they had already stolen, would instead have become the great social engineer his life prepared him to be, a socialist by any other name...