Spoilers & spoilsmen

...For the purposes of this brief television review, however, it suffices to say that most Americans now believe the 1980 election is hopelessly spoiled before it even begins, that the spoiling consists in having their presidential choice effectively limited to Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan, and that this limitation was accomplished in the primaries by the way the Democratic and Republican parties ran things and are still running them, in short that the real spoilers this year are the comfortable men sitting in those comfortable chairs and calling John Anderson a spoiler...

...The Spoils System did this by the astonishingly titled Election Reform Act, which hands out taxpayers' money by the bushel basket to the two major parties and does its damnedest to insure that no one not a card-carrying, dues-paying member of one of those two parties shall get anywhere near the presidency or, indeed, public office on any level that the two parties can protect...

...McCarthy then, in the view of such political philosophers as Arthur Schlesinger Jr., became a "spoiler" because he persisted in the race he had entered even after Robert Kennedy announced that he was ready to take over...

...Somewhat to my surprise "spoiler" in the sense the comfies are using it does not appear in the Webster's New Collegiate or the OED, the two I live on, nor even in the 1859 Funk and Wagnalls Standard, which I keep around for laughs...

...we should also vote for him to save what can be saved from the Joint Mayors of the Palace before it's too late...

...on the other hand, I didn't quit my paying job on the prospects of futures in the arms biz...

...We Jeffersonians, a dwindling band, maintain there is no such thing in a true Republic unless it be the voice of the people and the jiggled primaries sure ain't that...

...McCarthy in '68 was a spoiler because the Democratic nomination was supposed to be divinely ordained for Robert Kennedy if he wanted it...

...Well, the Spoils System as it used to operate is gone forever, but those com-fies chatting it up about "the role of spoiler," are, of course, the embodiment of the latest reincarnation of the Spoils System—and there have been a few...

...Now, if separation of church and state means anything, it surely means that no candidate, even one favored by the Junior Schlesinger, is also favored by God and that such favor should mean 20 June 1980: 359 nothing at all to the non-theistic voters, let alone to the non-theistic mechanisms for setting up tickets, ballots, voting days, whatever...

...Since neither Democratic nor Republican party is mentioned in the Constitution, since, moreover, the Founders were all but unanimous in their fear and detestation of "party and faction," hoping, naively, to be sure, that such party or faction could be permanently avoided, what we have here is a Mayor of the Palace situation, but one that, unlike most of its precedents, has now been established by law and it is high time a disestablishmentarian movement got going...

...They certainly kept people more alert...

...This is why the chairmen and their spokespeople speak in such horror of John Anderson...

...so have Margaret Sanger, Ralph Nader, Gloria Steinem and Martin Luther King, but none of those private persons was established, none of them drew or disposed of government money...

...We should vote for Anderson because he is the only candidate talking sense...

...Anyone else trying to horn in is not only un-patriotic and un-American, but positively antiGod...

...The reason I hoped enough to haul down the 1895 F & W was that 1895 was so much closer to the glory days of the Spoils System...

...The man's an atheist...

...As far as I know, Eugene McCarthy was the first American of any prominence to recognize this profound change in the way we conduct our public business...

...The first underlines the point that the major parties are, in fact, the spoilers of this year's elections, having spoiled it for all of us by inexorably bringing to presumptive nomination the two candidates supported by minorities of minorities in the idiosyncratic, crazy-quilt primary "system," as it is mysteriously called, and offering no one at all a person of some basic common sense can get even mildly enthusiastic about...

...The closest approach is in the Random House Unabridged, where the word as "sports slang" means a team that wins a victory over a team ranked higher, presumably so ranked by journalists or some other equivalent of National Chairmen of major parties...

...The party chairmen are presenting themselves, finally, as the voice of God...

...Whereas in the old days the Spoils SysCommonweal: 358 tern meant jobs for all the winner's footsoldier supporters and hefty government contracts, with plenty of margin, for hefty party contributors, nowadays the Spoils System has simply delivered to the two major parties the privilege of deciding, all by themselves, who shall be the next president, or, to be finicky, who shall be the two choices, one of whom will be the next president...

...Except for that third, slang, not to say argot, listing in Random House, the whole drift of the dictionaries is toward spoil as in spoils-of-war, the loot, rather than toward spoil as in squeezing a lemon into a glass of milk or leaving the beef out in the hot sun just a shade too long...

...and allow as how John B. Anderson hasn't a ghost of a chance to win the election, will probably have no effect on it, "except," as they invariably phrase it, "in the spoiler's role...

...This was because after McCarthy had knocked Lyndon Johnson out of the race, Robert Kennedy announced that he, at long last, was ready to knock Lyndon out and would McCarthy please get out of the way...

...But the parties are the spoilers because they are also the despoilers...

...Of several minds: Frank Getlein SPOILERS AND SPOILSMEN THE MAYOR OF THE PALACE ENTHRONED You You HAVE to admire them for the sheer, brazen effrontery of it all: the national chairmen of the two major parties and their assorted spokesmen and representatives and the way they all ease back into their comfortable television studio chairs (whatever happened to those stools...

...zouaves and hussars loomed large in my National Security plans...

...Since these party committees, chairmen, functionaries, are not chosen for their jobs by popular election nor, as far as we know, by God, nor in any other way related to the Republic, we have delivered public business into private hands...

...It was an interesting point of view then and now it is germane to the whole question of "spoiling" in the nonlexigraphical sense the word is given by the comfies...

...FRANK GETLEIN Commonweal: 360...

...The parties, with their virtually anonymous comfies at the helm, do draw and dispose of such public monies...

...In 1968 (when I have no interest to declare), he was himself denounced as a "spoiler" in the nonlexigraphical sense of Robert Strauss et al...

...What is a spoiler and what is a spoiler's role are fascinating philosophical questions we'll get to in a minute...

...In such a sense, a spoiler would be more or less synonymous with despoiler and from such identification, however loose, two extremely interesting implications arise...

...As it happens, Eugene McCarthy is a good point to return to spoilers and spoilsmen...

...Here we get exactly the inner meaning of "spoiler" as it used by the comfies...

...We have, for the first time in our history, a Mayor of the Palace and it's a them and them are anonymous...

...Quel chutzpah...

...Of course, the parties, and their predecessors, have always acted as agents of the public will...

...If John Anderson does get elected, it will be in large part because of the groundwork done for him by McCarthy...

...With the Democratic and Republican parties as established parts of the Constitutional system, we have given away, handed over, an important and not entirely yet all added up, part of res publica , the public thing, to strictly, even passionately, private interests...

...He doesn't believe in the God of Arthur Schlesinger and Robert Strauss and John the Con Mitchell...

...There is a divinity that shapes our ends and it shapes them, now, through the liturgical medium of the national chairmen of the two big parties...

...In that sense, John Anderson may well turn out to be a spoiler, but he will be so only because the ranking is being made by people whose disinterest is kept well under control...

...I guess, speaking of disinterest and all that, I should say here that in 1976 I was McCarthy's announced choice for Secretary of Defense, a choice based, as far as I know, on our mutual interest in returning the Armed Services to more colorful uniforms and thus getting at least some return on the country's immense investment...

...The Democratic and Republican parties, for the first time in their histories and for the first time in the history of the Republic, have been officially empowered to act as in some sense agents of the popular will...

...He fought it, even fought a whole presidential campaign chiefly to get the issue before the courts, including the court of public opinion, was a lot more successful at the courts of law than in those of that opinion...