Election '80: When Heroes Are Hard To Come By
Fein, Leonard
ELECTION 80 WHEN HEROES ARE HARD TO COME BY LEONARD FEIN We have a wonderful new resource in Boston, the Kennedy Museum and Library. Several weeks back, I took my children, who range in age from...
...More recently he has backed away from his public embrace of the PLO...
...Oregon offers an example of how hard it can be...
...The case of Steve Symms, the Idaho Congressman who is running hard against Frank Church, tells us more...
...There are conspiracies, and there is baldfaced lying, and, most of all, we dare not defer to the experts...
...The issues which define the present danger do not all fall within the purview of government, much as we should like to relieve ourselves of their burden by transferring it to the agencies of the State...
...Opposing Denton is Jim Folsom, Jr., son of the former populist governor, who defeated Donald Stewart, a thoughtful conservative Democrat—and a good friend to Israel—in the primary...
...I find myself teaching through reminiscence rather than through current events, I hear myself sounding like an old-timer trapped in a distant past...
...In fact, I was beginning to wonder whether I was still a Democrat, whether the time hadn't come to join the Independent crowd, when convention season arrived...
...When I was growing up in Baltimore, the mayor was Theodore Roosevelt McKel-din, a moderate Republican with a sure sense of his city who was given to showing up at high school commencements and neighborhood wing-dings and booming out his message in the nearest thing to a William Jennings Bryan style I'll ever hear...
...And my bet remains that if Kennedy keeps going, or if some other credible liberal leader emerges, that number will go much higher...
...Some elections do matter...
...And he has since sought to play down the real issue of the campaign, which, truth being stranger than fiction, is his relationship with Yasir Arafat...
...The dismal choices we are offered in the forthcoming election are more than a political disappointment...
...In short, the world is a complicated place, and the old labels may not help much any more...
...But David Robinson's does...
...The Indiana contest is a classic battle between a liberal Democrat and a conservative Republican...
...Brzezinski's maljudgment...
...I looked at the Republicans and wondered how some of my friends who have made the shift to the GOP can feel comfortable with all that blue-tinted hair, with a party so white, so male, so smug...
...So I am left with ideas...
...But the outcome is not certain, for the evangelical tide flows full in Alabama...
...Most, moved by conviction rather than convenience, still support a politics of equity, and most insist that the civil liberties which distinguish this nation be rigorously protected...
...Quayle has voted against most foreign aid appropriations, for amendments that would reduce America's foreign aid programs...
...I think especially of Bayh, Church, Hart and Stewart...
...Hard cases make bad law...
...Symms offers more wheat than right...
...his campaign literature makes no mention at all of the Middle East, of the PLO, of Arafat...
...Not when blacks and whites stab and stone each other with hideous frequency, not after watching the Red Sox play at a Fenway Park which is virtually without blacks, not after many visits to Quincy Market, Boston's loveliest urban place, from which blacks are almost wholly absent...
...It may seem a bit peculiar to find a conservative Republican from Idaho embracing one of the world's most committed terrorists, but the explanation is not hard to uncover...
...I've heard the announcements, but have not seen sufficient correlative actions...
...So we talk about this country's generosity, its welcome to the Boat People, to the Cubans, to the Russian Jews, its continuing support for Israel...
...Rachel, now twenty, was three when John Kennedy was murdered, and she was five when the cities started burning, and eight when Robert Kennedy and Martin King were slain and the Chicago cops beat up on the kids...
...I do not know whether we are "behind" the Soviets or not, nor even what being behind means in 1980...
...I'd like for my children to sit in Howard Wolpe's chair...
...Listening to the Republicans, and perhaps even more, watching them, I remembered very quickly that I am a Democrat...
...I owe them an example, somehow...
...I fear bandwagons...
...My own good fortune is that I get to vote for Tip O'Neill...
...Yes, I'm a Democrat, even though the parties have come to mean so much less over the years...
...So used, what begins as a shame ends as a tragedy...
...I'd like to talk about integrity, but I can't...
...A myriad of political action committees have joined the effort to unseat Church, functioning as Symms' smear-carriers, and what the campaign tells us is that democratic elections are not always the exercises in civic education they are meant to be...
...The choice isn't always that easy...
...On the Republican side, there are Tom Railsback from Illinois, Millicent Fenwick from New Jersey, Silvio Conte from Massachusetts...
...they have a way of disappointing, or of being killed...
...Take Howard Wolpe, for example, a freshman Congressman running for re-election from Michigan's third district...
...Here was a handy opportunity to expose them to the excitement of the realm political, to its sometime glory, to its potential for heroism and nobility...
...She has come of political age during the tenure of Gerald Ford and now Jimmy Carter, and I cannot honestly blame her if she finds Sonny and Cher more interesting...
...He is also against the income tax...
...He has since come up with diverse gimmicks to entice the voters...
...If that be sufficient qualification for membership in the Congress of the United States, I cannot see why, any more than I can see how it qualifies Jimmy Carter to be President...
...I have in mind, for example, the matter of race, of race relations and discrimination and all that stuff we have by and large succeeded in ignoring ever since the good old days of Selma and the Woolworth lunch counters...
...Wolpe's no McKeldin...
...Earlier, Findley had defined his campaign as a referendum on his foreign policy, which he has come to as "a matter of principle...
...The right to be confused, which I defend, does not give rise to the right to be indolent...
...Findley...
...It doesn't always work that way, but one should be very, very wary...
...The political realm per se is not a sufficient arena for the acting out of our civic concerns...
...One thing you can do is remind your children—and yourself—that there's a Congress to be elected, too, and that some of those who are running are people of distinction...
...All that may not be enough to keep one a liberal, but it's more than enough to keep one from becoming a conservative...
...It swallowed me up, and I've been hooked on politics ever since...
...I cast no stone, for the stone is on my heart: I moved to this city from its suburbs almost eight years ago, and it is time for me to recite the al chet, to confess the sin of inaction...
...It follows that "we must rebuild our defense, strategic and conventional," and reinstitute the compulsory draft...
...It is, instead, a credibility gap, and it is brought about by the lamentable distance between the President's words ("Afghanistan is the most serious international crisis since World War II") and the President's deeds...
...The National Conservation Political Action Committee has raised over $4 million through direct mail, and is permitted to spend without limit so long as it does not collaborate with any candidate's campaign organization...
...But it is not fundamentally a hardware gap...
...William H. Sullivan, the American Ambassador to Iran at the time the Shah fell, tells (in the fall issue of Foreign Policy) how a carefully negotiated deal for an orderly transfer of power in Iran came unglued because of the President's readiness to accept Mr...
...But Symms is hardly alone...
...So my mission is to give them things to believe in...
...Now and again, the political sector provides it nourishment, as when it offers us a leader who captures and perhaps even enlarges our sense of this land, this people...
...On issues that matter greatly to me— and especially on the Israel issue— he's been outstanding...
...There's Henry Waxman from California, and Clarence Long from Maryland, and Steve Solarz from New York...
...Jimmy Carter, for whom I may yet end up voting, makes me feel dumb...
...It's awfully tempting, in arguing about such things, to base the arguments on extreme cases, as if all liberals were of the New Left and all conservatives were of the Moral Majority, a new political phenomenon with frightening implications...
...There are less of these than we would like, in this age of packaged campaigns, but in the forthcoming election, a number of Senators are involved in campaigns which offer meaningful ideological choice...
...Bayh vs...
...He votes right—that is, as I'd vote—on most issues, ^nd does wonders for my nostalgic impulse...
...Thirty-eight percent of the Jews call themselves liberals, when the liberals are pro-gramless and leaderless...
...In Denton's principal position paper, national defense is identified as "Vital Issue A," and Denton explains that "Concern about this nation's survival is my whole reason for entering politics...
...the more bucks, the more hustlers...
...Another thing you can do is to pay attention to those contests where the issues really do make a difference...
...his data base is the airline magazine and the daily horoscope...
...What choice is there...
...now it is Eastern Standard Time, suddenly it's Pacific Daylight Saving Time...
...By and large, the campaign literature of both Bayh and Quayle emphasizes the ideological differences—Bayh's support for ERA, for health and welfare programs, for effective civil rights enforcement, and Quayle's opposition to these...
...He supports ERA and the right to abortion, and he's had the courage to oppose a cut in taxes this year as too likely to increase inflation...
...The idea is simply that in this grand democracy, the burden rests with the people, and not with its governors, be they inept or skilled, be they effective or be they bumbling...
...It was Naomi's birthday (15th) and we are in the midst of a hyper-political season, and these two occasions had come together in my paternal head...
...I'd like to talk about compassion, but I can't...
...the hands say twelve, the chimes ring three...
...I cannot help, however, thinking back to the missile gap campaign of 1960, a gap which vanished on the morrow of the election...
...Not bad...
...And if it is patriotism and civic virtue which are at stake, then I owe Boston—and my children—more than a confession...
...In Connecticut, where James Buckley now seeks to defy tradition (having bombed on Broadway, he wants to open in New Haven) in his race for the senate against Chris Dodd, an articulate incumbent Congressman, the heart of the Buckley campaign is that Dodd is "soft" on defense...
...In this morning's paper, James David Barber observes, correctly so far as I can tell, that Reagan's philosophy, far from being a principled conservatism, "is that of 'Little House on the Prairie...
...I find myself apologizing for the President, rationalizing, explaining away rather than explaining...
...I don't know how I'd vote if I lived in Oregon—knowing people's positions on paper is only a part of what needs to be known in order to make an informed choice—but, on paper, Kulongoski looks good...
...Nor is Wolpe the only Congressman to inspire respect and to help restore confidence in the political process...
...And keep the daily papers away from them...
...Denton, who is opposed to all the things one might expect—essentially, the last hundred years—and who is supported by the Moral Majority, proves nothing about conservatives save that they, too, have their dross to bear...
...Instead, he has still further dissipated the majesty of the office...
...a clearer sense of mission is required, as well, and that is a very hard thing to come up with in the present circumstances...
...While I am regularly distressed at Bayh's efforts to do away with the electoral college and to substitute direct, popular election of the President and Vice-President, nobody's perfect, and here's a case where there's a real and meaningful choice to be made...
...Most, for all their disappointment in government-by-muddle, remain as suspicious of big business as they are of big government...
...Paul Findley is a moderate Republican (early this year he endorsed John Anderson, although he has since switched to Reagan) who has for twenty years represented Illinois' 20th Congressional District...
...Birch Bayh is running against Congressman J. Danforth Quayle...
...On its welfare, your welfare will depend...
...Maybe that's less than it used to be, but in a time when liberalism is bad-mouthed by nearly everyone, it strikes me as a pretty hefty minority...
...But heroes are hard to come by, and dangerous to worship...
...That shame, and the disgust with the process to which it leads, may easily offer us an excuse for keeping our backs turned to the needs of the widow and the orphan, the poor and the oppressed...
...And thinking back to Shaw's Major Barbara: Where there's a buck to hustled, there's bound to be a hustler...
...But Symms is not uninterested in foreign affairs...
...In any case, I do not mean this as a comprehensive catalogue...
...His seat was thought safe until the primary, which he won by only a 55-45 margin...
...They say, after all, that we are rapidly turning conservative, all of us, Jews included...
...If the last decade has taught us anything, it has taught us that the worst fantasies of the crazies are not always fantasies...
...There are occasions when an election offers us a choice between a candidate who is an active advocate of policies which directly threaten our beliefs and/or interests and one who defends those interests...
...He's just an honest and competent and thoughtful liberal Democrat, who serves his constituents and helps guide his nation, our nation, with integrity and skill and a solid political sense...
...One day, our class—we must have been fifth or sixth graders—was taken to City Hall, and each of us got a chance to sit in The Mayor's Chair, the biggest chair I had ever seen...
...Alone, Symms might not present much of a threat to Church, who is among the Senate's more distinguished leaders...
...Our civic investments should be diversified...
...There are others, to be sure...
...I spend a fair amount of energy scheming to make patriots out of my children—or, at least, to induce in them a healthy civic consciousness...
...Quayle, Church vs...
...This is the quirk in the Election Reform Act of 1974 which has led to the formation of so many "PACs," and which invites negative campaigns, campaigns to defeat rather than to elect a candidate...
...I know only that years back, I was talking about "Dr...
...so, too, very many others...
...Yes, Jews are worried about economic issues, but that hardly leads them to Kemp-Roth...
...Am I stuck on and in the past...
...One idea is simple, straightforward...
...Surely not Reagan, that genial throwback to the days of Gene Autrey, a corner druggist peddling empty nostrums for our social itch...
...Patriotism is not essentially a political sentiment, and its sources are not primarily political sources...
...The nation will thus be spared his syntax and his insights...
...Several weeks back, I took my children, who range in age from 12 to 20, to visit it...
...they are worried about this country's military capability, but that does not lead them to endorse the MX missile or to oppose Salt II...
...I cannot figure it out, him out...
...The army does not have enough qualified people, and it does not retain the ones it does have...
...But most Jews, so far as I can tell, are still disposed to support the expansion of social and economic opportunity which has been liberalism's program in 20th century America...
...I write in advance of some of the primaries, so I cannot be certain, for example, that Dick Stone will be a candidate in November...
...There is a gap, and it does invite Soviet expansionism...
...I'd hoped he'd teach my children to honor the presidency, that institution which Johnson abused and Nixon dishonored, by his example...
...Many good chairs to sit in, chairs by the dozens, chairs of earnest and able men and women whose presence in the House does their constituents credit...
...absurd cases make none...
...Denton holds that "All our major problems such as the strategic imbalance, the failing integrity of the institute of the family, the economic down-slide— even energy crunch—all of these problems would be solved if our government and people would adopt as a major national goal the effort to deserve the title One Nation Under God.' " Most likely, Denton will lose, this being Alabama, which has never sent a Republican to the Senate (or elected one to^any statewide office...
...And once having become patriots, we have no choice but to invest in the political process, even (or especially) in its years of drought...
...they are worried over criticisms of Israel from the left, but that does not lead them to embrace the Republican party, which is not only the party of Israel's good friends, Bob Dole and Jack Kemp—among very many others—but is also the party of Steve Symms and Paul Findley, of whom more in just a bit, and of John Connally, reminders that there are worries both right and left...
...I get scared, wondering whether if this is their America, it can still be mine, too—not because they won't let me have my piece, but because they make me feel that I don't belong...
...It's accepted without question that the Russians have moved ahead of us, or soon will...
...There's no question that defense is, next to the state of the economy, the big issue...
...Libya, it turns out, needs wheat, and Idaho—you guessed—has all this extra wheat...
...Those of my friends who know him speak of him with lavish praise...
...Like many people in Washington—like the President of the United States, for that matter—Gil-more would make a distinguished officer of, say, the Rotary Club...
...Usually, I can more or less figure out what makes a President tick...
...The centerpiece of Findley's foreign policy position is American recognition of the PLO...
...Strange-love" with a friend who had served for a time as a senior scientific advisor to the President, specializing in matters nuclear...
...Reading the campaign literature from around the country is an illuminating experience—illuminating, and depressing...
...the weak and the poor stay weak and poor, South Bronx is still South Bronx, and the blacks stay trapped...
...In fact, he has taken it upon himself to become Libya's principal spokesman on Capitol Hill...
...Too many mistakes, too little coherence, and more and better hardware won't make any difference, any more than all the dodgem trucks and choo choo trains chugging endlessly through the wastes of Nevada and Utah would mean one ayatollah less...
...Massive increases in weapons procurement seem to me a diversion from these core problems, about as helpful as the recent proposal to raise morale by producing more distinctive shoulder boards to signify rank...
...How do you argue today, after the marching, after the shouting, when the nation is on a skateboard to hell and when the candidates make you want to yawn—or cry...
...It's not so easy to stay liberal during a period when (a) nobody's quite sure what the word means any longer, and (b) the only national leader who can lay plausible claim to liberal leadership is a Senator who has only just now found his own authentic voice, at last...
...I allowed as how I had thought the film amusing, but flawed by its obviously burlesque exaggerations...
...It would not be even if government were more effective...
...they are worried about affirmative action programs, but that does not lead them to default on the American dream...
...That, and an ingrained suspicion of the politics of fear, make a skeptic of me...
...It will not do to say that I do not know the prescription, though that is true enough...
...Not much charisma, perhaps, but that may be a gain, it being hard for the charismatic ones to do the slogging work that goes with the job...
...This nation's deterrent capability cannot be separated from the state of its armed forces, whose condition depends more on morale than on hardware...
...In the days of Spiro Agnew, I used to argue with my students, insist that Agnew and his hardhats did not own the American flag, that Tom Jefferson's America and Walt Whitman's America is spelled with a "c," not with a "k...
...Which brings me to the third idea...
...I've seen too much small-mindedness, too much shifting of political rhetoric to suit political winds...
...Where do I find a living, present example that will help my children understand that pride in this nation and in its government is not just another of daddy's old-fashioned notions-to-be-indulged...
...And now it comes time for her to cast her first vote, to choose between a demonstrably inadequate incumbent and his wholly unqualified opponent...
...They make me feel like an immigrant...
...But I'm a Democrat, and Pack-wood's opponent is an Oregon State Senator named Ted Kulongoski, and Kulongoski opposes the MX missile (Packwood is for it), favors national health insurance (Pack-wood doesn't), is for gas rationing (Packwood isn't...
...Perhaps Anderson...
...For the political realm is so pervasive that we cannot leave it unattended, not if we value our liberty, not if we cherish our hopes...
...A higher pay scale will help, but not suffice...
...He's running against a man named Gilmore, an entirely pleasant businessman from Kalamazoo—with a net worth of better than $29 million—whose list of civic activities and honors goes on for pages, and includes everything from the chairmanship of the Kalamazoo County Republican Executive Committee to "Past participant and member of group speaking on the Greater Kalamazoo Mall before National Retail Dry Goods Association, New York City...
...The army may or may not need new weapons systems, but it cannot adequately maintain the ones it already has...
...But the cornerstone of a curriculum in patriotism is Saro-yan and Steinbeck...
...One might suppose that Symms is a classic isolationist, opposing the moderately liberal Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, a classic internationalist...
...Vital Issue B"—there are only two vital issues, the rest being merely "Important Issues"—is "One Nation Under God...
...It also tells us something about the bedfellows who snuggle under the conservative blanket, and quite likely own the bed...
...Grosse Point comes to Detroit: Grosse Point used to have regulations against real estate sales to people of "swarthy complexion," and when I watch the Republicans in action, I feel every swarth...
...But this President's clock has a disordered mainspring: the hands go now this way, now that...
...they are a public shame...
...Take, for example, the case of the Republican nominee for the Senate from the State of Alabama, Jeremiah Denton...
...The New York Times reports that the growing conservatism of the Jews is a result of "worries over economic issues, opposition to affirmative action programs, concern over criticism of Israel from the left, and more general fears about the state of the nation's military defenses...
...ELECTION 80 WHEN HEROES ARE HARD TO COME BY LEONARD FEIN We have a wonderful new resource in Boston, the Kennedy Museum and Library...
...so, too, Bess Meyerson's New York primary campaign against Liz Holtz-man...
...I suppose that in the wake of Iran and Afghanistan, such a reaction is inevitable...
...Bob Packwood, the incumbent Senator, is a moderate Republican with a good record...
...The defense bandwagon seems to me to be rolling as fast as it is not because of a gap in hardware, but because it offers a quick fix to unemployment, a quick buck to contractors, a quick thrill to a new generation of macho intellectuals and a quick vote to candidates who are ready to pander to the people's paranoia...
...A second idea is to begin far from the polls and the pols...
...Still, New York's Jews went for Kennedy over Carter by four to one, and the same Times article reports that 38 percent of the Jews call themselves liberal, compared to 23 percent of the Catholics and 17 percent of the Protestants...
...I watched most of both conventions, evidence, I guess, that if you sit in a mayor's chair at impressionable enough an age you can easily end up a masochist...
...Bayh is among those Senators targeted for defeat by right wing groups...
...And the system cannot afford cynics...
...For it is written, "Seek ye the welfare of any city to which I have carried you off, and pray to the Lord for it...
...A full moment report on the Symms v. Church contest appeared in December 1979...
...On issues related to Israel, as to Soviet Jewry, Bayh has been a reliable and energetic friend...
...In 1980, if you want your children to learn about the grandeur of politics, you've got to go to a museum...
...My concern is that they'll not have the chance, that they'll generalize from the dreary presidential choices to the whole of the government and settle for cynicism...
...she was thirteen when Henry Kissinger's mendacity was rewarded with the Nobel Peace Prize, and fourteen when Richard Nixon's was punished by his being kicked out of town...
...Robinson, a Jew, a liberal Democrat, a former State Representative, makes effective use of a photograph of Findley breaking bread with Arafat, and of Findley's assessment that Arafat is "a very intelligent, cultivated man of obvious ability...
...Symms—or, if you will, Robinson vs...
...I speak from inside a glass house named Boston, as racist as any of America's big cities...
...My friend looked at me with sympathy, and then went on to tell me story after story to show that nothing in Strangelove had been overdrawn, overstated...
...I'd like to talk about human rights, but I can't...
...It may easily induce us to sulk out the next four years, retreating still deeper into the tunnel of "me-ism...
...Symms is against foreign aid, against Salt II, against the Panama Canal treaty (his literature ingenuously asks Idaho voters, "Should the United States sign away canal ownership to an unstable and dictatorial Panamanian government...
...There's time enough for my children to learn to be skeptics...
...Oh, happy coincidence: "Alabama has the spirit and the resources to make a major contribution to re-build these defenses, putting thousands of good workers and many idle plants back to work...
Vol. 5 • October 1980 • No. 9
