The Home Front
BOHN, WILLIAM E.
THE HOME FRONT By William E. Bohn Taking Hucksterism Out of Politics Washington, D.C. Strolling about the old Senate Office Building the other day, I saw that Senator Richard L. Neuberger's door...
...Surely, while all this debate had been going on in the Senate, there had been some whispering from desk to desk...
...And a large part of the discussion goes way beyond the mere business of getting elected and making a success of public office...
...For two years, they worked together as a team...
...Strolling about the old Senate Office Building the other day, I saw that Senator Richard L. Neuberger's door was open and that the pretty girls he brought with him from the great lumber and apple state were on show at their desks...
...In the 1952 session of the Oregon Legislature, Dick was in the Senate and Maurine was in the House...
...That seems to be the way minds are running now among the younger Congressional set...
...Chapter 10 of the book tells about how much it costs to get elected and why the excessive cost debases our whole political system...
...The most honest candidate in the world cannot buck this game...
...They want to help make a success of government itself...
...What I wanted was a story...
...This easygoing, outdoorsy young statesman doesn't care which Senators or oilmen are malefactors of great wealth...
...He must either use the hucksters' tricks or see the hucksters take over and put real crooks into office...
...In 1954, Maurine went back to the Legislature and Dick came to Washington, but they are still a team...
...He, too, will have to have money...
...This volume outlines the combined adventures of the two Neubergers, Richard and Maurine...
...The book was written, I suppose, by Dick, but at least half of it is about Maurine, what she has done, how she acts, what she thinks...
...Any candidate of a party which polled as much as 10 per cent of the votes in recent elections would be entitled to support, and the amount of his subsidy would be calculated on the basis of 20 cents per voter in Presidential elections and 15 cents in Congressional elections...
...With things the way they are, he said, bribery is natural...
...But before I read the law I looked into the Senator's book, Adventures in Politics...
...Surely the incorruptible man from South Dakota had not been the only one to be hopefully approached...
...I expected the junior Senator from Oregon to be all hot and explosive about the 25 hundred-dollar bills which had been handed to the Senator from South Dakota...
...He wasn't interested...
...In his law, Senator Neuberger proposes to alter this situation by having the Federal Government pay a large part of the expenses of any national candidate...
...Though they ran as Democrats, they were the only candidates in their state who polled bigger votes than the champion vote-getter, Eisenhower...
...Let's fix things so that it will be easier to be honest...
...He gets a good deal of pleasure out of reminding people that it was Teddy Roosevelt who first suggested this daring experiment in 1907...
...They are concerned about the success of their state, of their country...
...He said he had not heard a whisper of gossip about which of his colleagues had taken money or refused it...
...These people are not interested merely in their own success...
...And I have a notion that we are entering a period in which we will make more fundamental improvements in our various governmental mechanisms than were undertaken by the muck-rakers of 40 or 50 years ago...
...The candidates are presented like soap or cigarettes...
...The President is not the only one who is disgusted...
...But I could not have been wronger in my expectations...
...It would be nice to have some idea whence the smells would probably arise when the panel of eight got to digging the dirt...
...Now it is said to take $3 million to carry on a Presidential campaign in one moderately large industrial state...
...In 1860, the Republican National Committee spent $100,000 to elect Abraham Lincoln...
...So, naturally, I dropped in...
...Professor Winston W. Crouch,' we are told, "examining 40 years of the initiative and referendum in California, has said that in most instances the old adage of politics that 'the side that spends the most wins' has proven true...
...The whole thing is so smooth, so slick, so professional that the voters are hardly given a basis on which to make up their own minds...
...I am talking about this bill just to show how minds are running in Washington...
...Each party would be entitled to receive from private sources a sum equal to that supplied by the Government-but no individual could contribute more than $100...
...I suspect that they are more or less typical of a lot of young people who are getting into politics at the present time...
...I expected him to hand me, in between his denunciations of the oilmen, some juicy bits of gossip...
...I carried home with me a copy of the proposed law which the young man from Oregon has placed before the Senate...
...The whole operation would be under the control of a bipartisan board of scrupulous integrity...
...The day before, a panel of eight Senators had been set up to poke around in search of bribery in connection with election campaigns...
Vol. 39 • March 1956 • No. 11
