Prospects for New York's Conservatives
ROBERTS, STEVEN V.
NATIONAL REPORTS Prospects for New York's Conservatives By Steven V Roberts To the American political forces on both the Right and Left who feel the ideologies of the Democratic and Republican...
...For example, the party's first Declaration of Principles proposed "freeing the farmer from bureaucratic regulation as dependent wards of the government, by eliminating in gradual stages the entire crop control, price control, and subsidy program...
...The people who vote Conservative are not generally swayed by the charm and sex appeal sold on the campaign trail...
...Officials estimated that they spent only about $35,000 on the whole campaign...
...It is no accident, therefore, that Adams beat Roosevelt by 15,000-2,000 in Staten Island, where rapid new construction has given thousands of families an opportunity to escape from the central city and own a patch of crabgrass...
...Or as William Buckley has written: "It seemed to me that the neglect of one body of opinion on the political spectrum, even while its counterpart at the other end, because it was effectively organized, was militantly represented, had resulted in distortions in the politics of both major parties...
...After years of talk the two men organized a successful drive in 1962 to collect 12,000 signatures, including at least 50 from each of 62 counties, to get a new party on the ballot...
...As a campaigner Adams was about as effective as could be expected for a man whose major experience in meeting strangers had come at academic meetings and faculty teas...
...Moreover the party, which has only four full-time employes anyway, was in poor financial health...
...That does not mean that the Conservatives will not continue to torment the Republicans...
...O'Doherty and Mahoney, the Alex Rose and David Dubinsky of the Right, continue to run the show with some help from a few friends and relatives, including O'Doherty's brother, who is party treasurer...
...On a more ceremonial level, one of the few luminaries the party can produce is Charles Edison, the elderly former governor of New Jersey, who is also a major contributor...
...It elected a uberai Republican governor...
...Everyone knew what it meant, and it appeared in diatribes against busing children out of the neighborhood schools and the excesses of the welfare system as well as the review board...
...Its program is primarily a series of negatives: lower taxes, less spending for health, education and welfare, no busing, etc...
...The Conservative party is rooted in fear of the future and false nostalgia for a past that never was...
...Advance planning was done by amateurs, which means it was virtually non-existent...
...They are neither radicals, nor ideologists, but politicians, committed to increasing their power within the existing system...
...They had one central ambition: to exert the same influence on candidates and policies they felt was exerted by the Liberals...
...It is for this reason that John V. Lindsay was challenged by Buckley -who now admits he may have aided his intended victim's victory...
...If the Liberal party, which effectively mobilizes Left-opinion, did not exist, neither would a conservative party need to exist...
...Now they claim they will have much more influence on politics in general and the Republican party in particular...
...So did several candidates for the State Legislature...
...It's still considered somewhat risqu?© to run as a Conservative," notes Buckley...
...Unless you're independently wealthy, or otherwise free, all sorts of pressures can spring up...
...Nervous and unsure of himself, he would sometimes walk through an entire shopping center without greeting more than one or two voters...
...Imagine beating Franklin Roosevelt in New York," exulted William F. Buckley Jr., a leading party theoretician and its candidate for Mayor last year, "It's almost obscene.' Other leaders proclaimed that the party would have vastly increased influence in the politics of the state...
...This technique of arguing that what ought to be, will be, is used constantly to justify preconceptions of all kinds...
...We're out to break their stranglehold on politics in this state...
...Undoubtedly the issue which contributed most heavily to the Conservative total was the referendum to abolish the civilian-dominated complaint review board in the New York City Police Department...
...Adams' speeches were such a conglomeration of dry statistics and hackneyed exhortation that one reporter was led to comment that Adams "is the only man I know who can be banal and esoteric at the same time...
...The Conservative party was created, and is still dominated by two young Irish Catholic lawyers who met at a rally for Senator Robert Taft in 1952, when they were both political outcasts in the liberal climate of Columbia Law School...
...Minority bloc vote" was used frequently as a code phrase...
...Conservative leaders firmly reject the idea of a third party and continue to identify with the Republicans...
...The complete banality of New York campaigns, the absence of any real difference between the candidates, the same old tired demogogic appeals-'I can buy more than you can'-could drive you crazy...
...Conservatives were euphoric...
...Despite the Conservative vote, the election showed that to win in New York a party must put forth liberal candidates and programs...
...Party leaders insist they did not profit from a "white backlash," but their campaign clearly appealed to white resentment against the gains and pressures of Negro militants...
...The party even circulated petitions putting a referendum on the ballot and only withdrew it to avoid confusion with the one sponsored by the police...
...Others were elected ostensibly because of their vote on the Conservative line...
...If it turned conservative the Republican party would almost certainly cede the leadership of the state to the Democrats, who have not been able to capture it on their own...
...But it would be wrong to dismiss, or oversimplify, the Conservative vote as merely a manifestation of racial prejudice...
...The reason is that the Republicans would lose more than they would gain by bending to Conservative pressure...
...As one prominent liberal Democrat has put it: "I'm a John the Twenty-Third Catholic, not a Bill Buckley Catholic...
...By seizing Row C the Conservatives have shaken a menacing fist in the face of the Republicans...
...Incensed by the hegemony of Rockefeller, Javits and Lindsay, they want to force the GOP rightward...
...Steven V. Roberts covers government and politics for the metropolitan staff of the New York Times...
...A campaign office was never opened and everything was done at party headquarters- three cramped rooms in a mid-town office building...
...But the GOP will have to hold its ground, unless for some reason the preferences of the voters, as they have revealed them in the postwar elections, begin to turn rightward...
...There is no discussion of how the farmer's lot would then improve...
...Thus the party was strongly identified with the fight against the board and in virtually every district where the board did badly the Conservatives did well...
...The Conservatives received more than 500,000 votes because their simple and unpublicized message struck sympathetic chords, and appealed to visceral and troubled emotions...
...Pundits discoursed at length on such topics as "New York GOP Dilemma: Conservative Gains...
...He is the focus of Federal help...
...In addition, in 1966 New York returned all seven of its freshmen Democratic Congressmen from normally Republican districts, four of them opposed by Republicans with Conservative endorsement...
...But by failing to cause the defeat of Rockefeller, they left the GOP in control of state patronage and thus less vulnerable to Conservative pressures than it would have been had the Governor, an aggressively liberal Republican, been beaten as expected...
...While campaigning for the Senate, Congress, and this year for Lieutenant Governor, he often appropriated the duties of campaign chairman, chief fund raiser, public relations director and head cheerleader...
...Even though the party is organizing more counties all the time, few new faces are being drawn into the top echelons...
...Mills is not the last Republican who will be defeated by a margin smaller than the Conservative vote...
...The party finally settled on Paul L. Adams, the academic dean of Roberts Wesleyan College in North Chili, a suburb of Rochester...
...asked Lawrence Fertig at the party dinner...
...Yet a closer analysis of the party raises serious questions about its future...
...Their first gubernatorial candidate in 1962 drew 141,000 votes and the total has risen steadily until this year, when the top of the ticket received 507,000...
...Not the Negro in Watts or Harlem...
...The heart of the Conservative strength is the lower middle-class family man who has saved enough money to buy a small house and feels his hard-won status and security threatened by higher taxes, a bewildering governmental bureaucracy, and the discontent of minority groups toward whom he has always enjoyed feeling superior...
...The Conservatives searched desperately for a candidate with some stature and could not find one...
...Indeed, their resentment of the Liberals is somewhat awesome...
...The party is strongest among Catholics and its list of candidates often reads like the membership roll of the Holy Name Society...
...But economics is not the point...
...J. Daniel Mahoney, a keen and witty fellow whose boyish face makes him look younger than his 35 years, has been state chairman since the party's birth...
...Right now there is no one else ready to move into the leadership, which has to be bolstered if the party is going to continue to expand...
...NATIONAL REPORTS Prospects for New York's Conservatives By Steven V Roberts To the American political forces on both the Right and Left who feel the ideologies of the Democratic and Republican parties are converging in a nebulous centrism, the recent achievements of New York's Conservative party seem a portentous development...
...It is very doubtful, though, that the Conservatives would be anywhere near as helpful supporters as they are occasionally damaging enemies...
...Although it may make further electoral gains, its leadership, origins and sources of support make it an unlikely vehicle for the overthrow of two-party liberalism in New York...
...It is an inspiring show of faith, if bad economics...
...O'Doherty summed up their position at the annual party dinner: "We are not a bit defensive about getting every possible vote on the review board issue...
...The Liberals dictate the policies of both parties," asserted one party official...
...The other parties are just appealing to the minority bloc vote...
...Mahoney is gradually withdrawing his steadying influence to concentrate on his law practice and a book about conservatism...
...Raucous and self-important, O'Doherty has inspired more dedication to the party and antagonized more prospective recruits than any one person...
...If the Conservatives hope to influence both parties, they clearly concentrate on the Republicans...
...One Republican candidate for Congress, Louis V. Mills, lost in the 27th district because of a strong Conservative vote...
...Some Conservatives even believe that if they succeed they could happily dissolve and rejoin the separated brethren...
...But that would not serve the party's purpose, which is to force the GOP to the right...
...Their strategy for gaining leverage over the Republicans has two elements...
...The Conservatives would find it very difficult to ape the Liberals, who have relatively few policy differences with the Democrats and exert power primarily in terms of personalities, not programs...
...We were both politically interested in New York," recalls Mahoney, "but there wasn't much of an avenue opened for a conservative...
...His brother-in-law Kieran O'Doherty, is five years older...
...The progressive, internationalist character of New York's GOP has been successful because it appeals to a large portion of the state's electorate...
...Who is the forgotten man...
...The first is a gradual accretion of party membership, now 30,000 state-wide, and voting strength...
...But the evidence indicates they will have a difficult time exerting such influence in either realm...
...It is the little guy...
...The underlying assumption, of course, is that the curtailment of present programs, such as welfare, would somehow result in the solution of the problems they are designed to combat...
...Adams was right when during a particularly disastrous campaign he said: "We don't make any converts when we campaign like this...
...We do it because our people expect it...
...They vote on the basis of strong beliefs and strong fears, and Adams would not have had to kiss a single baby to get most of their votes...
...Television time was out of the question...
...For one thing, in New York City at least, they take more votes from the Democrats than from the GOP...
...It was, rather, a sign of a deeper protest against a world grown too large, too complex, and too fearful...
...Kieran O'Doherty lacks Rose's shrewdness, and despite his ability to spark a crowd is probably, on balance, a menace to the party's future...
...One reason is lack of leadership...
...The Conservative party could probably gain more influence by moderating its policies and making its endorsements more acceptable to Republican candidates...
...More importantly, however, it appears that even if the Conservatives do gain strength they would probably still be ignored by the Republicans...
...One gets the feeling that the homage paid Governor Edison is less in recognition of his age and largesse than of the fact that he is about the only party member who has ever won an election...
...And, ironically, in holding liberal ground, the GOP may be aided by the existence of the Conservative party on the Right and the consequent absence of extreme Rightists in Republican ranks...
...On a national level, in fact...
...William Buckley remains a big attraction at party functions, but he is not really part of the leadership and insists he will not run for office again...
...Mahoney and other leaders agree that Catholics tend to have a conservative bent-even though they are finding less and less support for conservative social policies in Catholic teachings...
...The year 1966 was crucial...
...A doctrinaire Right-wing body working outside the two party system, it appears to be making substantial gains in its attempt to become the electoral balance of power in the state...
...In last November's elections, the Conservative gubernatorial candidate, a diffident dean from a tiny Methodist college, won a narrow victory over Liberal Franklin D. Roosevelt Jr., defeating him by over 10,000 votes in New York City and taking Row C on the ballot from the Liberals...
...Yet the faithful got the message...
...The second, in Buckley's words, is to perform an "exhibitionistic disciplinary act" that would dramatically display Conservative power and chasten the Republicans into accepting a working relationship...
Vol. 49 • December 1966 • No. 25
