Fair Game
GOODMAN, WALTER
Fair Game BY WALTER GOODMAN The GOP Blues Harken now to the lamentations for the present condition and fearsome future of the Republican party. Woe and woe, how the party of Richard...
...But, no, the poor in spirit are always with us, and nothing that happens to a mere party will deter opportunism in public life...
...We must also ponder what is going to happen over the next decade to liberals and their policies and principles...
...His opinions may be reprehensible, but they are clearly his, and he makes no bones about them...
...Working hard to become the heir apparent to what is left of the GOP after November is John Connally, as gamey a dish as has lately been served up by American politics, too much even for the stomachs of the Republican moderates who could digest Robert Dole...
...Since the era of Robert Taft, it has been evident where the soul of the Republican party lies...
...A Southern strategy thrown into disarray by a peanut grower from Georgia...
...The President's victory was a marvelously near thing, achieved only by the self-abasement of the party's "liberal" component, and his campaign will be filled with reassurances to the Reaganites...
...Senator James Buckley of New York, recognizing this, has been showing signs of Presidentitis, and will doubtless be heard from in 1980...
...to hear him is to be confirmed in the initial impression...
...It is Gerald Ford's misfortune to be Gerald Ford in the year of Jimmy Carter, a man not cast in the familiar liberal mode, ambiguous enough to exude conservatism while proclaiming populism, a Southern churchgoer who makes Northern ethnics uneasy...
...What sort of pressures will they be able or willing to bring upon the ineffable Carter...
...If one is obliged to lament the possible absence of a loyal opposition after November, I will do my worrying over the liberal voice...
...He had a following, the most impassioned segment of his party, and he spoke for it in a forceful, unequivocal way...
...Ronald Reagan, turned out to be a more impressive figure during the primaries than most observers expected...
...Yet Gerald Ford's record as a caretaker President is not on balance discreditable, even if no one has accused him of being an inspiration to the young...
...So forgive me if I cannot grieve over the tribulations of the GOP...
...But if he wins, can his victory be assessed as a repudiation of conservative principles...
...A President running on a platform that repudiates his Secretary of State and the proudest accomplishments of his reign...
...How much will they swallow in the interests of power...
...But perhaps the mourners are premature...
...Ford and Mrs...
...Schweiker, having lost his tournament, is now exposed as merely another underachieving politician without balls...
...Still, between a Reagan and a Schweiker, one's respect, if not necessarily one's vote, must go to Reagan...
...their leadership has been battered in both parties...
...But, no, whatever their party suffers in November, its narrowest principles promise to be more widely accepted than they were a decade ago...
...True, his views epitomize the narrowness, the fears, the hostilities of America's haves...
...it may breed the sort of schismatic politics that continues to bedevil France and Italy, or the kind of catch-all party that afflicts Mexico...
...For now, if we are to indulge in concern, let it be for liberalism, which is at present licking its wounds, limping hopefully after Jimmy Carter, panting for an occasional bone and maybe a pat and not too many kicks in the ribs...
...The Federalist and the Whig precedents may not be quite applicable...
...An election that promises grief to the White House incumbent from one end of the land to the other...
...To look upon this man is to mistrust him...
...Goldwater, for those who may have been looking for him, was to be found in the embrace of Nelson Rockefeller...
...It would be rash to describe Carter as either a born-again liberal or conservative, but if the nature of his opponents and the national mood do push him to the Right, liberals will find it more difficult to stand up against him than against a Republican President...
...Political parties in America do not die all that easily...
...Buckley may have to affect a drawl...
...The Libera Malaise The question, then, is not only what will happen to the Republican party, interesting as that is...
...If we could believe that the dissolution of their party would mean we would never again have to be affronted by the likes of a Connally or a Schweiker, then who would not welcome that with a full heart...
...they are Goldwater country, and today that is where the big money is...
...We are in a conservative time...
...Reagan in the fashion and smile categories...
...We need not pause over him...
...Woe and woe, how the party of Richard Nixon and Spiro Agnew has fallen...
...At present, politicians identified with the liberal camp are in more trouble than the Reaganites...
...his future lies in doing TV commercials for American Express...
...One can foresee the uses Ford will make of the contentious and unfastidious Dole...
...It is invincibly conservative...
...or if they do, then they come alive again with scarcely anybody noticing that they have been away...
...The man he beat out for the nomination, Richard Schweiker, is the saddest case of the campaign so far...
...Everyone seems agreed that the Republicans will lose this November —but not because liberalism is experiencing a resurgence...
...the flow of life seems to require it, and we can all learn something from that...
...His running mate, Robert Dole, has been awarded the high task of being to Ford for the next several weeks what Nixon was to Eisenhower, what Agnew was to Nixon...
...The main reason advanced for concern over the fading of one of our major parties is that, willy nilly, it leaves the other without some broad and salubrious competition...
...and they find themselves on the outskirts of the 1976 campaign...
...The candidate who chose him...
...What seems to me a source of concern is the role that liberals will be permitted under a Carter regime...
...It is the Easterners who are going to have to do the settling...
...The frontline troops have in recent decades been obliged to settle for a candidate such as Thomas Dewey or Dwight Eisenhower because they were backed by big money and had a better chance to win than the fabled Taft...
...A fair point—yet the Republican party, though small, is not crippled...
...Nothing in his record suggests that he has any larger aspiration...
...He speaks in phrases that most politicians have stopped abusing, and his vision of America does not extend much beyond the oil wells of Texas...
...It is true that the Republican personalities of the moment offer no competition to the memory of Abe Lincoln...
...True-believing Republicans have never been happy with the mildest Republican brand of liberal, however, or altogether comfortable with Easterners...
...Carter can be depended on to play them shrewdly, and for a while at least the temptation for liberals will be to go along with a victorious Administration, to take what is granted them and hope for more...
...Their summer love affair was a highlight of the Republican convention, almost as stirring as the competition between Mrs...
...He is a man of far-reaching limitations, which he has learned to live with by playing the political game in a most careful way...
...In the aftermath of Vietnam and Watergate, his unexciting personality is a plus of sorts...
...If we could believe that the demise of the GOP would mean an enlargement of generosity in Republican breasts, who would not welcome that...
...That fact in itself is no disaster...
...His charms may not wear all that well through the fall...
...Powerful Republicans who decline to give themselves to the cause...
...the platform his followers imposed upon the uncombative Republican "moderates" offers the choicest sampling of mean sentiments toward the outer world and the inner city that we have heard since the nomination of Barry Goldwater...
...It lived through the Roosevelt drought, so why should it not live through a Carter dry spell...
...Poor Schweiker, pretending to have been a closet conservative all these years, while he was receiving such high marks from the AFL-CIO...
...The Rightist Mood There are many less obnoxious figures in the Republican party, but it is the likes of Connally, not Senator Charles Percy of Illinois or Senator Charles Mathias of Maryland, who represents the deepest dreams of deepest-dyed Republicanism...
...The only mystery about Connally is why he takes himself seriously as a national candidate...
...They are seen as having failed the nation in their time of power...
...The very existence of a political party being problematic between elections, what exactly is it that one is supposed to grieve for—local politicians who may find themselves adrift...
...Perhaps he will prove to be another FDR, but if not, who will be doing the hard basic work of developing programs to meet the needs that may be shunted aside until the country is again ready for an activist Federal government...
...He resembles that tennisplaying opthalmologist who allowed himself to be castrated in hopes of winning tournaments in the female league...
...we have had sufficient excitement for a while...
Vol. 59 • September 1976 • No. 19
