Off the Campaign Trail
MARGOLIS, RICHARD J.
States of the Union OFF THE CAMPAIGN TRAIL BY RICHARD J. MARGOLIS Here are some random notes I took during the early days of the current Presidential campaign, before I grew discouraged. They...
...but then he got to be President, and before you could turn around he'd passed that damn-fool integration law...
...September 9. Just three days since Labor Day, and already the tide is turning...
...He is the Peter Pan of Presidential campaigns, more debonair than Harold Stassen, peskier than George Wallace...
...I favored it when it was proposed, but now I wonder...
...I find him offensive...
...Nixon had suffered enough, Ford said...
...He won't stand for no busing nonsense...
...Support the President," proclaimed the bumper stickers?and most American voters were happy to comply...
...So the day after the election he emerged as a prophet with honor in his own land, a territory the Tribune was pleased to call "The Upper Midwest...
...You only say that because you like Hubert," she told him...
...A young pollster seeking fame and fortune would be smart to predict a Ford victory...
...Two years ago the Congress approved Gerald Ford's appointment as Vice President because of all possible choices he seemed the least likely ever to run for President...
...The winner will be the man who's not running—Hubert Humphrey...
...If he were wrong, people would quickly forget...
...Now you take LBJ...
...Voting is not a puberty rite...
...It beats me why, but Gallup and Roper have missed the boat...
...Kennedy is the only city-born President we have elected since William Howard Taft, of Cincinnati...
...Doesn't he know my whole career's at stake...
...That cabbie, I have concluded, spoke a perverse truth...
...That is how statistician Louis H. Bean did it in 1948...
...Especially when it comes to matters having to do with the colored...
...Carter's Playboy interview is strewn with such ancient oddities as "sin," "lust" and "humility...
...Ford has been the most persistent nay-sayer in White House history, a chief executive with a handy ballpoint pen in search of a policy...
...If Jimmy wants to throw the election he'll have to find a better way...
...Nixon embracing Mao...
...I respectfully sought him out...
...His wife disagreed...
...Who believed back then that Ford would come so far by doing so little...
...Four years later Ed and I were still holding forth in the journalism school (he was teaching...
...If we are to have a children's crusade, though, Gene McCarthy seems the ideal candidate...
...lack of experience makes one an Augie March, the kid with "a weak sense of consequences...
...Well, an adultery in the heart may be worth two in the bed...
...All the polls say so...
...they looked distinguished and cheerful...
...That's easy," he confidently answered...
...He's from Michigan...
...he will pardon Vietnam deserters...
...David Brinkley assured us last night that the debate contained "nothing new," the ultimate putdown of journalists and advertising executives...
...First he told me he was a Southerner through and through...
...A mediocre poet and a wretched politician, McCarthy may nonetheless emerge as the spoiler of Carter's master plan...
...He was crying into his suds: "Why can't he be vague and inconsequential the way he used to be...
...He issued the 56th this morning...
...if he happened to be right, his reputation would be assured...
...Youth seeks ideological finality (McCarthy), while maturity settles for ad hoc tentatives (Carter and Ford...
...It's what happens to a born Southerner once he gets up here and sets foot in the White House...
...The medium is the message, and the message is that the debate was just a spectator sport, like the Super Bowl...
...He didn't hesitate...
...It is hard to be a centrist nowadays...
...Bean's affectionate hint that the pundit's wish may have been father to his prediction reminds me of my quondam journalism professor, Ed Emory, who was possibly the only other writer in America to have correctly prophesied the outcome of the 1948 race...
...In any case, to judge from history, the White House is not a sexual fidelity institute...
...Adhering to one's heritage may be fine in theory, yet it is absent from the White House, possibly the only place in America where the Melting Pot actually works...
...Political opiates are the religion of the young...
...I just say that because it's true," he replied...
...People tell me there's a New South nowadays.' "It's not the new South or the old South I'm worried about," he said...
...Surely there is something curious and corkscrewish in our political system that compels leaders to repudiate their origins by bending over backward: Kennedy coming out for planned parenthood...
...September 10...
...Every time he opens his mouth he loses votes...
...The view suits the medium and its habitually smart-ass newscasters, who would sooner trivialize the news than report it...
...Surely he is the worst President we never elected...
...Was the 18-year-old voter amendment a good idea...
...I suppose most of his supporters are young and idealistic...
...September 24...
...Only half of all citizens ages 18-29 are registered to vote, compared to 72 per cent of those 30-49 and 85 per cent of those 50 and older...
...People keep telling me that Ford is "likeable...
...September 8. This morning a Washington cabbie presented me with an entirely new version of Southern Rim politics...
...for most of us it is a deadly serious commitment, an act of public consequence taken in absolute privacy...
...Adlai Stevenson,' he said...
...and Kelley, who indiscretely allowed Federal workmen to decorate his house, had already learned his lesson...
...Two negatives make an affirmative, or so grammarians tell us...
...He said he had "looked on a lot of women with lust" and had "committed adultery in my heart many times...
...Our national politicians, it appears, feel they cannot afford to be associated with a single ethnic or regional quirk...
...I demurred...
...It is a sign of maturity," wrote Santayana, "to be able to live in an unfinished world...
...rooms are too cold...
...He published an article in the Nation, amid much derision, that flatly predicted Truman would beat Dewey...
...The majority of 18-year-olds I'm acquainted with are still struggling toward adulthood: We have given them the pill, the key to the family car and the vote?but in what they have yet to learn and to achieve or botch, they remain children...
...but what would they say about 56 negatives—the number of vetoes Ford has slapped on bills passed by the Congress...
...You can never trust a President from the South," he said...
...It's got to be Truman,' he kept muttering as he shifted pins...
...September 7. Everyone thinks Jimmy Carter is a shoe-in...
...There is agreement among TV commentators this morning that the 28-minute sound failure during last night's Ford-Carter debate was the highpoint of the show...
...September 13...
...September 21...
...The Democrats were then busy goring each other in Presidential primaries, so I asked Bean who he thought the nominee would be...
...It is driving some of his supporters crazy...
...TV teaches us to smirk at politics, then tells us in shocked tones that 70 million eligible voters may stay away from the polls this election...
...I was planning to place some shrewd bets based on his '52 divinations...
...Although Ed never told us freshmen how he did it, we noticed that his office walls were covered with charts and maps and that he had stuck a lot of mysterious pins into the maps...
...I asked him what he thought of Gerald Ford...
...He resembled Arthur Goldberg, only comelier...
...and all those rural-born chief executives masquerading as dedicated urbanites...
...This afternoon I had a beer with a young lawyer friend who is doing a bit of research for the Carter campaign, which he hopes will get him a job in the new administration...
...I tell you, you can't trust a Southern President...
...There was a a guy, a Texan, who knew how to keep the nigras in their place...
...Who's it going to be this time, Ed...
...This strategy could pay off, as it did for Nixon four years ago...
...Several months ago I was introduced to Bean and his wife...
...I lost a small fortune...
...Only twice during his stint in the White House has he demonstrated compassion for another human being—first for Nixon, whom he pardoned, and then for Clarence Kelley of the FBI, whom he let off the hook...
...There is hardly a misdeed Ford will not forgive, provided it is committed by a political colleague...
...Carter is getting roughed up by the antiabortionists, not because he favors abortions but because he doesn't disfavor them enough...
...I asked...
...Experience lowers one's expectations...
...They are the jottings, by and large, of a bemused bystander...
...Ed was lucky enough to have had his forecast printed in a late-October issue of the Minneapolis Tribune...
...Then he let it be known that he would not vote for Jimmy Carter...
...he will fire Earl Butz...
...Ford's all right," came the answer...
...Bean had the next-to-last laugh, just before Truman's...
...He will not support an antiabortion amendment...
...One of the polls assesses Gene McCarthy's voting strength at 7 per cent...
...Carter, who swept the primaries by saying nothing (and saying it rather badly), seems now to have developed a taste for specificity...
...Kissinger wooing the Arabs...
...Ford, meanwhile, stays in the White House, sniffing petals in the Rose Garden and acting like the President...
...The price of Watergate, like the price of nearly everything else these days, continues to rise...
...I was simply hanging around), and Ed was again playing Saurat to his political wall-maps...
...Mrs...
Vol. 59 • October 1971 • No. 20
