The Road Ahead
The Road Ahead OUR ESTEEMED contemporary, The New Republic, has graded the recently adjourned Eighty-ninth as "the B plus Congress-not excellent, better than fair, very good," We are inclined...
...In addition, some of the more cautious Northern Democrats, who have supported Administration bills with faint heart, may interpret the election returns in a way that will send them wobbling over to the center or the conservative side...
...They are Charles H. Percy of Illinois, Mark O. Hatfield of Oregon, Howard W. Baker of Tennessee, and Edward W. Brooke of Massachusetts...
...We will, rather, have many regional groupings, and personal followings which may loosely band together every four years to try to elect a President wearing a party label...
...The four new Republican Senatorsone su:ceeded a fellow Republican, accountmg for the net gain of threeare all moderate to liberal...
...Indeed, the elections this year gave the Republicans a somewhat stronger position than they had in the Eighty-seventh Congress in 1961-62 when the conservative coalition was able to block or water down much of the legislation proposed by the Kennedy Administration...
...These results-and there were others like them-do not indicate that the country repudiated President Johnson's position on Vietnam...
...In a news conference just before the election, President Johnson asserted that it was inconceivable that "the decision of the election could in any way change the government's policy in Vietnam...
...In the recent elections, the Republicans captured forty-seven seats formerly held by Democrats, most of whom were supporters of Great Society legislation...
...and which are now promoting a reconcentration of income and wealth in the hands of a relative few...
...Yet this is the overwhelmingly important problem of our time . . . . "The pursuit of social justice here at home has been slowed for want of money...
...Senator...
...Brooke is the first Negro elected by direct vote of the people to "the world's most exclusive club...
...The speech was remarkable because Senator Gore, in calling for a basic political realignment in the country, criticized his own Democratic Party as much as he did the Republicans...
...Otherwise, we will break our system down to a point where there will be no truly national political parties...
...The Road Ahead OUR ESTEEMED contemporary, The New Republic, has graded the recently adjourned Eighty-ninth as "the B plus Congress-not excellent, better than fair, very good," We are inclined to go along with that evaluation, if it is confined to domestic affairs, but we prefer to call it the foot-in-the-door Congress because so many of the laws it passed represent a significant if modest effort to cross a threshold of social welfare legislation that had long been barred by the coalition of conservative Democrats and Republicans...
...The most constructive criticism, the most restraining influences, upon the Executive during this session of Congress have come from the liberal Democrats...
...Thus, Hatfield of Oregon, the nearest to a dove among the nation's governors, defeated Representative Robert Duncan, who campaigned as an out-and-out Administration hawk, for U.S...
...What is urgently needed just now, as Senator Gore put it, is for "the Democratic Party to re identify its course...
...In Arkansas, Winthrop Rockefeller, also a moderate, triumphed over Jim Johnson, a bitterend segregationist, to become the first Republican governor in that state in nearly a hundred years...
...stands for nothing...
...How can there be a real two-party political system when the supposedly liberal party, the Democrats, so crowds the middle, so to speak, that it finds itself in right field on tax and fiscal matters, counts among its members the most conservative members of both House and Senate, and tolerates the nation's most reactionary governors...
...Summing up the impact of racism on the election, Dr...
...Senator Cooper of Kentucky, an opponent of escalation in Vietnam, won easily...
...As for the Senate, it will remain a largely liberal body, although some of its most powerful committees will continue to be led by Dixiecrats...
...How can one party accommodate at one time the most liberal and the most conservative and yet stand in unity for something or anything really...
...It showed up mostly in urban precincts inhabited by blue('ollar workers who cast a significantly larger-thall-usual vote for Republican candidates...
...the cru cial struggle ahead will be largely a rear guard action to preserve the gains of the past two years and prevent the conservative coalition from starving promising new programs to death...
...The Republicans gained three seats this year, to bring the division to sixty-four Democrats and thirty-six Republicans...
...In New Hampshire, a retired Republican general, Harrison R. Thyng, who advocated enlargement of the war, was decisively defeated by the incumbent, Democratic Senator Thomas J. Meln" tyre...
...Pollsters sounding public opinion on the eve of the election often heard something that went like this: "I am sick and tired of having to choose the lesser of two evils...
...Much the same trend prevailed in the gubernatorial contests where moderate Republicans were largely successful...
...Each of the two minor parties piled up more than a half-million votes, with the Liberals polling some 10,000 more than the Conservatives...
...The general appearance of the Republican Party as it emerged from the 19.66 elections was that of a respectable, mIddle-of-the-road organization-in contrast to the extreme right-wing appearance that Barry Goldwater gave it m 1964 when he led his party to disaster...
...Martin Luther King Jr...
...In Dearborn, Michigan, the only place in the country where the voters were given a chance to vote directly on the issue itself, a surprising forty per cent cast their ballots for withdrawal of U.S...
...He was right, of course, partly because he intended to have his own way, whatever the outcome, and partly because he knew that no mandate could emerge from the polls since most of the candidates of both parties were ducking the Issue...
...Many of the most forward-looking achievements of the last Congress squeezed through the House of Representatives by as few as twenty-five votes...
...It is against this background that a remarkable, almost unnoticed speech in the closing weeks of the Eighty-ninth Congress takes on added interest...
...Four moderate to liberal incumbent Republican Senators were reelected-Senators Clifford Case of New Jersey, Margaret Chase Smith of Maine John Sherman Cooper of Kentucky...
...The election of Mrs...
...The Republican Party...
...To improve housing for the poor, to rebuild our cities, to educate our young people to acceptable levels, to retrain our mature men and women for jobs appropriate to our automated and cybernetic economy, to care for our unproductive elderly in a manner suitable to a civilized society, are objectives which call for expenditures of large sums of money...
...The hope of progressive forces that the cautious legislative beginnings of the Eighty-ninth Congress would be measurably strengthened by the Nineti eth Congress have faded now...
...troops from Vietnam...
...President Johnson, he asserted, "has adopted the traditional economic policies of the Republican Party, and his Secretary of the Treasury has advocated and implemented such policies which have led to our present sorry plight, characterized by tax favoritism, tight money, high interest rates, and dislocations which threaten the stability of our economy...
...We should have some consistency and unity of philosophy by which each party is governed...
...On the other hand, Dr...
...Most of the eighty-two Southern Democratic Congressmen who will be returning in January usually vote against the Administration on major social legislation, and together with the strengthened Republican bloc in the House, will revive the old conservative co~tlition that long barred the way to progressive legislation until the antiGoldwater landslide of 1964 swept a liberal majority into the House...
...Of the GOP he said that it "consistently takes a negative rather than a constructive pOSItIOn...
...The speaker was Senator Albert Gore, the articulate, liberal Democrat from Tennessee...
...The new Congress, it seems clear, will support the President's adventure in Vietnam in much the same way as did its predecessor...
...It is only in this way that we can release the na tion's energies and resources for the larger struggle that beckons America~ the struggle to achieve the Great SOCI ety at home and provide meaningful assistance to the underdeveloped na tions of the world...
...Lurleen Wallace in Alabama, the conservative Claude R. Kirk Jr...
...I t is one of the tragic ironies of the recent election campaig'n that on the issue which the polls reveal as disturbing them most, the people had little if anything to choose...
...Some of the measures are no more t?an feeble beginnings, and many are fmanced with pitifully inadequate appropriations, but as a whole they represent an historic breakthrough in such critical areas as education, health, housing, poverty, transportation, conservati?n, immigration, urban development, hIghway safety, truth-in-packaging, automobile safety, and Federal assistance for the arts and humanities...
...with the welfare of all the people...
...Percy in Illinois conducted his drive on a platform that emphasized peace-seeking in contrast to Senator Paul H. Douglas' warlike stance...
...In the parliamentary-party systems of Europe, this would represent a comfortable working majority for the party in power...
...Turning to his own party, Senator Gore said he spoke with "sadness and regret...
...In New York, which has shown greater hospitality to new parties than any other state in recent years, more than a million voters rejected both major parties to vote for the Liberal or Conservative slate-a showing which The New York Times characterized as "astonishing...
...King said...
...On the other hand, the backlash was not much apparent in Massachusetts, where Brooke won handily, and in two other state races where it was expected to be a major factor...
...I see no clear path to peace...
...King said, "despite appeals to bigotry of an intensity and vulgarity never before witnessed in the North, millions of white voters remained unshaken in their commitment to decency...
...Scarcely disguised appeals to prejudice and bigotry became an accepted practice in many electoral campaigns," Dr...
...The problem of peace in the world is as acute as ever...
...What they do suggest is that there is considerable concern among Americans who want their government to emphasize peacemaking more than it has-a fact that can hardly delight Hanoi and Peking, which have shown little enthusiasm up to now for a negotiated settlement...
...But the election...
...The one significant exception this year was Ronald Reagan, who won a landslide victory over Governor Brown of California, but even in this case it ,:~s the skillful efforts of Reagan's pubIIClty staff to black out his reactionary record and have him masquerade as a moderate that contributed to his triumph...
...The tragedy of the November 8 elec tion results is that the foot-in-the-door achieved by the Eighty-ninth Congress may be stuck just there for at least the next two years, and, indeed, may have to be withdrawn altogether in some cases...
...In thirty-five races for governor the Republicans won twenty-three and the Democrats eleven, with one contest that in Georgia, still unresolved at thi~ writing...
...Even this function, a negative one at best, is not being effectively performed...
...In Maryland, Spiro Agnew, a moderate Republican, defeated George P. Mahoney, who had campaigned almost exclusively on his opposition to open occupancy legislation...
...Many voters felt they were cheated of a meaningful choice on other issues as well...
...That, in fact, is what we now have...
...and Robert Griffin of Michigan...
...We gave up, ' at the Federal level, the funds necessary for these tasks when a Democratic Congress, under the leadership of a President elected as the Democratic nominee, passed the massive tax reduction bill in 1964, primarily for the benefit of the rich and the very rich .. .. "We should, in my view, have a realignment of parties and party affiliations...
...Neither of our two political parties, I am sorry to say, is charting a productive, promising foreign policy...
...And the situation needs remedying...
...in Florida, and Ronald Reagan in California . . . are indicative that large segments of America still suffer from a repulsive moral disease that must be cured before our moral health can be restored...
...But in the United States the Democrats are not so much a party as a coalition of parties shaped by history and geography...
...President Johnson can best move in that direction by greatly expanding the Administration's efforts to seek a negotiated settlement of the war in Vietnam...
...results in some parts of the country suggest a growing demand for a greater emphasis on negotiation as opposed to escalation of the conflict...
...There is much in Senator Gore's an alysis that is sound and has long needed saying by so respected a political figure...
...said that while he saw much that discouraged him, "some most encouraging developments took place to more than offset the negative side...
...The white backlash was plainly a factor in the election outcome, but not so great as many thoughtful Americans had feared...
...The Democratic majority in the House remains substantial-248 to 187 as compared with the margin of 295 to 140 in the last Congress...
...The political arithmetic is quite simple...
...But despite scattered bits of evidence of third party activity and slowly mounting pressures for basic realign ment, the prospects for the years just ahead are not bright...
...The only excuse for the Republican Party's existence at this moment is to furnish some sort of opposition to, and a check upon, the Democratic Party...
...The victorious Brooke in Massachusetts stressed the need for negotiations with the Veitcong's National Liberation Front...
Vol. 30 • December 1966 • No. 12
