The People, Yes
Editorial
The People, Yes Editorial "you shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free" A merica moves into mid-passage of the Nixon Administration with the country in a more realistic mood about...
...The Democrats must resolve the future of their party within the next two years, deciding whether to move forward with their most promising new leaders—such men as George McGov-ern of South Dakota and Harold The Lesson The lesson of the last election, as of previous elections, is that Democrats cannot win as a pale, indecisive imitation of the GOP...
...In Maryland, Senator Joseph D. Tydings sought to neutralize the opposition of gun lobbyists and other right-wing extremists by sponsoring repressive anti-crime legislation for the District of Columbia...
...It was, equally, an assumption that there was no need to deal with it in realistic terms, to talk of specific programs or courses of action, so long as the proper changes were rung on the emotional chimes...
...Anything better than losing thirty House seats and breaking even in the Senate would mean success," Vice President Agnew claimed just before the election...
...The national dialogue was, if anything, more rational in June than in November...
...New Democratic governors and heavily reinforced Democratic contingents in state legislatures will play a major role in the important process of redistricting on the basis of 1970 census results...
...In brief, the voters in much of the country displayed more independence and, more good sense than the politicians or the "experts" gave them credit for...
...Only time will tell the effect of the marginal Republican Senate gains, but we strongly suspect they will not provide the "philosophical majority" for which the President campaigned...
...Louis Post-Dispatch November 8, 1970 Hughes of Iowa—or remain content with the stagnant politics—and politicians—of the past...
...And the general Democratic response was to run for cover, shouting "me, too...
...It was the Administration's contention, as the campaign drew to a close and its hopes for a massive triumph faded, that it was bucking the historic trend under which the party holding the White House loses Congressional seats in an off-year...
...We wait and wonder which new Nixon will emerge from the debris of 1970...
...If we are fortunate, environmental protection may yet emerge as a major political issue of the 1970s...
...One of the most hopeful developments was the defeat of half the members of the "dirty dozen"—the twelve members of Congress singled out by conservation groups for their total disdain of the nation's natural heritage...
...Max Rafferty, long a symbol of jingoistic know-nothingism, lost to a black candidate, Wilson C. Riles...
...And yet, surprisingly, the fear-and-smear campaign did not work well, Mr...
...In California, Governor Ronald Reagan, the founding father of Mr...
...The distortion of reality, the debasement of language, the dissemination of misleading or utterly meretricious claims—these are, unfortunately, attributes of most political campaigns...
...This, like so many of the Vice President's utterances, was an oversimplification amounting to falsehood, for Mr...
...If he learned any pragmatic lesson from the campaign it must be that people are less easily diverted from the real needs of the country than he believed, and that neither massive use of television nor appeals to the dark side of the American character can re-elect him in 1972...
...In Texas, a conservative Democratic candidate for the Senate defeated an equally conservative Republican, Representative George Bush, whom some White House aides have been touting as an up-and-coming figure in national politics...
...he didn't bother talking to blacks...
...Dangerous Pollution The President and Vice President Agnew — Nixon's "Nixon" — set the tone...
...It was a rare candidate —Republican or Democratic—who felt called upon to discuss, frankly and intelligently, the pressing problems confronting this troubled land...
...It was an assumption of both major parties that the election would turn on this conglomeration called the "social issue...
...It would be hard to find two less appropriate words...
...Their frenzied cross-country tours put on display, in person and by . proxy, the "old Nixon" so familiar to serious students of political pathology...
...The Vice President went to the booze-and-bunko capital of Las Vegas to inveigh against the "creeping permissiveness" of the "drug culture...
...And the House of Representatives, which has lagged far behind the Senate in recent years in addressing itself to the nation's needs, is bound to be a somewhat more progressive body...
...The People, Yes Editorial "you shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free" A merica moves into mid-passage of the Nixon Administration with the country in a more realistic mood about its problems than its leaders are...
...The returns from the South spelled bad news for the President's Southern Strategy...
...One function of electoral politics in a democracy, we have always believed, is to help create a citizenry enlightened —or at least informed—on the major issues of the day...
...Nixon's "victory" claim notwithstanding...
...He managed, to be sure, to drive from the Senate one of its most able and courageous members, Albert Gore of Tennessee, and to purge his own party's Senatorial candidate in New York, the outspokenly independent Charles Goodell, in favor of Conservative James Buckley...
...Dear, did he say which candidates are FOR bombing, burning, rioting, and mugging...
...What remains to be seen is whether the election outcome will contribute to the creation of a more responsive political system in the United States...
...There are at least a few favorable signs...
...he lost...
...The President went to Dixie to assure white Southerners that his Administration would not treat them as "second-class citizens...
...Both forces were much in evidence during the recent campaign...
...In Illinois, Adlai Stevenson III jammed an American flag into his lapel, embraced Mayor Richard J. Daley, boasted of his gun collection, and won the Senate seat held by Republican Ralph T. Smith...
...Such Senators as Charles Percy of Illinois, Clifford Case of New Jersey, Edward Brooke of Massachusetts, and Mark Hatfield of Oregon—all up for reelection in 1972—are now on notice that they must build their own constituencies, independent of the White House and the national party...
...Despite President Nixon's whistling-in-the-graveyard chatter about a "moral victory" and "ideological gains" in the recent elections, the most readily identifiable result was the nearly solid refusal of the people to be tricked by the political pied pipers...
...In South Carolina, Senator Strom Thurmond's protege, Representative Albert Watson, lost a bid for the governorship...
...The campaign was, from beginning to end, an exercise in immorality...
...Nixon, unlike any other President in modern American history, failed to bring his own Congressional majority with him when he was elected...
...He prides himself on being a political realist, and we are certain that he is not talking about "moral victory" in his private deliberations...
...But the lesson also is that they can win, where it counts, with vigorous young liberals who articulate progressive answers to real contemporary problems...
...Tom Wicker of The New York Times described it—correctly, we believe—as "the most depressing election campaign of recent times—one so shabby in most of its aspects that it is tempting to call it unworthy of the American people...
...In many contests, though by no means all, they were able to overcome the pressures of costly, computerized Madison Avenue campaigns, as well as the lure of fright tactics and cheap sloganeering...
...Nixon's "law-and-order" strategy, ran behind moderate Republicans on his ticket...
...In New York, Goodell and Mayor John V. Lindsay could serve as the potential nucleus of a third political force...
...If he is capable of growth he will stop dealing with the gimmicky or public relations aspect of the nation's problems and start dealing with the heart of the problems themselves...
...Few Democrats running for office felt any obligation to meet the Nixon-Agnew rhetoric head-on...
...They were particularly prevalent in the shoddy appeals offered up to the nation's electorate in 1970...
...Toward this end, the 1970 campaign can only have had a negative effect...
...At a time when the United States is still bogged down in the most cruel and immoral war it has ever waged, when the historic promises of racial justice remain unfulfilled, when the air and waters are poisoned and polluted, when many millions continue to live in miserable poverty and a shaky economy threatens to increase their ranks by millions more, the political campaign was dominated by scare-talk and blather about "permissiveness" and "radical-liberals" and "pornography" and "law-and-order...
...If the results of the 1970 election fell short of providing a reason for optimism, they at least furnished no further basis for despair...
...The President, we suspect, will not be unmindful of political considerations as he ponders which course to follow...
...Nixon's homes-away-from-home, where both he and the Vice President had campaigned extensively, racist Republican candidates were defeated by moderate Democrats...
...There were other encouraging signs in the election returns...
...It was, therefore, in keeping with the worst aspects of the campaign for President Nixon publicly to describe the election results as a "moral victory" for his Administration and the Republican Party...
...For better or worse, however, the dominant role in the next two years will be President Nixon's...
...That means, above all, nominating clear-headed liberal candidates, who face the future rather than the past, and unambiguously reject the timorous defensiveness too often exhibited by Democrats in the face of reactionary attack...
...The net effect, we believe, of the Nixon-Agnew assault on Senator Goodell will be to strengthen rather than weaken those independent Republicans who have every reason to fear that their names might appear in the future on an Administration purge-list...
...Nixon has broad latitude to make basic decisions between now and 1972—decisions about war and peace, about poverty and prosperity, about reordering or neglecting the national priorities, about leading the nation or frightening it...
...But the Administration suffered a setback in the House, and a near-rout in statehouses around the nation...
...Given the President's extraordinary campaign efforts and the money invested—Republican Congressional candidates, it is estimated, outspent Democrats by a margin of five-to-one—it would have been reasonable to expect substantial Republican gains...
...his sidekick, Senator George Murphy, was decisively defeated by John V. Tunney, and the state's Superintendent of Public Instruction, Dr...
...In Florida, one of Mr...
Vol. 34 • December 1970 • No. 12
