POLITICS/BUS RIDE

...Senator Henry Jackson, Washington, campaigning for the Democratic Presidential nomination in Florida, advances his own anti-busing amendment in a desperate play for George Wallace's constituency, while some of the other candidates fumble for words that will satisfy black voters without alienating whites...

...Erwin Knoll Senator George McGovern's impressive showing in New Hampshire—he captured thirty-seven per cent of the vote—continues to demonstrate the great gulf between his standing in the polls and his standing with the people...

...Any such suggestion is unthinkable...

...The emotions and energies and talents expended on the busing controversy might well be directed toward examining a society that has not solved the fundamental problem of equitably distributing its vast wealth, and has not learned how to avoid poisoning its atmosphere or squandering its resources...

...SANE found the South Dakotan's record "clearly superior to those of all other candidates in the primaries...

...I say it's time we told the rest of the nation that we aren't caught up in the mania to stop busing at any cost, that we're trying to mature politically down here, that we know the real issues when we see them, and that we no longer will be fooled, frightened, and divided against ourselves...

...That goes without saying...

...Over the opposition of Governor Askew, the question went on the ballot, not only fueling the fires of bigotry in Florida but helping to pull out a bigger vote for George Wallace on primary day...

...Moreover, the variables are hardly likely to produce a more than 900 per cent difference between the poll's four per cent and the people's thirty-seven per cent...

...So the door is open wider than ever for corporations to funnel money to the parties by buying advertising...

...The Internal Revenue Service has warned Americans who contribute to political campaigns this year to insist on receipts if they want to claim a new Federal tax break...

...But since they have refused to do so...

...Lindsay called it "one of the saddest moments of the campaign that liberal Senators including Muskie, McGovern, and Humphrey will bend in this fashion"— but he himself, of course, was spared the necessity of making a choice on the Senate floor...

...As we pointed out editorially in our March issue, McGovern did up to seven times better in the Iowa and Arizona Democratic caucuses than he had in the last Gallup Poll preceding those caucuses...

...Senator McGovern's campaign organization has yielded to deserved criticism by retaping a campaign commercial to identify Robert Kennedy as the speaker...

...The plug for McGovern is part of a speech Robert Kennedy made in 1968 in supporting McGovern for reelection to the Senate...

...This leads big business, more than ever, to "buy into" the parties as a step toward "buying into" the next Administration...

...Critics, especially in the Muskie camp, have charged that McGovern organizers had deliberately omitted mention of the late Robert Kennedy's name to create the impression that the endorsement came from his brother, Senator Edward Kennedy...

...A reporter recounted Humphrey's bombshell to Ann Wexler, a Jewish campaign aide to Senator Edmund S. Muskie, who commented: "Ah, come on, you've got to be kidding...

...I have fought anti-Semitism all my life and I reject any support from any quarter tainted by that despicable social disease...

...No one should be deceived that the campaign against busing is anything but an attempt to bestow new legitimacy on the old pattern of separate but unequal schools...

...The National Board of SANE, the militant anti-war organization, is supporting Senator George McGovern for President...

...The Senate might well be deliberating on an economy that has not managed to sustain prosperity—in peacetime—or, for that matter, even in time of war...

...Millions of children in all regions and of every race are deprived of a meaningful, humane education...

...Senator Hubert H. Humphrey has discovered an urgent national issue that his rivals for the Democratic Presidential nomination seem to have overlooked...

...Senator Abraham Ribicoff, Connecticut Democrat, warned that the Mansfield-Scott amendment amounted to "public notice that we have given up the struggle to end discrimination...

...The President and his would-be successors who are so preoccupied with busing might well be pondering and proposing alternatives to a system that sends its young people off to police the world and condemns its old people to useless penury...

...his answer, therefore, was to render school desegregation relatively painless by removing all seats from the classroom...

...Speaking a month ago at a fund-raising dinner for the private Torah Day School in Miami, Florida, Humphrey came out four-square for kosher lunches for Jewish children...

...This is the overt motive of those who are pressing for an anti-busing amendment to the Constitution...

...And it could well turn out to be the result, if not the intent, of the milder Mansfield-Scott amendment which the Senate approved and sent to conference with the House of Representatives, since it opens some potential loopholes in the enforcement of desegregation orders...

...There would be no busing controversy," says Representative Shirley Chisholm, "if local school districts would furnish quality education to all of their children, both black and white, in good faith...

...No, not kidding, Ann, campaigning...

...Busing is the way the overwhelming majority of school children outside our central cities get to school...

...It is, rather, all about halting and, to whatever extent possible, reversing the pitifully slow progress that has been made in the last eighteen years toward racial justice in the nation's public schools...

...that cannot even provide its citizens with adequate health care...

...News stories suggesting that some of John Lindsay's recent activities in New York City which have offended some of that city's articulate Jews might make him the beneficiary of anti-Semitic support in Florida brought an angry rejoinder...

...It is, at best, an imperfect expedient for exacting a measure of compliance with the Supreme Court's 1954 desegregation ruling...

...but all awkwardness and inconvenience cannot be avoided in the interim period when remedial adjustments are being made to eliminate the dual school system...

...He told his colleagues: "Let's just be candid with ourselves and with the American people for once on this issue of school desegregation...

...I support busing as a legitimate temporary means to aid the integration of our public schools...

...Muskie, Humphrey, and Hartke have fuzzed their positions by drawing a nebulous distinction between racial desegregation (for which they would bus) and racial balance (for which they wouldn't...

...No one—least of all the Federal judges who have reluctantly imposed busing decrees—believes that busing is a panacea...

...President Nixon, deep into preparations for his trip to China, takes time out to appoint a Cabinet committee on the busing crisis and announces that he will soon produce A Solution...

...I was appalled by the story," Lindsay declared...

...Every fourth year the Republican and Democratic parties engage in the shabby practice of selling advertising space in the souvenir programs put together for the national conventions...

...His White House aide, Harry Dent, a specialist in Dixie politics, encouraged the Republican leadership in the Florida legislature to support a move to put an anti-busing referendum on the ballot for the March 14 Presidential primary...

...To be sure, there are factors that may explain some of the difference between McGovern's national rating and his showing in a single state primary, but some of these considerations tend to cancel one another out—in the case of New Hampshire, for example, the regional advantage for Senator Edmund Muskie versus McGovern's year-long campaigning in the Granite state...

...It amended the internal revenue code making the advertising purchases tax deductible as business expenses...

...Senator Walter F. Mondale, Minnesota Democrat, tried to inject a rational note during the Senate's recent near-catastrophic debate on busing...

...We have designated him our preferred candidate because of an outstanding and creative record of anti-militarism, based on a broad understanding of world politics and domestic realities...

...Who is campaigning on these issues...

...Why are Americans—who pay the kind of homage to their motor vehicles that older societies reserved for their household gods, who find their relaxation on the interstate highway system, who keep their cash in drive-in banks, and who buy their nourishment at drive-in restaurants—reduced to babbling incoherence by the prospect that their children may have to ride a bus to school...

...It was the barely concealed motive of those who sponsored the Griffin Amendment to the education aid act in the Senate last month...

...Political pundits gaze deep into their crystal balls and predict that busing will dominate the year's political issues, overshadowing the war and the state of the economy...

...The tragedy of the great busing debate—the tragedy of racism—is that it beguiles honest and sincerely troubled men and women into ignoring their genuine grievances and prevents them from acting in behalf of their real self-interest...

...There might well be some campaign talk about people's access to power—the power to form and manage their own communities, to control their own destinies, to lead their own lives...

...Or maybe it's the same thing...

...The GOP, it should be noted, has been trying to sell a $25,000 inside cover page in its convention program to the Sheraton Corporation, a subsidiary of ITT, the company which allegedly offered $400,000 to the Republican Convention in exchange for Justice Department approval of an ITT merger...

...The "vertical Negro plan," you may recall, was based on Golden's observation that white Southerners seemed reconciled to walking or standing with blacks, but fiercely resisted the notion of sitting with them...

...I hope we can say to those who would keep us angry, confused, and divided that we're more concerned about a problem of justice than about a problem of transportation, and that while we're determined to solve both, we're going to take justice...

...These are—or ought to be—the issues of politics...

...They rode 256,000 yellow buses 2.2 billion miles last year...

...Clearly this is not what the great furor over busing is all about...

...The remedy for such segregation may be administratively awkward, inconvenient, and even bizarre in some situations and may impose burdens on some...

...This year the GOP expects to sell $2 million worth of such advertising, nearly enough to pay for their convention, and the Democrats about $750,000 worth...

...As Mayor John V. Lindsay was swift to point out, his Senatorial rivals for the Democratic nomination "ran for cover" by voting for the Mansfield-Scott amendment—all except Senators Jackson and Vance Hartke, who did not even bother to show up for the vote...

...There is an education crisis in America, but it has nothing to do with the beleaguered bus...

...But all things are not equal in a system that has been deliberately constructed and maintained to enforce racial segregation...

...The old, familiar, yellow school bus, a fixture on the American landscape for at least half a century, has suddenly emerged as the national bugaboo—a piece of machinery even more formidable and frightening than the first Sputnik launched by the Soviets in 1957...

...A tax credit can be subtracted from a final tax bill while a deduction simply reduces taxable income...

...The annual cost of busing last year was $2.5 billion...

...Chief Justice Warren Burger, who can scarcely be counted among the nation's daring social innovators, has written: "All things being equal, with no history of discrimination, it might well be desirable to assign pupils to schools nearest to their homes...

...The new law allows a tax credit of up to $12.50 for individuals and $25 for couples or a deduction of $50 for individuals and $100 for couples...

...They are subjected to indifferent indoctrination in the rote skills required by a profit-oriented economy, and then disgorged from school to scratch out indifferent, indoctrinated, rote lives...

...Twenty million elementary and secondary school children are bused...

...When a party sells a convention advertisement, what else is it selling that the public doesn't know about...

...But neither do we want our children to grow up into a world of continuing racial discord, racial hatred, and, finally, a world of racial violence...

...Governor Wallace is, at least, candid: "You elect me on March 14," he told the Florida crowds, "and they're going to end busing in this country...

...The virtue of Golden's pray-as-you-ride plan is that it is no more frivolous—and considerably less dangerous—than the balderdash about busing being bandied about these days in the halls of Congress and sundry state legislatures, the inner sanctum of the White House, and wherever Presidential candidates gather to pick up a primary vote or two or a few points in the public opinion polls...

...Why...

...In particular, he appears to have the firmest commitment to the transfer of resources from military to civilian programs...

...Senate liberals tie themselves into parliamentary knots on the issue, and count it a triumph when they defeat one anti-busing amendment by adopting another...

...President Nixon, who had helped to incite and encourage the anti-busing campaign, displayed his hand most obviously in Florida...

...Then, in New Hampshire, he piled up thirty-seven per cent of the Democratic primary vote—a showing more than nine times stronger than the four per cent he received nationally in the last pre-primary Gallup Poll...

...And forty per cent of our school children—sixty-five per cent when those riding public transportation are included—ride to school for reasons that have nothing to do with school desegregation...

...The answer is surely not to be found in the politicians' demagoguery about "forced" and "massive" busing, or in their newly discovered reverence for "the concept of the neighborhood school...

...The politician who neglects them to engage in diversionary demagoguery is merely promising us a new lap of the journey we have been on for a long time now—a long, bumpy bus ride to nowhere...

...Golden's latest scheme, designed to allay the anxiety of busing opponents by playing to their piety, is just as simple: a constitutional amendment that would permit pupils to pray while riding on a school bus...

...That's a question the media should address to the national chairmen of both parties...

...In 1968, after critics had assailed the practice by pointing out that corporations bought the space as a way of making otherwise illegal contributions to political parties, Congress incredibly sanctified this dodge...

...In the view of both parties, that cleared up the legal problem...

...This, he declared, "must be viewed as a basic right . . . not a privilege or a luxury," and he added: "I call, here and now, for the President to issue an executive order specifying that Federally funded meal programs must provide kosher foods for all who want it...

...All of the school desegregation decrees handed down to date in the Deep South, Senator Mondale pointed out, have raised the region's proportion of children being transported by bus to three per cent above the national average...

...POLITICS BUS RIDE Harry Golden, the North Carolina sage whose "vertical Negro plan" helped deflate the racist hysterics of the 1950s, has come up with an equally ingenious idea for coping with the current uproar over busing...

...Who is campaigning for office on this urgent issue...

...McGovern and Eugene McCarthy have been bolder in defending busing, although neither has been as eloquent as Florida's Democratic Governor Reubin Askew, who told the people of his state: "Of course we don't want our children to suffer unnecessary hardships...

...that taxes the poor to subsidize the rich...