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Tuesday, November 7, 1972
University Daily Kansan
KANSAN comment Voter Knowledge
On an election day it's inevitable that the appropriate topic for an editorial will be some aspect of the elections. It would be redundant to review the merits of the promises made by candidates since most people will have already decided who will get their votes. The important thing is for most people to 'X' their ballots or pull the levers.
Today the candidates take a passive role and let the citizens of this country become active in politics. All those citizens who know the candidates and what they stand for should act upon them, not because it is difficult to indicate what they think the government should be. Although the government is an oversized conglomerate of bureaues and offices, it does have an influence over the private lives of us all. It alters our paychecks, plans our streets, picks up our trash and educates our children. It's not easy to tell why we don't profound influence on our lives. What is easy to forget is that the government is not an "it" but rather a "they."
Since the government is composed of other people it is important for those who do have some understanding of the process and how to be necessary for everyone to vote—only
those who know who and what they are voting for. The presidential candidates have made their promises common knowledge for anyone who cares to read a newspaper or watch television. Unfortunately, the promises of candidates for local offices are not so well known. Some candidates have helped voters by encouraging their platform advertisements in paid advertisements. Others have skipped the explanations and merely shown their faces. Nevertheless, there is information available on all candidates. It is up to the voter to find it.
There is precious little merit in urging everyone to vote. The emphasis should be on knowing the issues and the qualifications of individual candidates. Unfortunately, again, voters cannot understand these issues and find through osmosis—some interest and active searching for the information is required.
To vote stupidity or mechanically is almost as useless as not voting at all. It may be too late for this election but an informed electorate may yet provide the necessary power and balance on the now awesome power of national and local government.
—Mary Ward
The Election Discussed
Garry Wills
One View . . .
It is a new kind of defeat, where even local victories will only rub salt into Mcevern's wounds.
He might win three states, putting him one up on AlF Landon. What state would be third—Hawaii? He could grace of the very thing McGovern aimed all his moral lightning bolts against—the Daley machine's need to have one of his own officials in county prosecutive office. What a way to "win" something, even while losing!
or two states, South Dakota the second? He was losing it late in the game. Will people come out of pit, rather than pride?
How many states will he win?
One, Massachusetts? Even that
would be wrong.
Kennedy's victory, a blind vote of
hope for tomorrow, when a viable
candidate leads the party.
Then simply be Teddy's first leap up.
Let's be generous. Say he wins four states or five. Still under Goldwater's record. McGovens the people resented the Goldwater comparison last spring, Ironic, Goldwater's favor! And Goldwater's water! And maybe might figure in here? West Virginia, -perhaps -if Jay Rockefeller can drag his coattails across the finish line with all ten inertions of McGovens burden on them. If, on the contrary, even they lose losses, he will be only one (but not two) behind McGovens's blight cast on other candidates unlucky enough to share a Party label with him.
I grant there will be a last-mile closing of the numerical gap. I think he will finally get up into the fortes on the percentage of total votes cast. Give him that, and he'll be happy that (he only pulled 38 per cent of the populace on election day). But, after all, Mogern is at
least trying, and Goldwater was—by the end—out to lunch. But the name of the game is that of a lawyer who McGovern's people, when his polls did not climb, said he might best sneak in by electoral shenanigans canceling the election or by prior liberal pieties about "one man, one vote," and trusting the choice of "The People"). Once again how crushing to lose even a minor electoral than in the popular count.
How come so bad an outcome after so big claims? Delusion, obviously. And the first instinct of them is to deny reality, by is deny, to direct, to raise irrelevant issues and nonleighening "explanations." The analyses will be as wild as the predictions were. We were told that students should electoral college; we shall be "explained to" in terms of accident (e.g., Eagley), malice (the President sabotaged not only MGovern but the whole country), bought, and Democrats lacked the cash), a Machiavellian timing (the Administration screwed everything up by doing so in critical asks—bringing peace).
All that will be nonsense
menton's effect was mainly on true believers. Any small advantage the Administration sharpened got from illegally reading Larry O'Brien's mail was canceled by disgust for their trick. Both Democrats have withdrawn without money (besides, the money wasn't there because McGovern was perceived as a loser).
The war could have been settled earlier, but the proof of that is too complex to convey in the heat of a campaign—even if people would sit still to hear it. The populace has merely asked
for an excuse to forget the war—and Nixon gave them that.
Ironic, finally, how the failure of the new politics will be explained in old terms as lack of leadership and the incumbent's advantage.
The truth is McGovern won the nomination by a set of unrepresentative procedures that precluded a win in November. He was not given the opportunity to it into the center. His first supporters loved him for being (or seeming) far out from the conventional politics. They clogged his efforts to move into the center, and he never imagined the image is what principally offended Middle America—not inconsistency, Eagleton or opposition to the war. We simply do not elect people who are our allies because we down to our level to win our votes; and Nixon started there.
The Palace of a Chief Minister, is a Seminary to breed up others in his own Trade: The Pages, to become Ministers of State in their several Districts, and learn to excel in the three princi- plics: writing, lying, and Bribery. Accordingly, they have a Court paid to them by Persons of the best rank; and sometimes by the Force of Dexterity and strength. Gradations to be Successors to their Lord.
(C) Universal Press Syndicate 1972
Voter Morals
—Jonathan Swift from Gullivers Travels;
"AVoyage to the Country of
the Hoyuhnhnms"
I told him, that a First or Chief Minister of State, whom I intended to describe, was a Creature wholly from Joy and Grief, Love and Hairied, and Anger; at least he is aware of the other two in my Desire of Wealth, Power, and Titles; That he applies his Words to all Uses, except to the Indication of his Mind; That he never tells a Truth, nor has he spoken of it. Nor does he lye; nor a Lye, but with a Design that you should take it for a Truth; That those he speaks worst of behind their Backs, are in the surest way to Prevent them from your Attention to others or to your self, you are from that day forlorn. The worst Mark you can receive is a Promise, especially when it is confirmed with an Agent, who is very wise Man retires, and gives over all Hopes.
Like Gulliver, many Americans seem to have come to accept corruption in government and politics, and speak of it just as matter-of-factly as Gulliver. Yet we have, every four years, an opportunity to change our own Chief Minister—an option not available to Gulliver.
No other method comes so close to reading the American political pulse than a presidential election. While we can argue the relative powers of the President—most agree that it is the President, and how he guides his administration, that sets the moral and intellectual spirit of the country. Or, it is argued, the President is simply a reflection of the mood of the country.
—Thomas E. Slaughter
Regardless, today we chose, and if the pollsters are correct in predicting a Nixon landslide—it should be left to the sociologists and psychologists to tell us how—like Gulliver—we have come to accept corruption with a casual shrug.
WASHINGTON—In another few hours, relatively speaking, the lights will go down; the cleaning crews will sweep out the last littered hall; George of Dakota and the campaign will have ended at last. I thought it never would.
By all the usual indications, we can look for a landscape on Tuesday. This is the consensus of the news magazines and the professional pollsters. They are hinting at the lively possibility that Nixon will win the States and lose only the District of Columbia. My own seat-of-the-puss guess is Nixon, 54 percent; McGovern, 44, and everyone else, maybe 2. If these collective voters mark the mark, Nixon will claim an overwhelming victory. He won't have earned it.
This has been a dismal campaign—dismal in every particular way. If the outcome is as lopsided as it now appears to be,
James J. Kilpatrick
we will be looking back to the Goldwater-Johnson election of 1964. There are certain superficial parallels: Goldwater, a political unknown, came from a small State; he put together a preconvention team that wrapped up the nomination process and was happening; and Johnson, for his part, perched on his Gallup Poll and declined to debate. Yet the parallels are misleading.
That 1964 campaign had a sense of dedication and excitement, a sense of conflict, that Goldwater's billboards carried his slogan: "You know in your heart he is right." Wages were forever slipping around with the money to insert a little modifier; "far," in front of "right." It was generally true. The philosophical chasm was clear. And Goldwater, the human being, was loved fiercely for this same fervor that in other years went to a Roosevelt or a Kennedy.
... And Another
For all the thousands of words that were said of Vietnam, I am ever probed past McGovney ever put on my epithets and got down to the hard, troublesome questions of the role of the U.S. as defender of Western values. There is indeed a monarch who has been so much that toasts the Communists in Peking and Moscow and bombs the Communists in Hanoi. Govern remarked the irony; he seemed unable to do much more.
We have missed all that in 1972. There are differences, of course, between Nixon and McGoven; on such matters as national policy, they differ in Supreme Court, the two men are far apart. Otherwise one searches in vain for sharp differences because Nixon has none, partly because McGoven never could make his own philosophy clear. And McGoven, the human enemy, embraces a clammy embraceable as a clammy.
On the issues of consistency and credibility, Nixon was wefully vulnerable. This was the Nixon who campaigned against Mr. Bush's major staggering deficits in fiscal history. This was the Nixon who opposed price and wage controls and imposed them. This was the case when he was denied by those who turned his back while underlings bugged the Watergate.
So the lights go down, and the cleaning crews come in. Clear the arenas! Next week, ice hockey. Yet the disappointment cannot be swept away so quickly. Assume the problem of governing this nation more severe than the problems he faced four years ago. Then the momentum of a changing administration has sustained him, for a while.
McGovern had capital here; he squandered it. He had set out to be the candidate who would be beyond distortion and evasion. McGovern was above all else, believable. A week or so ago, in California, McGovern dealt with Nixon's vetoes of October 27; he distorted McGovern's views about the defense bases McGovern would close; he evaded them. He kept promising to end inflation by providing self for everyone; the people clapped, but the people did not believe.
That honeymoon ended a long time ago. The Nixon administration is tarnished by canal. It leaks not by argent or somehow, but somehow, God knows how, Nixon pick up the pieces of this broken year and put the country back together again. He may not be a philosopher, but he is a first-place man-of-fall work. And perhaps it is just what we need or the four years that they lead.
(C) The Washington Star Syndicate, Inc
Voter Choice
"Afther lookin' th' candydates over," said Mr. Dooley, "an studyin' their successions carefully I can'tubly stuff you see a presidential possibility in sight."
Although Mr. Dooley's words were spoken some sixty years ago, they might just as well have been those of the average voter who makes his way to the polls today. This election year has been unusually long given the large number of candidates in one party and the subsequent 'round 'robin elimination among the primaries. More importantly, this election year has been, for the most part, an extremely sad chapter in the history of Presidential elections.
During the past year the voter has been subjected to some of the most appalling incidents in modern campaign history. We watched as one leading candidate broke down in tears on a cold New Hampshire day. We were witness to the attempted assassination of another. And finally we observed the remaining candidates go for each other's throat in the final days of the California primary. Is it any wonder that the average person
has so little respect for either the candidates or the campaign?
Of course it is not all the work of one party. The other one has outdone itself in this election year. Reports of political "sabotage squads" and secret campaign coffers have become almost routine items in the news of the day. The other being glimpsees of their candidate, although constantly assured, by his ubiquitous stand-ins, that he is alive and thriving somewhere in the West wing.
Fortunately it all ends today when millions of Americans make their way to the polls. They go to make the final decision on which man they want to lead the country. And then in the middle of the morning they remember: The tears, shots, rhetoric, capers, surrogates, affairs, whistles, rumors, secrets, deals. . .
Suddenly the choice isn't as easy as they thought. It becomes a question of fear; not courage. Of weakness, not strength. Yet there remains no alternative, only the comfort of Mr. Dooley's words, "I can't thruthify say that I see a prisidintial possibility in sight."
Mark Bedner
Readers Respond
To the Editor:
Two Evils, Libertarians . . .
"...we are not prepared to endorse either the incumbent governor or his Republican challenger. We find in neither leadership that in our view are needed in Kansas in the future."
October 31,1971
—Kansas City Times, Tuesday October 21, 1971
Once again the Democrat and Republican parties of Kansas have forced voters into a war with the Democratic party for governor. As in '66, '88 and '70, this election year seemingly confronts us with the choice of voting for either the Democratic party (either evil) or voting "no" for governor.
Morris Kerry, with his roots deep in Kansas soil, is actually stuck in the mud. His answer for our problem is to make the highway program is more highways. His answer for pollution and land shortage is—more-informed and better-trained tax program is—take off all farm and drug taxes without providing
for additional revenue. His answer for the credibility gap in campaign communications campaigned to his qualifications are—played for KU and was out of practice when he extremely minor case of polio.
Robert Docking has been standing for Kansas for six years. time he took a step forward, time he took a step forward, property taxes have skyrocketed, education has suffered and the state bureaucracy has grown tremendously as Bob has made new friends or rewarded old ones. for the highway problem is—like Morris—more highways.
It's a welcome relief to know there is an alternative for governor to turn this year. Instead of voting "no," you can write in Randy Cummins and Thad Campbell, or vice versa, governor. Randy and Thad offer fresh approach in Kansas for management to the failures of the past nor
caught by big money interests in the future. They offer sound financial programs and will attend the governor's mansion. We deserve better than Morris or Bob and Randy Cummins and Thad Campbell; offer us the new vision that we have waited for too long.
Gary L.Ayers Lawrence Junior
★ ★ ★
To the Editor:
Richard Nixon is creating a great tidal wave of corruption that is breaking over the bedrock of our nation. Last March Life magazine outlined how the Nixon administration pered with justice" to protect major Nixon campaign contributors in San Diego from criminal prosecution. Then the ITL筏琳, the Watergate committee that led the diary lobby debacle, the bank charter bribe, the carp industry
caper, the illicit $10 million, the
firing of Walt Hefler and the firing of Walt Hefler and freeing of Jimmy Hofa poisoned the political process
In addition, Pentagon fat cats thrive, while Appalachian poor rot.
Worker salaries freeze, while corporate profits surge.
skyrocket, while welfare and unemployment soar.
And Nixon continues to prop up a corrupt military dictate in迪诺斯, where he frodochina than the Allies dropped in Europe, Africa and Asia in all of his wars.
All of this is legitimate political dynamite for the American electorate to ignite on Nov. 7 by evading Richard Nixon's House and propelling George McGown into the presidency.
Griff and the Unicorn
Joe Mikesic Kansas City
By Sokoloff
★ ★ ★
1. Abolition of the Federal Communications Act, thus guaranteeing broadcasting First Party engagement with other media
To the Editor:
2. Support of an all-volunteer army;
Tonie Nathan. Their names will not appear on the Kansas ballot, but they will appear on many names in. With both major parties moving closer to absolute statism every year, rejecting the idea of a statewide government power in all spheres of activity. I cannot support Mr. McGovern or President Nixon.
3. Unconditional amnesty for all who have been accused or convicted of draft evasion and for deserters who were draftees;
I would like to take this opportunity to call the attention of your readers to an active political party of which they may not be aware, the Libertarian party. My husband and I are aware of the fact of the party's existence and basically what it stands for. The party's candidates for President and Vice President of the party are John Hospers (Director of the School of Philosophy at the University of Southern California) and Mrs.
In the brief space available, I would like to outline a few of the Libertarian party's proposals:
4. Repeat of controls on wages, prices, rents, profits, production and interest rates; and
5. Repeal laws restricting the introduction of孕期监测 during the first hundred days, and apposition to coercive measures to control their use.
The complete party platform (paraphrased in small part above), may be found in the September 1972 issue of Reason magazine; or interested parties may obtain a contact number 442-3189 for further information.
Thank you for allowing me to bring the above to your reader's attention.
Thomas Gandet, Jr. Lawrence Senior
THE UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN America's Pacemaking college newspaper
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