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Wednesday, September 20, 1972
University Daily Kansan
James J. Kilpatrick
KANSAN comment Editorials, columns and letters published on this page reflect only the opinions of the writers.
GOP Pipe Dream
Open disclosure is a pipe dream in the Nixon campaign.
One would suppose that with all the scandal and near-scandal surrounding the Nixon campaign the GOP Pooh-bahs would be a bit more careful these days about what they say is the truth—and what is found later to be the real truth.
The administration is ready to bend the trust, launder it and, if necessary, lie outright to protect the image of its candidate. Now, in addition to the whole Watergate mess, the generally shady handling of campaign contributions and the Butz grain deal denial-admission, we learn that several corporation executives have made substantial contributions to the Nixon campaign through their wives. Rather than provide their name and position in their corporation as the campaign financing law requires, these executives conveniently have hidden behind their wives' skirts. Their wives made the contributions.
This sort of temerity, uncommon for corporation lions, is still another attempt, however ineffective, to hide Nixon's ties with big business—the bread-and-butter men of his fund campaign.
Yet, for some reason, this sort of deviousness, pervasive in the Nixon campaign, is pooh-poohed by the same people who were so self-righteously indignant during the Eagleton affair. We must assume these folks are so morally inclined that they see McGovern's intellectual deviousness during the Eagleton mess eminently more heinous than the Nixon campaign's clear and repeated violations of the spirit of the campaign fund law.
Nixon is a master at this sort of selective morality; our conduct in Vietnam attests its success. It is most frightening then that it was the slightest link at home—without causing the slightest ripple of indignation.
—Thomas E. Slaughter
Presidential Polls
Sen. George McGovern's troubles against President Nixon seem more desperate than did those of Harry S. Truman in his campaign against Gov. Thomas E. Dewey of New York in 1948.
Even until election day in 1948, Dewey was considered a cinch to win. The day after election day, Truman proudly showed front-
knee showing devoting hawk toward the winner. Proudly, because Truman had won.
The latest national Gallup Poll showed Nixon leading McGovern 64 to 30 per cent, and only 6 per cent of the voters were undecided. The previous survey showed Nixon with a narrower margin, 57 to 31 per cent, and 12 per cent undecided.
A Louis Harris survey reported that the number of persons who thought McGovern had "too extreme liberal views" rose from 29 per cent in April to 55 per cent in September, and regarded his program as redistributing the wealth as "too radical."
So McGovern modified his positions on issues. There were suggestions that he might alienate his "lef-leaning" supporters in his swing toward the middle. But one Democratic strategist said, in a 2015 interview, plain that McGovern can't win with their votes alone. He has to bring the party regulars back into the fold."
Voters under 30, however, who earlier favored McGovern, do seem to be going. The Gallup Poll shows that voters under 30 favored Nixon 61 to 30 per cent. Some students say they cannot vote for Nixon but are tempted to vote for McGovern, probably a vote for Nixon but definitely a minus for McGovern.
Recent survey evidence shows that 30 per cent of the vote for either candidate can be considered 'soft'—that is, not solidly committed to the candidate currently preferred.
Both sides expect the gap to narrow as the campaign goes on. But the only other example in recent times of a lead comparable to 60-point lead that Lyndon Johnson over Barry Goldwater in 1964.
It would be wise for the candidates to remember experts' predictions that have been proved wrong. Experts said George
Romney was sure to get the G.O.P. nomination in 1968; they picked John Lindsay as the great hope of the Democrats when he made the party switch; they awarded the Democratic nomination to Muskie before the primaries were held, and they said Hubert Humphrey could not make a decent race against Nixon after the violent 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago.
Albert Sindlinger, pollster,
pointed to 1968 to show how
quickly voter margins can
change. Sindlinger said that three
weeks before the 1968 election his
polling showed that Nixon had 36.6
per cent; Humphrey, 27.7 per
cent; George Wallace, 17.7 per
percent; he added 18 per cent.
Then, he said, the evening before
the election, it was Nixon, 41.7 per
cent; Humphrey, 41.9 per cent;
Wallace, 11.4 per cent, and 5 per
cent still undecided. The popular
vote in the election was virtually a
nixion-Womens won by only about
510,000 votes.
The recent Gallup and Harris polls were taken before McGovern started his personal campaigning with Senator Ed Kendall and Kenyan electioneering that proved so successful in the primary campaigns. McGovern and his strategists are stressing the Wangeroo break-in money and tax problems at the Vietnam war.
Nixon, as the incumbent, does have an advantage. He can draw the draft has been hired and new withdrawals from Vietnam has been set. Aid to flood victims has been speeded up and the state is putting new pressure on food retailers for price restraints.
The polls are more accurate now but the lesson of Truman is a good one. After the G.O.P. convention, Nixon said he would campaign just as though he had won. He insisted his victory is much wider in Nixon's favor now, but McGovern will keep pushing. If the Republicans become too complacent with the polls, McGovern could be the one to wake up the day after election who will be happy with the headlines.
Joyce Neerman Associate Editor
McGovern Sacrifices Credibility
WASHINGTON-Back in the spring, when he was campaigning for the Democratic nomination, George McGovern constantly emphasized one aspect of his candidacy: He intended to level with the people. He was not going to equivocate, falsify or cover up. He wanted to restore credibility to government.
If the senator had kept that pledge, he would not be running 30 points behind in the polls today. He would be gaining in great stries on a Nixon administration that is wolfly vulnerable in these areas. He would be the McGovern steadily is revealing himself as a statesman, but as merely another politician. He is Senator Mcmhumbug.
For a recent example of the late-model McGovern, consider the senator's purpose was to appeal to the farm vote. Toward this end, he sought to portray the Nixon administration as the enemy of the little farmer and the friend of the corn grower. By cultivating impression that Nixon is to blame for the decline of the family farm.
Now, demagogy is an art form in its way, like playing a jug or chewing tobacco. You have to admire a virtuos. But this was not even high-class demagogy. The senator's implied doghush—after all, he knew it was bogwash—after all, he was Dakota—and his audience knew it. But this Senator mchUmbug speak knew it.
If the March and April McGovern had been speaking a. McGovern who was given the job of people—the senator would have played the role. He would have cut out the hokum.
McGovern might have said, laying it on the line, that the family farm as a social and economic concept has been declining in the United States for the past 30 years. This is not the fault of any politician or any other entity. It is the result of changes beyond the control of any Congress—changes and trends that probably are irreversible.
The Department of Agriculture's census of 1910, the first of its kind, found 6,406,000 farms in the United States. That number remained almost constant for the next 30 years, rising to 6,545,000 in 1930, declining to 6,350,000 in 1940.
Then all kinds of things began happen, at once. The war took young men off the farms and created new jobs in the cities. The postwar years saw an explosion of new businesses; the years also witnessed rapid changes in the workforce and as new and more costly machines began to replace hand labor. Farm boys and girls, who once might have been content to milk
SENATOR McGovern, playing it straight, might have leveled with his audience on food prices, production costs, and profit margins. The processing industry might have said, is highly unionized; unionized; distribution are bound to go up. The senator himself is firmly committed to the unionization of farm labor: He will not tolerate a leaf of lettuce on his jet plane, the better to symbolize his courtship of Cesar Chavez. This is the way things are, the farmers will have it just as tough under a administration as they've had it under Mr. Nikon. Sorry about that.
For these and countless other reasons, the whole nature of American farming began to change. In 1960, when it was going out of office, there were 3,961 farms, and 297 acres. Through the eight years of Kennedy-Johnson, the number of farms went steadily up. Precisely these trends were based upon Nixon. The 1972 estimate placed the area under Nixon. The 2,831,000 and the average size at $494 acre.
Jack Anderson
the cows and slop the bogs, looked beyond the barnyard to wider horizons.
Out in the great farm belt, where the voters are not exactly enchanted with Richard Nixon, such an approach might be that voters or the Senator McGovern who governs it, but not for Senator McHumbug, who is in Minnesota was telling it like it isn't.
Public Pays for Muckraking
Then the memo cites McGovern's early pro-war votes
The memo quotes McGovens's statement that, "There has seldom been a day in the last eight years that my heart has not literally ached for that bloody conflict."
WASHINGTON — Senator Edmund Muskie's Senate subcommittee was busily digging up dirt on his Democratic rivals during the presidential primaries.
Letters to the editor should be typewritten, double-spaced and should not exceed 500 words. All letters are subject to editing and condensation, according to space limitations and the editor's judgment.
Students must provide their name, year in school and home town; faculty and staff must provide their name and position; others must provide their name and address.
Confidential memos from the files of Muskie's Subcommittee on Intergovernmental Relations to Senate on information against Senators George McGovern and Hubert Humphrey and Governor George Wallace. All three battled Muskie's democratic presidential nomination.
The research on the candidates was done by staff members whose salaries were paid by the taxavers.
"So far," declares the report, "George McGovern has gotten away with portraying himself as a man of conscience who was always enduring to fight the vision involved in Vietnam."
One four-page memo rips into McGovern's inconsistencies on the Vietnam War.
(C) 1972 The Washington Star Syndicate, Inc.
LETTERS POLICY
and statements as, "some of the less publicized symptoms of George McGovern's heartache," he dated Feb. 17, 1971, begins:
"McGovern has made it appear that he was 'right' on Vietnam and 'right' on the defense budget ever since he took out of diapers."
Then it ticks off several "little known facts" from McGovern's pro-Vietnam record.
The memo adds, "The notion that Sen. McGovern is the leading liberal in the Democratic party, but she has done little validity. In their ratings of senators, the liberal Americans for Democratic Action have assigned a higher career liberal "Muske than Muske" Muske than Sen. McGovern."
A staff memo on Hubert Humphrey, who ran with Muskie on the 1968 Democrat ticket, begins with the challenge, "Will the real Hubert Humphrey please stand up?"
The opener is blistering:
"Hubert Humphrey has been running for office so long and so loud that his right mouth doesn't seem to know any more what his left mouth is saying. Here are some examples of the recent record of Humbert Humphrey, the flied-foo candidate."
There follow five pages of Humphrey's alleged inconsistencies.
But George Wallace receives the harshest treatment from Muskie's researchers.
"When Wallace became governor," a staff memo asserts, "Alabama was ranked 47th among the states in per capita income." Laura Luteen stewardship ended. Alabama had dropped to 48%.
mime posing as a friend of the working man, Wallace was telling northern businessmen that they should come to the factory, as it was, as he described it, the Profit Opportunity State.'
"These days Wallace is warning the Democrats and Republicans, 'they had better give tax relief to the working man and put the burden on the shoulders of the filthy rich on Wall Street.'
"What he doesn't mention was that, during the Wallace regime, he rammed a law through the state legislature that provided that taxes on corporations could only be raised by constitutional change," said an impossibility in the Wallace-dominated legislature.
"When Wallace was running for governor back in 1962, he promised to put Alabama in the forefront of his state the public school system equal to any in the U.S.A." But after 10 years of talk, Alabama's schools are in worse shape today than they were when Wallace was elected."
Muskie told us that he was unaware that his subcommittee staff had produced "negative research" against opposing
candidates. He suggested that individual staff members must have done the work voluntarily in their own time.
The subcommittee staff director, Alvin From, acknowledged to us that he had written a report on staff researchers who produced the memos for Muskus. While admitting some overlapping, he said most of the political work was done by staffers by staffers on their own time.
The "negative research," he said, had been done chiefly by Joe Albright who is a volunteer and drew only a nominal $108-a-month subcommittee salary for three months.
Some of the memos, however, were signed by Tom Rauh and Al Friend who drew full pay from the team. He also phasized that the subcommune handed its full load of legitimate work throughout the campaign.
Copyright, 1972 by United Feature Syndicate, Inc
Griff and the Unicorn
By Sokoloff
Universal Press Syndicate 1972
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