University of Virginia Library

Robert Gillmore

Can The Democrats Find Their Best?

I find myself strangely bored by
the preliminary Democratic
Presidential campaign and I have
been trying to figure out why.

It's a matter, I think, of
substance but not a little style.
Consider the candidates.

Edmund Muskie: the reputed
front runner, of whom (I must
admit it) Playboy says, "there is
less...than meets the eye," an
intensely ambitious and perhaps
insecure Polish-American who has
conquered both a humble,
sometimes humiliating background
and heavily-Republican Maine to be
the state's first Democratic senator,
a man whose ambiguity may be his
political strength but which may be
as much the gleanings of a thin
intellect as a deliberate campaign
tactic.

Edward Kennedy:
the would-have-been front-runner
had he not driven off a bridge on
Cape Cod, thus revealing that he so
little values a human being — alive
or dead — that Mary Jo Kopechne
had to wait — alive or dead — in a
car under water while the youngest
Kennedy contemplated whether or
not to call the police and thus
demonstrated that his cheating at
Harvard may not be the exception
but the rule of his life, a life which
would pervert the slaying of his
dead Presidential brother to read
"When the going gets tough, the
tough get cheating." A man whose
record and rhetoric is otherwise
laudable. A pity.

Masked Liberal

Hubert Humphrey: a liberal
whose liberalism was masked by
understudy to an Administration
which climaxed the Vietnam war
and to a President who will have
not once but future greatness when
the Great Society is called the
Second New Deal; a man whose
evanescence unlike Franklin
Roosevelt's — is, strangely, not an
asset but a liability; a
misunderstood man who if he could
match his intellect and his
compassion with some Nixon or
Kennedy power lust would deserve
to be President and might be so.

George McGovern: a George
Norris who, like Eugene McCarthy,
plays mostly one note, but who
plays it so well that he wins the
political heart of all those who are
deeply disenamored with a
wretched, wasted war; but who so
clearly lacks the diversity of
support which he needs for
nomination.

Birch Bayh: the Hoosier farm
boy who with wife Marvella won a
high school oratory contest, who
distinguished himself especially by
Constitutional and Senatorial
reform and the fight against Judge
Carswell, but who excels Edmund
Muskie in his vagueness. The boyish
idealism upon which he is
campaigning may be his route not
to victory but to early defeat; and
if that is all he has to offer,
deservedly so.

Harold Hughes: former alcoholic
and truck driver; like Muskie and
McGovern and Bayh, a Democratic
wonder boy in a Republican state
(Iowa) but only like McGovern
courageous enough to blast the war
— indeed courageous enough and
self-made enough to override his
paucity of any other qualities.

Henry Jackson: a rare bird: and
Democratic hawk, an
unreconstructed Stuart Symington
who likes the ABM, the SST and
who has a perverse fascination with
military muscle but whose
liberalism is otherwise atypical.

In other words, the Democracy
does not seem to be running its best
men.

In the Senate alone, the titular
candidates are outclassed by men
who aren't even running —
Wisconsin's William Proxmire,
Michigan's Philip Hart,
Connecticut's Abraham Ribicoff,
Rhode Island's Claiborne Pell and
especially Illinois' Adlai Stevenson
III.

Positive Party

The Democratic party has been
the party of the positive state for
barely forty years — only since the
New Deal. Before that, the burden
of bringing national power to bear
in behalf of prosperity had been
born by the Federalists, Whigs and
Republicans, usually with
Democrats tugging them
backwards; by Hamilton in spite of
Jefferson; Biddle. Clay and Webster
in spite of Jackson; Lincoln in spite
of Douglas; McKinley despite
Bryan; the Republican Roosevelt
and Hughes against Wilson. Only in
the New Deal — thanks to
Republican myopia — were the
roles switched. And today we are
still left with two Republican
parties, one wanting to perform its
historic role; the other, the
neo-Jeffersonian.

It is, however, to the amazement
of historians and to the eternal
credit of Democrats that the party
(until the New Deal) always used its
meagre resources well. The party
which was for so long the dung
heap of racists and bosses always
nominated the flowers which
sprouted from it: not Champ Clark,
but Wilson; not Al Smith, but FDR;
not Lyndon Johnson, but John
Kennedy; not merely liberals but
men of clear stature, men not from
barren but rich backgrounds, of not
modest but bountiful education,
and perhaps prepared for public
service by generations; men who
in sum, bring depth and breadth
of education and experience to their
judgments.

Republican Malady

On the contrary, the Republican
party since its beginning (and the
beginnings of its predecessors, the
Federalists and Whigs) have had
stables full of such men Nelson
Rockefeller, William Scranton,
John Chafee, Elliot Richardson,
Robert McNamara, John Gardner,
Douglas Dillon, Hugh Scott, Charles
Percy, Jacob Javits, Clifford Case,
Edward Brooke, Mark Hatfield,
Charles Mathias, (House members)
Ogden Reid, Bradford Morse,
(university presidents) Kingman
Brewster, Robben Fleming, and
Edward Etherington, McGeorge
Bundy, Malcolm Moos, and on and
on.

The Republican malady of
course has been quite the opposite
of the Democrats: the GOP is
forever rejecting its best men and
picking its lesser, the
neo-Jeffersonian — Nixon over
Rockefeller, Goldwater over
Scranton, etc.

The Democrats in 1972 should
not follow the Republican
example. They must find, perhaps,
a new John Kennedy, else their
candidate may have all the
brilliance and standing of Al Smith.
And like Smith, he will lead his
party to defeat.