Candidates Seek Votes, Cannot 'Talk Sense'

The Presidential campaign is well into its final week, and perhaps the bees, in James Reston's phrase, have begun to settle. If one is to believe the pollsters, the analysts and the newsmagazines, Senator Kennedy has the election won, and it is all over but the counting. I cannot share the experts' certainty, though as a Democrat I'm optimistic; overconfidence new seems a serious hazard for the Kennedy camp.

In any event, if in fact the bees have settled, and Kennedy has won, the puzzling question is "Why?" What has Kennedy done right and what has Nixon done wrong, to bring about this result? An answer is hard to pin down, particularly in a Harvard community, which is, after all, far from normal. To many here who like Kennedy or who sympathize strongly with his views, the apparent winner's campaign has been disappointing, with few high spots and many weak statements, missed opportunities and errors of omission. To these same people, who never expected much of Nixon, the Vice-President has given just what they expected, a large dose of demagogy, unsupported statistics, and unsubstantiated charges.

The campaign, then, for this group of enlightened observers, has been a rotten one; it has shed little light on the issues, and there hasn't been enough heat to make the absence of light tolerable. To them, Kennedy's apparent success is undeserved; his case may be a good one, but he has not made it well at all. Nixon, on the other hand, has been his old demagogic self, but he has made no catastrophic blunders.

These national voters are the ones who can't see how either candidate can or should win who want to vote "No" for the Presidency this year. They are the ones who look, usually in vain, for "reason in politics" and, not finding it, decide a boycott is better than voting for the lesser of two evils. The lesser of the two evils for them in the current case is clearly Kennedy, and it is he who has disappointed them, as perhaps Governor Stevenson did not.

The rationalists' objections to Kennedy's campaign point at the same flaws that many of us who support the Senator list as reservations to our support. They would be valid objections were Harvard University the entire electorate, or were Senator Kennedy's business as Democratic nominee something other than getting elected. The objections are worth exploring, if only as an indication of why Kennedy's campaign has failed to stir Harvard and similar communities to a very high level of emotional commitment.

First, we have the question: What happened to the New Frontier? Senator Kennedy's call at his nomination for a new and higher outlook for American democracy has given way to the more pedestrian concept of "getting America moving again" and to the even more disappointing emphasis on staying ahead of the Russians. Most liberals (and probably Senator Kennedy himself) feel that the Democrats' programs of school construction, urban renewal, civil rights progress and social welfare are worth doing on their own merits, not merely as weapons in cold warfare. These rational liberals wish that Senator Kennedy would stress these merits, rather than the matter of beating the Russians.

Grow the Man ship

Second, there is the question of what Nixon once called "growth man ship." Kennedy constantly emphasizes the need for economic growth and has engaged in several irrelevant exchanges with the Vice-President on statistical matters relating to this question. Here the rational liberals observe that comparisons between American and Soviet growth rates prove nothing, because the Soviet economy is in a quite different stage of development from ours.

They further ask: Growth for what? For more schools, yes; for reducing unemployment, yes; but for more of all the consumer goods that are epitomized by the catch-phrase "tail-fins," emphatically no. As John Kenneth Galbraith wrote in The Liberal Hour, "There is no assurance merely from expanding output per se that the benefit will accrue to those at the bottom of the pyramid who need the goods the most." Kennedy's call for growth for growth's sake, or merely to out produce the Russians, is, for some, another grave weakness in his campaign.

Third, the liberals are worried about the almost complete disappearance, since the convention, of the word "sacrifice" from Senator Kennedy's vocabulary. (This defect, it must in all fairness be added, has been largely remedied in recent weeks). The program that their candidate--and it must be remembered at all times that he is still their candidate--has embraced is not the easiest and most comfortable for the American people to adopt. He has embraced it, and the liberals have embraced it, in the belief that it is a necessary one for the sake of survival. Therefore, Kennedy is not forthright when he emphasizes only the benefits of his program and not the sacrifices that self-indulgent American consumers must out of decency and necessity make.

A fourth and related point, and perhaps the most important, is Kennedy's omission of the price tag from discussion of his program. Nixon's "costing out" of the Democratic platform in terms of $16 billion, 25 per cent higher food prices and 2 million lost jobs on the farm and in the cities may be ignored as irresponsible figure-juggling. But the fact remains that all these projects and services will cost money, and Kennedy has again been less than frank in mentioning the price tag along with the obvious benefits. The price is one, liberals believe, that the nation can and must afford, and they wish that their candidate would make this clear to the electorate.

Some Democrats wonder why Kennedy has not used his running mate Lyndon Johnson's very effective argument that the Republican charge that the Democrats will "spend the country into bankruptcy" preaches a kind of economic timidity, and that this timidity "downgrades America" much more than Democratic complaints about the fact of falling prestige. The country, Johnson continues is too strong and too wealthy to be "spent into bankruptcy"; Republican timidity merely keeps the nation down.

In any case, the omission of the price tag is the weakest point in Kennedy's argument. As Galbraith writes, again in The Liberal Hour, "If we haven't yet learned to mistrust, indeed to ignore, the man who talks about high national purpose and then omits all mention of the price--or perhaps urges strict economy in public outlays as one of his higher purposes--our case could be pretty bad."

What distresses the rationalists is that our case, by Galbraith's standards, seems in fact to be pretty bad: The candidate who "talks about high national purposes" and omits most if not all mention of the price appears to be the successful one. Of course, the alternative, to Galbraith, is even worse: the man who urges economy as one of his higher purposes. With such a choice, the people I have termed "rationalists" choose the boycott, decide to vote "NO!", although it is quite clear on which side their sympathies lie.

All the rationalists' objections to Kennedy's campaign I think are quite reasonable; their objections to Nixon's demagogy I accept ever more readily. What I cannot agree with is their conclusion, their decision to boycott.

First, Kennedy's failings, if not excusable, are at least explainable. As I noted earlier, Kennedy's business as Democratic nominee is to win the election; there are certain lengths of honesty to which one can go and certain appeals which, though irrational, go over well. For any of the bright promises of the platform to be fulfilled, Kennedy must first win the election; I think he may be forgiven for trying to do so. His campaign, despite its weaknesses, has been more consistent than most; the errors, unlike those of Roosevelt in 1932, have been those of omission, not of commission.

'Sense' Not Vote-Getter

Adlai Stevenson, admittedly, set out in 1956 to "talk sense to the American people" and in fact did just that, but it can't be shown that the experience did the American people much good. They voted for a man who very clearly didn't talk sense, and probably only a small minority of those who supported Stevenson did so because of his "sense" and not for other, less rational reasons.

Second, the rationalists no longer claim they see no difference between the two candidates. They know very well which man they would rather see win. If they share the feelings of other liberals, they consider it very important for him to win. It is threaten depressed areas. If Nixon wins, part, not to cast their votes, just because the form--not the substance--of their candidate's arguments has been disappointing.

To stay away from the polls in this country is a sign of indifference, not of protest. If anyone can honestly say that he sees no difference between the candidates and that to him it makes no difference who wins, then and only then should he not vote (a case could be made for such a course of action in the current Massachusetts gubernatorial race). The problem of "reason in politics" is as old as democracy itself; it cannot be solved by boycotting Presidential elections until a "reasonable," intellectually consistent candidate appears: the wait will be a long one, and the candidate--unless he has other qualities besides sweet reasonableness--may very well lose.

The electorate, one might as well admit without cynicism, is usually swayed by things other than reason. This is why, to the Harvard community, this has been a rotten campaign. This is why Eisenhower defeated the candidate of reason in 1952 and 1956. This is how (to return to the original question) the next President will win the election.

Kennedy appears to have won now--and this is what really distresses the rationalists--not because his argument was good (which it is, if you fill in a few omissions), but because his personality is appealing; because in the absence of a popular Republican leader, the country is normally Democratic; because, possibly, of a large Catholic vote; because of dissatisfaction with the Republicans "ins" in certain depressed areas. If Nixon wins, it will most likely be for similar "irrational" reasons: response to his demagogy about "running down America" and "not giving an inch of the area of freedom"; a carry-over of Eisenhower's immense personal popularity; the material satisfaction of those who have prospered (or think they have prospered) under Eisenhower. Kennedy has done nothing right, except being himself. Nixon has done nothing wrong, except also being himself.

This, it seems, is the way elections go, and yes, it was a rotten campaign.