On Purity

THE 1968 presidential campaign of George C. Wallace can only be characterized as overly racist. Wallace did not run on a major party ticket, did not expect to win, and concentrated on arousing latent racism among the disaffected. In 1972, before he was injured, Wallace was campaigning for the Democratic nomination and appeared to stand a good chance of emerging as a major power broker at the Democratic National Convention. This situation demanded a new political strategy, one which would appeal to a broader segment of the electorate, one which might be termed covertly racist. As a paralyzed Wallace, employing this latter approach faded quickly in the early primaries of this new presidential season, Jimmy Carter, perceived by many to be the front-runner for the nomination, has moved quickly in an effort to co-opt the Wallace strategy and, thereby, the Wallace constituency.

The starkest example of Carter's use of code-word racism in his search for votes came two weeks ago in South Bend, Indiana. Carter said the federal government should not attempt to break down the "ethnic purity" of white neighborhoods by assisting blacks or other minorities to move to such neighborhoods. He spoke of "alien groups," meaning blacks, and with less subtlety, in a newspaper interview a few days before the South Bend speech, referred directly to "black intrusion."

But while these remarks may be the most obvious indication of a racist current in the Carter campaign, this current has in fact been consistently present. Indeed as Senator Hubert Humphrey has said, heavily anti-Washington and anti-urban rhetoric is nothing more than the newest form of disguised racism. And although Humphrey, in nothing this phenomenon, did not point specifically to any candidate, it is Carter who has decried federal aid to the cities, Carter who has spoken of the "burden" of welfare, and Carter who has posed himself as the anti-Washington force.

The other major candidates, Senator Jackson and Representative Udall, have not been entirely clean on this issue--both have on occasion made statements similar to those Carter made at South Bend, and Jackson's blatant pitch for ant-busing votes in Boston was particularly deplorable. But it is Carter who has carefully but deliberately injected the race issue into the current campaign, and it would be wrong to fail to distinguish between him and the other candidates on this question.

The Carter campaign is then a dangerous campaign. Carter should be defeated in Pennsylvania, and those who have supported him but would still wish to view themselves as within the American liberal tradition, should repudiate that support.