599 / 676
GOLDWATE/t
60,
this country for the people--he called them the Do-Nothing CongreSlt–
who govern it.
It
is
only initially remarkable that this kind of disgust exists at
the two extremes of the electorate : with a mass of people who know
next to nothing and with the liberal, highly informed intelligentsia. The
one group has been made to feel increasingly that politics is no longer
concerned with them, with people at all, as it was in the time of
Roosevelt; the other knows enough to feel contempt for the games
going on year in and year out about some of the compelling issues of
our time, like medicare. It isn't surprising in such a situation, as the
contemporary history of Germany, Italy, and Spain attest, that the
Right should seize the radical 'initiative precisely at the moment when
a similar opportunity lies open to the Left. Kennedy seemed about
ready to grasp that opportunity in the months before his death. Though
he was cautiously conservative in his first year in office, his speeches in
the final year, especially about relations with the USSR, were liberating–
ly audacious. Even Castro has expressed admiration for the direction
which Kennedy gave, and which has since been reversed, to the Al–
liance for Progress. His election and his increasing popularity revealed
that there exists in the country a readiness to accept some of the
radical innovations he was apparently preparing to make, and some
of those he did make, to our enormous benefit, in fiscal thinking and
policy. The glamor he exuded had much to do with personal style, but
the response to it was to the evident distaste in that style for the old
pomposities and chicaneries. Though one may argue about the transla–
tion into actual policy of the image he projected, he did release many
people from the tedium of political stereotypes, the feeling, which is
the terrible price the nation must pay for General Eisenhower, that
daring and intelligence are somehow in bad taste. (The danger in the
present situation is less from Goldwater's election- Johnson will first put
the country in his wife's name, as one wag has remarked-than from
the tired style of rhetoric and of political intrigue which emanates
from this administration.) Personally and politically Johnson cannot
convince anyone that he is interested in serious innovations in national
policy, especially not the people under thirty-five who now constitute
the great mass of the population. The changes in our system, such as in
the structure of Congress or in the relation of the labor force to auto–
mated industries, that are recognized by 1Dore and more people as
necessities are not the kind that can be produced merely by political
techniques, of which Johnson is a master. Should the Democratic party
remain bound solely to him for eight more years, then the boredom with