An undignified election
Nicholas von Hoffman
W ashington Voting in America is like Catholicism in Latin lands. Everyone is nominallY in favour of it but only a minority actually practise it. Thus we had our elections here last Tuesday and barely more than a third of i those eligible bothered to vote. So that n Most states the winners were chosen by a mere seventeen or eighteen per cent of the Potential electorate. With the vox pop uli suffering from a case of laryngitis no great political movement Was to be expected and none occurred. The Democrats suffered marginal losses, but these . were smaller than the party con trolling the White House usually endures in an off-year election. That is not surprising since these elections were party contests only in the most remote and academic sense of the term. Neither party had promulgated i a platform and to listen to the contestants n most places was to hear Democrat and Republican alike say the identical things and make the identical promises. These mostly revolved around low taxes and fiscal resPonsibility. Some of us who don't vote are Waiting to cast our ballots for the first Politician with candour enough to campaign for high taxes and fiscal irresponsibility. The quality of the election is best demonstrated by what happened in Hubert HumPhrey's Minnesota where the Democrats Were turned out of both Senate seats and the governorship after more than a generation. Wendell Anderson, one of the defeated Democratic Senators, had previously gained the job by appointing himself ,..to it when he had been governor after numphrey's death. On arrival in washing he failed to vote on a number of roll-cal. l or registered votes. This prompted his victorious oPponent to run on the slogan, You'd think a man who appointed himself to the job would at least show up for work. In Detroit a twelve-term Congressman, fee. ently convicted of making his office staff Kick back part of their salaries to him, was re-elected with 81 per cent of the vote. On the other hand, in Massachusetts, the nation's only black Senator was defeated, Pnncipally because he was caught concealing some of his assets in a particularly nasty divorce fight. In Brooklyn a Congressman who stood mute to the charge of g improper advances to a sixteenyear-old boy was re-elected but the poor nbugger had to promise to see a shrink. 4.yeaking i of which, a referendum n k2alifornia that would have witch-hunted every homosexual teacher out of the public sterhool system there was defeated. In Illinois tne liberal Republican Senator Charles 4 ercy was re-elected only after he went on television and apologised for his voting record and swore he wouldn't do it again. It was, beyond doubt, the most undignified performance in a year when this rather undignified occupation seemed to dwarf even itself.
Unconscionable amounts of money were spent on these campaigns. One candidate for the Senate in the not so populous state of North Carolina spent more than six million dollars to get himself re-elected. In general the impression grows that higher public office is mostly available to wealthy men who buy their jobs as an ego-trinket. Sifting through the post-election garbage for a trend reveals little of significance. The tax limitation referenda on the ballots in some states did a little better than so-so, thereby showing that the voters understand, even if the politicians don't, that there is no such thing as a free lunch. Public ()Pinion polls taken of those who did bother to vote on Tuesday confirm that inflation is still the number one issue in the minds of participating electors. For action on that subject they hold out little hope from Congress although the President's performance has scarcely been of the electrifyingly brilliant variety. There was some dispute over whether President Carter's latest anti-inflation programme should properly be called the second or third he has announced since taking office, but none over the contention that it was the noisiest of his failures in these realms. Indeed, the President's long awaited anti-inflation speech was adjudged, by the sophisticated at least, as rhetorically trite, politically worthless, intellectually disreputable and economically fatuous. Other than that, it won universal approval. Indeed, Mr Carter seemed to be indulging in Tinkerbell economics: if you but believe in his anti-inflation proposals, they'll succeed. So he told the nation via the television that, 'if tomorrow, or next week or next month, you ridicule them, ignore them, pick them apart before they have a chance to work, you will have reduced thcitchances of succeeding.' There were other moments in his foggy locution when he made it appear that, somehow, profligate living by the working masses, too many microwave ovens, too many nifty-swifty Japanese sports cars, too many too rnuches of every sort, had something to do with the declining purchasing power of the dollar. . The most depressing part of the President's message is his inability to state a coherent theory of the causes of inflation. Like a house fly lighting on a dirty table top, he lands on one crumb of an idea, plays with it, takes off in a zig-zag flight pattern and comes down on another crumb for no readily understandable reason. By turn we're given to understand inflation is the unhappy work of unnamed Visigoths, voracious multinational corporations, greedy unions, Money-crazed physicians, deranged monetary policy experts, Saudi Arabian cupidity, Japanese diligence and/or superior German engineering. Listen to Mr Carter long enough and you have to conclude the dear man has no settled opinion on the subject and is as likely as not to tell us tomorrow that it's all owing to magnetic forces in the Bermuda Triangle or the Loch Ness monster's syphoning the gold from Fort Knox after the national hoard had been secretly liquefied by a consortium of Geneva gnomes and other unspecified international currency speculators.
Whatever the causes, Mr Carter's proposal to tackle the problem with voluntary wage and price controls only convinced most people he wasn't serious. At the same time, his announcement that the government would move to abolish regulatory red tape, which pushes up the cost of production, reinforced the suspicion that he doesn't yet understand that the proper definition of inflation is a rise in the general price level, not a rise in the cost of particular manufactures.
Despite the news that yet another attempt would be made to free business from promiscuous regulation, most businessmen were left with the impression that, in their heart of hearts, Mr Carter and his advisers believe only legally enforced wage and price controls can succeed. It is certainly true that the administration's now 'voluntary' programme involves a vast amount of bureaucratising. Nor did it help when the President chose his anti-inflation speech to announce that he would sign the tax cut bill but would veto any future tax cuts. In fact, there has never been any consistent correlation in American history between Federal budget deficits and inflation.
The cacophony of raspberries and ironic cheers which welcomed anti-inflation programme two or three, caused something akin to panic in the White House, which responded with plan three or four. The Stock Market reacted to this proposal to rescue the dollar from foreign ignominy with a great, one-day boiind-upwards. After that, the penguins of Wall Street began to have misgivings about a second antiinflation programme within the spade of a week.
The Administration also took convincing steps to cut back the rate of mode; supply growth. If they stick to it, and so far they haven't shown they can stick to any economic policy for more than a few months, there should be a diminution in the inflation rate by this time next year. However, everybody is terribly concerned the monetary retraction will pitch the country into a business slump, so it remains to be seen how long the boys and girls in the seat of government will hang in there with the new programme.
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