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FREEDOMWAYS      SECOND QUARTER 1972

political machines and the card-carrying party faithful, this candidate is distinguished today mainly by his gift for compressing the largest amount of words into the smallest amount of thought. This is the man who offers himself to the people one day enthusiastically approving the President's racist busing legislation, and the next day, slipping on his chic new wire-rim glasses and allows as to how, at second glance, he has decided the package is not quite as good as he first thought. This man is presidential material? Does this man deserve credibility, the respect and support of the American electorate?

Still another candidate now apparently regrets that he had to enter all the primaries, with his advisors wishing that he could forego them in order to win the nomination on the basis of all those irrelevant endorsements. We are supposed to accept him as President because he now admits he was all wrong on Vietnam and because he is "candid" and "frank" when he says that the American electorate will probably not accept a Black Vice-President. But people have apparently stopped listening to him too, because that kind of whining and whimpering are not good enough any longer. That kind of "earnest" nonsense is a waste of time, and the day has long since passed when anybody was interested in all those "sense of the Senate" resolutions.

Talked out, played out, worn out - neither of these men has the attention of the electorate any longer. The more they talk, the more they are turning people off. It is heartbreaking to have to listen to politicians who, before they get up, do not know what they are going to say; when they are speaking, do not know what they are saying; and when they have sat down, do not know what they have said.

Don't tell me the American people are supposed to choose between Nixon and Agnew and Humphrey and Muskie all over again, because they all come out of the same bag. They are tired and irrelevant. The kind of insipid politics they offer is exactly what is responsible for the malaise in our land. They have all constituted our nation's political leadership for years now. The country cannot much longer survive such mediocrity. In a sense, they have all played the game too long, never decisively rejecting the violence in Vietnam, tut-tutting the corruption in the White House - contributing in their own ways to the nation's vague, sickening sense of cultural disorder, of imponderable ideological conflicts - and moral duplicities, of pervasive institutional incompetence and corruption. From my campaigning around the nation, it seems to me that what the kids were saying five years

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"ALL WE ARE SAYING IS"-      CHISHOLM

ago about the lack of a future now seems to have become the cry of a very large segment of the country. The discontent and cynicism of the young and Blacks have now pervaded the white working class and middle class. America today faces a crisis of national morality, credibility, and intent. Individuals and institutions have come to regard change as something more likely to be for the worse than for the better.

Americans now know that they are being cheated and suckered by a system that produces timidity, mediocrity and compromise rather than concerned and dynamic leadership. For many, the "Garden of the World" has become a jungle, the "American Dream" has become a nightmare, and the "last asylum" conjures up no image except perhaps that of an institution for the criminally insane. The true measure of their predicament is the extent to which Americans look to someone like George Wallace for their salvation; an incredible state of affairs which does not particularly flatter Mr. Wallace but says reams about the failures of Richard Nixon and his chief Democratic opponents.

The issues in this election are: emancipation from the hypertrophy of narrow commercial interests; the priority of the general public interest over those of single groups and individuals; participation and co-determination; and the greatest possible measure of freedom and social justice.

If neither political party can come to grips with these issues, the present political system will not survive, and it will not deserve to. Perhaps through all the gloom of 1972, we may yet see the last hurrah of the Nixons of America, and then be able to roll up our sleeves and set to work getting ourselves together.

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