Propaganda does work
Nicholas von Hoffman
Washington Within two hours after the state of Mississippi had definitely gone into the Carter column, and won the election for him, the pundits were speculating on television whether Kissinger would take the milliondollar advance from his publishers and write that book. The accommodation to President-elect Carter was so swift that little effort was invested into looking backward in order to find out how he had done it.
The South had returned to the Democrat Party, to vote for one of its own, even though Carter won't be the first, but the third Southerner to become President in this century. Apparently the Southern inferiority complex is infinite and infinitely manipulatable by Southern politicians. But no amount of primordial allegiance to yams and hams would have given Carter the prize without other things working in his favour.
His biggest advantage was Robert Dole, Ford's disastrous running mate. After his television debate with Walter Mondale, Dole seemed to come unglued, and began to campaign not only against living Democrats but dead ones as well. Blaming his mangled, war-wounded arm on Franklin Roosevelt, the peculiar Kansas senator also criticised Woodrow Wilson and the American part in World War I. The thesis that Democrats start wars is an old and cherished Republican argument; it is also one that many nonRepublicans half believe, but Bob Dole just seemed crazy saying it. People who could think of no other reason to vote for Carter did so out of the fear that something might happen to Ford.
Dole may have cost Ford the election, but a lot of other more minor things may have done so also. The possibility even exists that the fuss that the Ford people made over that tiresome Playboy interview scared the womanisers and sex-fiends out of bed and over to the polling places. In the end we were beginning to hear people say that if Ford got elected he would close down the X-rated film industry.
That thought did not bother the con servative voters in the vast and empty western states, but in the east the people seemed to grow conscious of being ashamed of Ford. They liked him well enough, but the goof just was not Presidential material. Most of the population is still located in the east, and Carter managed to fashion the same coalition of states that John Kennedy had in 1960.
In the last hours before the polls opened, the country began to have something of a feeling of a national invader; the enemy, though, was not from without, nor even subversive groups from within, but the people themselves. The enemy was the `voter apathy' which the Americans harboured in their souls, and all the apparatus of the modern, centralised, unitary society was turned on to fight it. 'Vote,' television commercials ordered, 'it's the bicentennial thing to do.' The Labour unions, the churches, the girl scouts implored the country to vote.
CBS was right, because American elections of this sort are simply a way of reaffirming the `system'. The outcome, the selection of a winner, is less important than the symbolic act of voting, of saying by virtue of pulling the lever on the voting machine, that'[ believe'. To those who vote all blessings do flow. The very same CBS network found itself a bedraggled taxi-cab driver in San Antonio, Texas—a man who described himself as a former derelict, a reformed alcoholic and a redeemed wastrel— who found new self-respect by voting. `When I vote,' said John Francis Crawford, 'T feel like somebody.'
Propaganda does work. The people who were saying that they would not be caught dead in a voting booth a week ago were bouncing up and down the streets on election day calling their non-voting friends irresponsible'. In every other democratic society, abstention is considered a political act; in the United States this week it was sabotage. Nevertheless 45 per cent of the eligible voters (the exact number won't be known for a time) stayed home.
The civic slackers were urged on in their sloth by people such as W. Averell Harriman, the octogenarian money-pots and international Pooh-Bah, who as Carter's foreign policy adviser went to Russia, conferred with his Soviet peers, and then announced that Russia had no need to fear. No matter who won the American presidential elec tions, foreign policy would stay the same. The end of the campaign was filled with so many quick turns that only the most deter mined non-voters could avoid being sucked into the excitement of the thing. The Sunday preceding the Election we had, for example, the arrival in Plains, Georgia, at Jimmy Carter's church, a reverend of the black persuasion, who applied for membership of the congregation. Rather than grant it to him, the deacons decided not to hold divine service. The decision was explained by the church's minister, who told the television cameras that the deacons had acted in accordance with a 1965 resolution not to admit `niggers' and `civil rights agitators'. Carter, away campaigning at the time, said that he disapproved; others accused the black minister of being deranged, and it was revealed that he had once been jailed for non-support of his family. We thrive on non-sequiturs. When not trying to fend off the evils of others' making, the great Southern Peanut ended his campaign with a characteristicallY energetic display of vacuity. His closing themes involved his contrition for being interviewed by Playboy, and disquisitions on
leadership: the absence thereof in Washington, the need thereof, Mr Ford's lack of it
and Mr Carter's possession of same in great evidence. At the same time, Carter's aides were giving out statistics of the past two years. The man has made more than one thousand speeches in as many cities while travelling a quarter of a million miles and spending 25 million dollars. Far from being depressed by such statistics, the Carter people are proud of them.
Ford's final days were suitably tasteless. He toured the country in the company of 3 bald, ex-baseball player turned sports an nouncer. In his last eleven days of franticjet travel, he seems to have made as many
speeches as Carter has in the last two years'
It was awful. The man lost his sense of place somewhere in Iowa, he lost his voice in Buffalo New York, and he lost control of himself in Grand Rapids, Michigan. 14.e wept and called out mawkish thanks to Ills home-town crowd while a brass band plaYed the University of Michigan Football Fight song. At times during his ordeal, and ours' it looked as though Mr Ford was running for President of the Alumni Society. Meanwhile, the American electorate was inundated by Ford television commercials., the most tasteless of which exploited his wife Betty's operation for breast cancer' While his wife was undergoing the knlfej President Ford was tearing away the age-°1u curtain of shame and secrecy by publicising every wretched„ excructiating detail. , length Air Force One took off for Washington, and bug-eyed and speechless old raisaleyes got back to the White House to watch the Election results. Ah, but wouldn't Ynt; know it, someone started a fire in the Ova' Office fireplace without opening the damr3er, so that the smoke chased the poor man out, the room before the voters could chase nirli out of the house.
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