A Plea for Positivism

"We are known," Edward Brooke says of his fellow Republicans, "as people who substitute negativism-a grumbling, carping, protesting rejection of new ideas-for constructive policies." Moreover, Massachusetts' attorney general contends in his first book, The Challenge of Change (Little, Brown), this popular image of Republicanism should be of concern to all Americans, for the two-party system is at stake. "Not to be alarmed about the status of the Republican Party," he writes, is a "symptom of impending rigor mortis."

Leadership Anemia. A Negro who has won his last two contests in a Democratic state with a Negro population of less than 3%, Brooke, 46, aspires to succeed retiring Leverett Saltonstall in the U.S. Senate-where he would be the first member of his race to serve since Reconstruction days. While examining the party's ills has become something of a national pastime, his findings go further than most in both diagnosis and prescription. Brooke, who repudiated the Goldwater campaign in 1964, charges that the G.O.P. is suffering from leadership anemia, which in turn has produced "poor programs." It has "all but exiled" minority groups, conducted "campaign-by-slogan," betrayed the heritage of Abraham Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt.

What to do? Brooke would start with fundamentals: "Before Republicans can begin to mold America as we would like it to be, we must first recognize America as it is." Brooke's views of the U.S. largely echo Lyndon Johnson's. He lists the three great domestic problems as poverty, civil rights and the plight of the cities. At the risk of being accused of me-tooism, he urges Republicans to devise remedies that surpass the Great Society's in both volume and efficacy.

Outbeautifying Lady Bird. He condemns Johnson's war on poverty, for example, as a "pitifully inadequate and misdirected" rearguard action that is bound to fail because it treats the symptoms rather than the causes of distress. Brooke advocates "an all-out, unqualified massive attack on the conditions which doom many Americans." He would increase relief payments, expand unemployment and minimum-wage coverage, "retool our total approach to education," and seriously consider a guaranteed annual wage at Government expense. He would even outdo Lady Bird with a "massive clean-up-and-beautify-America program."

Though Brooke gives no estimate of how much his ideas would cost, he grants the price would be high, urges that expanded welfare programs be financed by deficit spending. Completed last November, the book contains no reference to inflation, though the author concedes the necessity to hold down Great Society expenditures in order to honor the U.S. commitment in Viet Nam. While accusing Johnson of "politics as usual, promising everything to everybody and forgetting the hard realities," Brooke himself offers no realistic way out of the dilemma-which as eloquently as any argument in his book bespeaks the plight of the Republican Party.

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