When Talk Is Cheap and Wild

By Hugh Sidey

THE PRESIDENCY

There is a political protest struggling to be born out in the country. If it makes it self heard, eventually it may ask something like this: Why are we repeatedly forced to choose our Presidents from the Congress? There is no rebellion yet, but there is at least a rising murmur at the spectacle of ten of the 16 presidential possibilities being products of Capitol Hill.

Congress is an unreal world--and getting more so. Talk there is cheap and wild and it is rarely accountable. Senators and Congressmen do not have to carry out their decisions, do not have to make the Government work. They walk away from responsibility after they cast their votes.

Few of them have ever run anything larger than their office staffs. Hubert Humphrey was a mayor and Edmund Muskie was a Governor, but so long ago that the experience is not much more than the faded clippings in their scrapbooks. In almost every city and hamlet, Americans can see that the politicians who went to Washington now talk and act like men in a different nation from their fellow politicians who stayed back home. They see that their Governors--Lucey, Brown, Ray, Longley, Dukakis, Walker, Thomson, Evans--are true executives and make real decisions. Senators talk and shake hands.

When Jerry Ford, who was tempered by 25 years on the Hill, is out on the stump, his rhetoric sometimes suggests that he would abolish the entire Government. As head of that Government, he must know, after a year's on-the-job training, that some of his campaign lines are pure baloney. But he cannot cure the congressional hangover. Some of Ford's vetoes, often delivered with simplistic and negative explanations, represent a denial of the legitimate, if costly advances our society has made in the past years. On the other hand, many of the bills that he ve toed were grab bags of every tired idea that has been propounded in Congress in the past 30 years.

A few weeks ago, Louis Harris, one of the men who read the national palm, gave a speech that would have been a shocker if any of the "Phogbounds" had been listening. "The voices from the top today are by and large not the voices from below," he said. The findings in his polls, he continued, showed the people sick to death of overblown and phony talk. They viewed politics as "sadly out of date."

The public, he said, wanted "the hard truth about the recession, energy, inflation and other key issues of the day . . . They want politicians who will level with them."

By last year some 70 million Americans, half of all those who are 18 years or older, had been through high school. That is the largest electorate so highly educated the world has ever produced. Their education has been dramatically enlarged by television. Their sensitivity to the facts of national life has been tuned by the drama of Watergate. They do not see the issues as black and white, as many of the candidates continue to shout. Quit talking to them as twelve-year-olds, advised Harris.

Lyndon Johnson, the pre-eminent legislative creature, got hundreds of bills passed, but the full effects of his program on the country were never calculated.

We suffer from that burden today. He never fully understood that he was the executive officer, in charge of final results. Instead, he used to take out the box score of bills passed and read the numbers to visitors as his measure of greatness.

An alarming amount of Rich ard Nixon's White House energy was spent running again for office, doing the same thing he had done in the congressional world in which he dwelled for 14 years.

He never fully conceived a pro gram for America, achieved al most nothing on the home front.

Jerry Ford in his first year responded competently to the problems that were literally thrust on him. But now that the time has come to move beyond the crises he inherited, there are worrisome signs that Ford's view of leader ship remains a reflection of his days on the Hill--days spent in meeting, talking and traveling.

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