Bugbears

In the past week the CRIMSON has staked out its position on four major issues of the Presidential campaign: civil liberties, Asian policy, Communist subversion, and civil rights. Our stand on each has been closer to that of Adlai E. Stevenson and the Democratic platform than to that of Dwight Eisenhower and the Republicans. No newspaper or voter, however, can sample the issues displayed by each party without finding some rotten wares. These non-issues, born of distortion and trumpeted throughout the country by leaders of both sides, have added only confusion to the Presidential campaign.

A typical Democratic bogey is the Taft-Hartley law. Democrats have pledged to repeal and rewrite the law, while Republicans would add the 22 liberalizing amendments proposed by Senator Taft three years ago. Since a new Democratic law as proposed by the CIO includes these amendments, the final legislative product will be almost the same no matter who wins.

Yet, Democrats stubbornly insist there is a black and white difference between amendment and repeal. They could have placed their Congressional majority behind Taft's proposals, but they preferred to keep the law inequitable in order to lure the labor vote with promises of repeal.

Distorting the Taft-Hartley issue, Democrats have at least aimed it at but one segment of the electorate. But the Republicans have paraded their dummy, the "Corruption in Government" issue, in front of everyone.

No one denies that the corrupt practices which seeped into Washington during the last years of President Roosevelt's life were ignored by Truman until public exposure embarrassed him. But this does not mean the Government is the reeking "top to bottom mess" Eisenhower says it is. Six-tenths of one percent of Government employees have been accused of or indicted for malpractice, leaving the Administration only slightly more sullied than Ivory soap. Bue even if .00001 of the three million Government employees were corrupt, newspapers could still have a scandal a day for a year. And since scandals always rate front page newspaper space over day-to-day honesty, people are bound to get a swollen impression of corruption in Government. Aware of this, the Democrats nominated a man who has had practical experience in cleaning up "messes" in his home state.

The Republicans, moreover, greatly exaggerate the effect of corruption on the workings of the Government. It takes a strange distortion of cause and effect to infer, with Gen. Eisenhower and Sen. Nixon, that corruption has interfered with our drive toward world peace and been a root cause of the setbacks in our foreign policy.

Such ill-founded "issues" may influence votes, but they will haunt the party that wins with them. False display of Taft-Hartley repeal as a panacea for labor will make writing a fair labor relations law even more difficult. And to convince the people that the Government is a stamping ground for thieves will make Government service all the more unattractive to the kind of public servants the nation needs.