Now the Democrats

It is a common enough allegation that a political platform is rarely more than a hazy frame, something like a television screen, behind which the all-important personality of a candidate assumes greater luster. I suspect that Mr. Nixon's newly acquired frame is just that, for the very good reason that he has had to fight off too many of his party's various wings to produce anything more substantial.

Senator Kennedy's platform is a far more subtle, and far more interesting document. Inevitably, it contains the dreary platitudes, the extravagant promises, and the baseless accusations at the opposition that the tolerant convention watcher has learned to expect. It reflects at the same time something of which many of the delegates to Los Angeles may not entirely have been aware: the genuine dissatisfaction of their party's intellectuals with the torpor in their society.

Some of these men (like Chester Bowles and John Kenneth Galbraith) helped to draft the Democratic platform, and occasionally the eloquence of their unhappiness gives the lie to the visions of mindless utopia cast by the rest of it. "We have drifted into a national mood that accepts payola and quiz scandals, tax evasion and false expense accounts. . . exploitation of sadistic violence as public entertainment," they tell us. The presence of these words in the platform implies that President Eisenhower's administration has been responsible for all these, just as Frank Church suggested in his keynote address that the Republicans had been spending Federal funds on deodorants instead of slum clearance or schools.

It is unlikely that Kennedy and his associates believe in either of these implications, any more than they believe in any "simple solutions to the infinitely complex challenges which face us." Yet for the most part, the solutions they outline in the platform are simple indeed, curses for only peripheral evils.

The platform pledges to raise the minimum wage to $1.25 an hour, to institute programs of loans and scholarship grants to students, to oppose "right to work" laws and the admission of Red China to the United Nations. This much, presumably, a Democratic Administration would be able to do, but its broader aspirations are not at all so easy to realize. It speaks (for example) offhandedly of "policies" that will ensure a yearly economic growth of five per cent "without inflation."

This intriguing dreaminess is, of course, harmless, but other Democratic planks are less so. The traditional clear-the-rascals-out clause is particularly ill-considered; it reads "We shall reform the processes of government in all branches . . . we will clean out corruption and conflicts of interest and improve Government service." This is the sort of thing for which Harry Truman very properly reprimanded Adlai Stevenson in 1952; surely there is no longer any need either to invoke or to exorcise the Jenner-McCarthy spirit.

With a name like "The Rights of Man," the platform could hardly treat the rights of Negroes lightly, and it is evident that it takes them very seriously indeed. It even mentions a year--1963--by which it plans to see at least first-step compliance with the Supreme Court's integration ruling in every affected school district. The foreign policy plank is made of equally stout stuff, giving the singularly honest assurance that "if meetings at high level offer prospects of success, we will be there."

Unlike Nixon, Kennedy and his fellow Democratic Senators have known what they wanted for some time. They admit quite candidly that they want to pass all the bills the President vetoed during the last eight years, and quite a few more besides. They want to see what the Federal government can do for the unemployed, the Negro, the slum-dweller and the old man (not the "senior citizen"), if it really puts its mind and money to it. The Democrats do not, it appears, regard GOP warnings that this kind of behavior reduces the freedom of the individual with any great seriousness.

The platform's lonely plaints about the dissoluteness of much of the United States convey quite clearly the authors' views that individual freedom is more than freedom from federal legislation. They would much rather equate freedom with a phrase they use frequently, "human dignity," and understandably do not consider padding expense accounts, exploiting latent sadism, or refusing to serve Negroes particularly dignified.

Despite their platform's apparent air of confidence, they have no more idea than I do whether they can use it to achieve their ideal of dignity. Their nominee's delineation of a "New Frontier" and his pleas for "sacrifice" suggests that they are going to try.