The Politicians Of Party Beach

Searching for a fountain of youth, Massachusetts Democrats charged forth into a Floridian jungle of inarticulate sincerity a week ago Saturday. Their hearts were pure, their visors shining, and their voices, through the clanking steel of good intentions, hardly audible.

Speaking to a mock convention of the state's Young Democrats at Memorial Hall, senatorial and gubernatorial candidates were all gently hung up on the Kennedy image. Endicott Peabody, running for Leverett Saltonstall's Senate seat, spoke with the late President's mannerisms--the left hand in the jacket pocket, the cupped right hand jabbing forward in the air. Edward McCormack, running for Governor, invoked JFK's name with liturgical repetition, but his speaking style was more like that of the younger Kennedys. He still had the monotonously rhythmic Massachusetts voice, nervous, clipped phrasing. Like everyone on the podium, he seemed to be staring out at a great imaginary photo-blowup of one of John Fitzgerald Kennedy's shy smiles, carnestly trying to mimic it.

The odd thing about all this is that the Kennedy way is hardly the best way to give a speech. Not until late October of the 1960 campaign could John Kennedy give an effective speech, and the younger brothers still haven't made it. But the style has an unstudied, youthful sincerity about it. And what the candidates wanted most to show the college Democrats was that a man of 45 could be as sincere as one of 20, if also as inarticulate.

That's probably a slight to the collegians to whom the style of awkward earnestness came naturally. They, at least, in their nominating speeches, didn't indulge in the verbal absurdities of the candidates

--A spokesman for Mayor Collins, pointing out the Collins won't be led by the mob, unlike Robespierre, that (long pause) .. uh .. character in the French Revolution."

--Edward McCormack endlessly intoning for the sincerity earnestness, vigor, vitality idealism and new blood of youth in his campaign without giving more than the barest hint of what he intended to do with all the energy.

--Endicott Peabody forthrightly elucidating his foreign policy eyes ablaze with intensity stepping to the side of the podium? "What'll we do in Vietnam?... We'll perseverel" and thinking that he'd said something.

Thomas Boylston Adams, running for the Senatorial nomination with a Vietnam policy advocating negotiations with the National Liberation Front and immediate free elections in those parts of Vietnam controlled by the U.S. had a different problem. If Peabody was having trouble putting his words into thought. Adams struggled with the more conventional reverse difficulty. Uncomfortable during his speech, he clung to the podium, constantly tapping his finger on the wood, his ring glinting through a waterglass with more and more agitation as he searched for adequate words. He couldn't find them. All that came across were the honest, but cliched catchphrases. One admired his courage and regretted his inarticulateness, felt his emotions and didn't believe his arguments.

The Massachusetts Democrats were courting youth and the Kennedy Style at the convention, but they misread both. Youth (if one can talk about "Youth" at all) is earnest and idealistic by choice, but it is inarticulate through inexperience. And President Kennedy, if awkward in speaking style, was hardly ever awkward in phrasing or thought. At his most lucid moments he made articulate questions and tentative answers out of vague popular feelings.

Political leadership is not the art of mimicking popular feeling but of shaping, articulating and responding to it. whether intentionally or through plain lack of ability, the candidates at the YD's convention were mostly mimics, and rather poor ones, of what they considered the Style of Youth. Like a paunchy Political Science professor who throws away what knowledge he may have gleaned in thirty years to become a surfer at the age of sixty, they'll deserve every spill they take.