Republican Convention in Miami Is A 'Grotesque Number Game'

MIAMI BEACH, Aug. 5--If you are searching for hoopla at the Republican National Convention you won't be disappointed; miniskirted Rockefeller girls, Nixon men on stilts costumed as Uncle Same, live elephants on the street and a helium-filled version flying above the Convention Hall, and personal visits to hotels by such celebrities as Hugh O'Brien, John Wayne and Ronald Reagan.

But if you expected any hard thinking on the issues facing this nation, you will be disappointed.

For try as it might to style itself as the party of change, the Republican party--if these delegates are the embodiment of it--is not a forward-looking political force.

On the first morning of the Convention, for example,they cheered enthusiastically when John Wayne said he wants his daughter to be proud of his country's fighting men. They did not cheer at all when Senator Jacob Javits said the GOP must solve the law-and-order problem by "reconciliation" rather than "repression." Javits was going too far. What he should have said to suit this Convention is simply that the GOP must solve the law-and-order problem.

Confused

Even the platform which the resolutions committee drafted, though admittedly a great deal more moderate than the so-called "Goldwater platform" of 1964, is a confused document, as platforms always are. And in calling for "de-Americanization" of the left than the average businessman-delegate to the Miami Convention. In any case, platforms don't influence candidates much, and front-runner Richard Nixon said Saturday he would not be willing to concede more than President Johnson has already given in an effort to get the bombing stopped.

The problem with the Republican Party is that, in its effort to recover from the debacle of 1964, it appears willing to buy unity at any price. A discussion on the floor of a major issue would lead to dissension beneficial to no one, the reasoning goes, so the issues have been buried in favor of the personalities.

Even the personalities, in fact, have by now taken a back seat to the pure mechanics of the nomination process. It is a grotesque numbers game, and everyone in Miami Beach is playing. At a Rockefeller press conference this morning, more than three-quarters of the questions were either about permutations of Presidential and Vice Presidential possibilities or about how far Nixon was ahead in the various delegate polls conducted by the media.

Ping Pong

Just as the candidate played ping-pong last week with the Harris and Gallup popularity polls, they are playing this week with the AP, UPI, and CBS delegate polls.

And everywhere people ask: Who's going to win? What will Gov. Rhodes do with his Ohio delegation? Who will the winner pick for his Vice Presidential candidate? Does Nixon really have it sewed up on the first ballot?

Set all these questions to the loud brassy music of any political convention, and place it against the palm tree-lined streets of broiling Miami Beach with hotel after hotel looking like a pastel copy of William James Hall and you have the Republican National Convention. It is almost festive enough to make one forget we are a nation fighting on two fronts.

There has been precious little talk, and none in high places, about how America should rethink its role in world affairs, although the usual lip service is paid to the need for a change. There has been a refusal to admit that the next Administration must infuse billions of dollars into our cities to accomplish what the platform rhetoric claims the GOP wants to accomplish.

At his press conference yesterday. Governor Rockefeller was asked by a foreign reporter, "do you think perhaps Marshall MeLuhan was right when he said the people only say they want change but really they don't?"

Who can know for the nation as a whole? But McLuhan seems to have analyzed precisely the attitude of most of the people who matter at this GOP convention.