CARTER'S VICTORY
BEHIND by David Frankel The following article is reprinted from the November 15 issue of Intercontinental Press. One thing came through clearly in the American presidential election: In the end, the voters had a hard time deciding who was worse, Ford or Carter. "I don't think the people liked either one of the candidates all that much, " admitted a Republican party leader in Cleveland when the election was over. At the close of the first of the so-called great debates between the two capitalist candidates, Ford summed up by saying: "I think the real issue in this campaign... is whether you should vote for his (Carter's) promises or my performance in two years in the White House. " A bare majority chose Carter's promises over Ford's record. They voted, above all, for Carter's promise to do something about unemployment and restore prosperity. The choice, however, was not made enthusiastically. Polls estimated that 20% of the voters were still undecided in the last week of the campaign. The remark of one Massachusetts voter who told reporters, "I'm not that hot for Carter, but I like the other guy less, " was The American ruling class was delighted that people bothered to vote at all. "Voters Jam the Polls, " said the main headline of one New York daily. Various states reported "massive" or "astonishing" turnouts, and Chemical Bank, one of the country's largest, took out a full-page advertisement in the November 5 New York Times that proclaimed:
"America: 79, 000, 000
"Apathy: 0
"More than 79 million Americans proved that the predictions of voter apathy were largely unfounded. The people had something to say and they said it. We feel they also said something else: the system works. " Chemical Bank, however, overstated its case. About 67 million voters abstained, and it is clear that millions of those who finally did vote still felt resentment and dissatisfaction over the lack of a real choice. The actual turnout was the lowest since 1948, when 51% of the eligible voters cast ballots. This year, the turnout was 53.3%, continuing the steady decline in voter participation since 1960, when 63% of the eligible voters. came out. The 1976 turnout dropped two percentage points from the 55.4% figure for 1972.
USA A prime goal of the ruling class in the 1976 election was to restore trust in the government, which was badly shaken by Johnson and Nixon's intervention in the Vietnamese civil war and by the Watergate scandal. This objective was reflected in the opinion voiced by Carl Hathaway, senior vice-president of the Morgan Guaranty Trust Co., that "there is an enormous amount of stability and normalcy in the current situation. This is an orderly transition, through the democratic process, of the seat of power, after all, and hardly any reason to be panicked" (Wall Street Journal, November 4). But it remains to be seen whether Carter can restore the confidence undermined by his predecessors. The program that Carter ran on was not substantially different from Ford's. Each insisted that he would maintain the stronger military establishment. Both men opposed the right of women to abortion. Both supported the death penalty. And neither promised any new initiatives regarding Black rights. On help to victims of the economic crisis, Carter hedged in his promises. However, Carter was elected on a program different from the one he ran on. In their attempt to find some difference between the two candidates, and in their dissatisfaction with the way things are going under Ford, the low-income voters singled out Carter's vague promises for a change and his insistence that he would "put America back to work. " Carter was elected to bring jobs and stop the cutbacks in social programs. The statistics on how people voted show how dominant the economic issue was in deciding the election. An NBC News poll found that 87% of those who pulled the lever for Carter gave jobs as a reason. A CBS News poll found that only one income group - voters from families earning more than $20, 000 a year - gave Ford a majority (62%) of its votes. (NBC and CBS are two of the major private national radio and television networks.) In contrast, families earning less than $8,000 a year gave Carter 62% of their votes. The vote in the $12, 000 to $20, 000 bracket divided half and half between Ford and Carter, while those in the $8, 000 to $12, 000 category gave Carter a 57% majority. (That the race was so close despite these statistics reflects the fact that the percentage of those who vote rises with income.)
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U.S.A The American workers sought to advance their own interests within the capitalist two-party trap. This becomes even clearer if the Black vote and the trade-union vote are singled out. Labor bureaucrats for Carter Carter made a strong appeal to the labor vote in his speech accepting the Democratic party nomination. "Our party, " he said, "was built out of the sweatshops of the old Lower East Side, the dark mills of New Hampshire, the blazing hearths of Illinois, the coal mines of Pennsylvania, the hard-scrabble farms of the southern coastal plains, and the unlimited frontiers of America." The trade-union bureaucracy went all-out for Carter, carrying out what New York Times reporter Warren Weaver called "the biggest, most expensive, best organized and most sophisticated campaign that organized labor has ever conducted in support of a presidential candidate." Unions distributed more than 80 million pieces of literature backing Carter's bid for the White House. Shop stewards and union officers were instructed to put the arm on local members during lunch breaks and on the job. Union newspapers functioned as campaign leaflets for the Carter-Mondale ticket. "Protect Your Jobs! Vote Carter-Mondale; " the Michigan AFL-CIO News urged in its final issue before the election.
"WE NEED CARTER!" said the headline of the New
York Public Employee Press. A quote from union leader
Victor Gotbaum was displayed: "The stakes are enormous for City workers; jobs, pensions, and the future of our City are on the line."
The campaign of the union tops in behalf of Carter met with success because of the feeling in the ranks that a change was needed. NBC estimated that 64% of trade unionists voted for Carter, while CBS gave the figure of 62%.
Without the votes from labor, Carter could not have won. Trade-union support provided the margin of difference for Carter in Pennsylvania and New York, for example. The loss of either one of these states would have cost him the election. Ohio, another key industrial state, was also won by Carter because of his trade-union support.
It was a convincing demonstration of the potential political power of the American trade-union movement - and of how that power remains harnessed to the service of the Democratic party, instead of to the independent labor party that is so badly needed.
'We shall overcome'
Even more impressive than the labor vote for Carter was the Black vote. NBC estimated that 92% of Blacks who voted cast their ballots for Carter, while CBS put the figure at 83%. The Center for Joint Political Studies, a Washington-based group that follows Black voting patterns, reported that Carter took 93% of the Black vote. As with the labor vote, Carter wooed Blacks and Hispanics from the beginning. At the close of the Democratic party national convention, Carter, Mondale, and the other party hacks joined hands with Coretta Scott King, the widow of Martin Luther King, Jr.; Black congressman and former civil-rights activist Andrew Young; United Farm Workers President César Chávez, and others. They all sang "We Shall Overcome," the song made famous by the civil-rights movement. With double the unemployment rate of whites, Blacks were even more responsive to Carter's promises about the economy. Moreover cutbacks in government spending in everything from child care and school lunches to welfare and job training have hit the oppressed minorities the hardest. Finally, Ford's competition with Ronald Reagan for the racist vote in the Republican primaries also hurt him among Blacks. Seeing no alternative, those of the oppressed national minorities who went to the polls backed Carter - and their votes, like those of the trade unionists, were essential to Carter's victory. In Pennsylvania, for example, Carter won by only 123,000 votes. Blacks in Philadelphia alone gave him 178,000 votes. In Ohio, where Carter's lead was only 7, 500 votes, Representative Louis Stokes of Cleveland noted that "the margin can be attributed to the large black vote in (my) Congressional district." Massive leads for Carter in the heavily Chicano areas of South Texas gave him his overall 2% edge in that state.
Nationwide, only 48% of white voters gave their support to Carter. In fact, even in Carter's home base in the South, the majority of white voters backed Ford.
Carter won 54% of the overall vote in the South, and every Southern state except Virginia, because he won the Black vote.
This point should be noted. Despite the claims by various commentators that Carter has reconstructed the
Democratic party coalition forged by Franklin D.
Roosevelt during the 1930s, the 1976 election gave convincing proof that the Roosevelt coalition is dead.
That coalition rested on the votes of white workers and
Blacks in the North, and on the white-supremacist
Dixiecrat machine in the South. The masses of Blacks were not allowed to vote in the South during the 1930s and 1940s.
When the old white-supremacist machine began to be broken down in the 1960s by the force of the civil-
rights movement, the Democratic party in the South split. The Dixiecrat wing that had been dominant in the days of the Roosevelt coalition was represented by George Wallace. In 1968, when Wallace ran on the American Independent party ticket against both Nixon and Democratic party nominee Hubert Humphrey, he won 13.5% of the total vote. Wallace's 10 million votes were concentrated in the South, where he carried the states of Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Louisiana, and Mississippi. In North Carolina, South Carolina, and Tennessee, he lost to Nixon, but won a bigger vote there than Humphrey. In 1972, the remnant of Wallace's movement, without Wallace, polled slightly more than one million votes. This year it received only 168, 000 votes. Thus, in the electoral arena, the 1976 campaign sealed the defeat of the diehard segregationists. The racist, reactionary vote had no place to go but to Ford or Carter. Wallace himself was one of those who sang "We Shall Overcome" on the stage at the Democratic party convention. The collapse of the Wallace movement and its reabsorption into the two-party system reflect the changing economic reality - particularly the urbanization and industrialization of the South, and the shift among Blacks from being agricultural laborers and sharecroppers to industrial workers. It is also a result of the gains won by the Black liberation movement over the last two decades. The reactionary objective of pushing Blacks back to the ir status prior to the mass civil-rights movement is no longer realistic. Such an objective could be attained only through the victory of a mass fascist movement. The need of the American ruling class for a classcollaborationist relationship with reformist Black leaders was reflected in the course of the presidential campaign by incidents such as Carter's rapid retreat on his "ethnic purity" slur and the resignation of Agriculture Secretary Earl Butz after a racist joke of his was publicized. Carter himself got his start in the 1976 presidential primaries as the candidate assigned by the Democratic party machine to block Wallace. Ever. Wallace has been trying to prove that he has had a change of heart on the race issue. He recently ordered the flag of the Confederate slavocracy flown underneath, instead of above, the American flag on the Alabama statehouse. He also gave approval to the pardon of a Black defendant in the infamous Scottsboro frame-up. Of course, the shift in stance on this issue is only relative. In general, both Carter and Ford tried to pretend in their campaigns that Blacks do not exist. They avoided discussion of the problem of racism in American society. Carter is now talking about putting Blacks in his cabinet; but aside from such possible gestures he will continue the basic economic and social policies that breed racism and give encouragement to ultrarightist forces. In this context, it is interesting to note that the 1976 election saw a virtual standstill in the number of Black elected officials. This different from 1974, when the largest number of Blacks since the post-Civil War Reconstruction were elected to state legislatures in the South. The 1976 campaign was also very different from the 1968 and 1972 campaigns, when Nixon's "Southern strategy" was based on winning the South by appealing to the racist vote. The ruling class now has to worry much more about keeping Blacks inside the two-party system because of the economic downturn and the general crisis of confidence in the Democratic and Republican parties. Also, a "law-and-order" campaign would not have gone over very well after Watergate.
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U.S.A. Silence on key issues Watergate and the whole web of government crimes connected with it was another underlying issue in the election. The Democrats and Republicans handled it by putting up two candidates not involved in Watergate who stressed their own honesty and avoided discussing the issues. Most people saw no difference between Ford and Carter on Watergate. Eugene McCarthy did run as a reformer against both capitalist parties, which he correctly charged with responsibility for government attacks on democratic rights. But McCarthy had no solutions for the economic problems worrying the electorate, and tended to downplay them in his campaign. Overall, because of his commitment to capitalist politics, McCarthy's campaign did nothing to help open a way forward for the masses. The Republicans hoped that McCarthy would take votes from Carter, and favored putting him on the ballot in some states. McCarthy managed to pull aboui 650, 000 votes, or 1% of the total, and he did prevent Carter from winning in four states. The rights of women was another issue avoided by the candidates of the two-party system. Neither Ford nor Carter had much to say about the question, aside from the ir repeated statements opposing the right of women to abortion. Where voters did get a chance to express their views on the question of women's rights, they came out massively in favor. State referendums on the Equal Rights Amendment to the U.S. constitution were on the ballot in Colorado and Massachusetts, and voters in both states backed the ERA by a three-to-two margin. Particularly significant was the fact that in Massachusetts the ERA was worded to include a prohibition against discrimination on account of race as well as sex. Boston has been the scene of one of the fiercest battles in the country over the busing of Black schoolchildren into white neighborhoods. As with Blacks, both the Democratic and Republican parties put forward few women candidates. The number of women holding elective office remained basically unchanged, although in the 1974 election there was an increase of about 27%. 'Ford to city: Drop dead' Aside from the role of Black voters and the trade unions in Carter's victory, the most significant factor was probably the crisis in the cities. CBS estimated that 60% of the voters in cities with populations of more than 500, 000 cast their ballots for Carter. The problems facing the city poor, of course, dovetail with racial discrimination and the overall state of the economy. Ford's attitude was summarized in a headline in the New York Daily News last year: "Ford to city: drop dead." New York City's financial crisis has resulted in tens of thousands of layoffs, the closing of hospitals, librar6 ies, and schools, and the slashing of social services, including garbage collection and fire protection. But the situation facing New York is not unique. As Business Week warned in a July 12 editorial, .... New York City's troubles are harbingers of a broader problem. Every major city in the U.S. is going to have serious financial distress in the next three to five years." The day after Carter's election, New York Mayor Abraham Beame, a fellow Democrat, pulled out a copy of the "Ford to city" headline, which had been issued as a campaign leaflet by the Carter organization in New York. Beame ripped the leaflet apart as television cameras filmed the scene. "I'll tell you one thing, " he said. "It's not going to happen under Carter. Which brings us to the question of the prospects under a Carter administration. An editorial in the November 15 issue of Business Week came right to the point. "One of the first things that Carter must learn as President, " it said, "is that he cannot deliver on his many domestic promises so long as international economies are out of control. " It would be surprising indeed if Carter did not make any gestures to the constituency that elected him. He knows that if he wants a second term in office he will again have to win the votes of Blacks, trade unionists, Chicanos and Puerto Ricans, and the population of the big cities. But the extent of the concessions that a Carter administration is willing to make will be determined by the overall problems of the world capitalist economy. The fact is that the economic recovery in Europe, even more than in the United States, has bogged down. The imperialist regimes are squabbling over which will capture the largest share of a shrinking world market and in this situation new attempts to hold down wages and living conditions are inevitable. The only alternative would be to make the capitalists rather than the workers pay, and Carter is not about to do that unless the capitalist class as a whole decides that such a course is necessary because of massive resistance from the working class and its allies. Wall Street's expectations were summed up by Leonard Silk in an article in the October 28 New York Times. Although Carter has been talking about stimulating the economy to produce more jobs, Silk noted, "In the realm of monetary policy, Arthur F. Burns will still be chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, and there are unlikely to be enough changes in the membership of the board or of the Federal Open Market Committee, the key policymaking body, to make much difference. " Carter is also talking about reinstituting the type of wage controls that led to a sharp drop in real wages under the Nixon administration. "Mr. Carter and his advisers have made clear that they would, in the words of Walter W. Heller, 'maintain and unchain' the Council on Wage and Price Stability, which has been deprecated during the Ford administration.
:% concludes: "Many businessmen and stock-market 'm estors are apparently prepared to be upset over the sossibility of a Carter victory. However, as one corpo: - are executive said, 'Business prefers Republican Presidents but growls all the way to the bank under Democrats.'" Drop dead' in politer tone What about Mayor Beame's confidence that what has been happening to New York City is "not going to happen under Carter"? "The Carter campaign in New York City sees the two candidates as day and night, " the editors of the Wall Street Journal commented October 25. "Yet beyond a difference in rhetorical tones, and wishful thinking in City Hall, we can't see why. Chances are that when New York returns to Washington in January with its plea for more help, it will get about the same reception, regardless of who is in office." Carter may agree to stretch out the time period over which the cuts in the New York City budget must be made, but he is in complete agreement with Ford that the cuts must be put into effect. There is every reason to believe that Carter, too, will tell the millions who depend on city services to drop dead. However, as the Wall Street Journal editors noted, he will probably do it with a different rhetorical tone. But the masses of people who voted for Carter did not vote for rhetorical tone. They voted for a difference in their lives; they tried to vote their way out of the depression, out of the economic crisis that has never ended for the unemployed, for those suffering from the cutbacks, and for those fearing new layoffs. Nor does Carter have a lot of time before people begin demanding results. The general attitude was summed up by New York Times reporter James M. Naughton November 4. "Faced with a choice between an accidental President whose boldest deed was to pardon former President Richard M. Nixon and a one-term former Governor of Georgia whose opponents accused him of inconstancy and guile, the voters, in effect, seemed to withhold judgment, as if to say their trust The extent of confidence in Carter - or the lack of it - was reflected in the NBC poll taken on election day. Only 40% of those queried upon leaving the voting booths said they would trust him to do the right thing most of the time, and only 30% chose the words "honest man" as an accurate description of Carter. There is no feeling that Carter is a savior. He is simply seen as offering a better chance than Ford to get the country out of the economic crisis. -ow good are Carter's chances of delivering? In that egard, his situation should be compared to that of
Lyndon Johnson, who campaigned in 1964 on the slogan of the "Great Society". When Johnson took office expanding industries were creating jobs, inflation was not a pressing problem, and real wages were rising. Today, American corporations are still laying workers off, real wages remain lower than they were in 1965, and the threat of a renewed economic downturn and sharp inflation is a constant preoccupation. Moreover, Carter has fewer political excuses than his predecessors. He has a Democratic party majority of 62-to-38 in the Senate and 290-to-145 in the House of Representatives. Thirty-seven of the fifty state governors in the United States are also Democrats.
** # * ฿ # The 1976 presidential election showed two basic facts about American politics. First, the masses of workers and the oppressed nationalities remain tied to the capitalist two-party system. There is no mass break yet from the Democratic party. But at the same time the American people are growing increasingly restive within the confines of the two-party system. They are becoming increasingly impatient and dissatisfied with the choices being offered them. From this point of view, it is important to note that although there appears to have been no appreciable increase in the socialist vote this year - partly because much of the protest vote went to McCarthy - the idea of an alternative to the Democratic and Republican parties has begun to gain a wider hearing than ever before. The fact that Michael Harrington, the best-known Social Democratic leader in the United States, and a Carter supporter, felt it necessary to debate Socialist Workers party presidential candidate Peter Camejo on this topic on the eve of the election was an indication of the growing sentiment for a better alternative to the perennial two capitalist parties. Pressure against the two-party system was also indicated by the discussion of this question in major dailies like the New York Times and the Washington Post, and in periodicals like the New Republic. The ruling class, of course, is not about to abandon a system that has worked so well for them for more than a century, but among broad layers of the population, the idea of something superior is gaining in attractiveness. Finally, it must be stressed once again that the oppressed minorities and the American labor movement expect that because of the way they voted they are entitled to responsiveness from the incoming administration. Looking ahead to reelection in 1980, Carter may try to consolidate his position by granting some concessions. But his margin for maneuver is severely restricted. Most importantly, he cannot solve the basic problems that the masses expect him to solve. In light of all these factors, it is safe to predict that the next four years are not going to be easy ones for Carter or for the class he represents.
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THE «INDEPENDENCE" FRAUD
Transkei: 0 Miles 300 BOTSWANA NAMIBIA SOUTH AFRICA TRANSKEI Cape Town The propaganda machine of the South African Republic has been shified into high gear in a feverish effort to focus interna ional attention on the "independence" of he