January 81, 1972
Page 1866
YOU CAN TRUST MUSKIE
HON. JOHN J. DUNCAN OF TENNESSEE IN THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES Monday, January 31, 1972
Mr. DUNCAN. Mr. Speaker, I read a very interesting editorial in the January 22, 1972, Knoxville, Tenn., News-Sentinel. I think it provokes some deep thought about our presidential candidates and their credibility. I would like to share it with my colleagues by placing it in the RECORD.
The article follows:
YOU CAN TRUST MUSKIE
So say the signs that blossom when Sen. Edmund S. Muskie of Maine takes his candidacy for the Democratic presidential nomination across the land.
Scripps-Howard's chief political writer, Ted Knap, reports Muskie braintrusters set great store by polls which show their man's credibility quotient is higher than President Nixon's.
Thus, in what has come to be known as the "packaging" of the candidate, the political packagers and the candidate himself are seeking to exploit the "down-home" image of Muskie as a man whose word is his bond.
Fair enough. Not all Administration promises have been kept.
But at this relatively early stage of the game we would suggest that the Muskie packagers supply the candidate with some words more readily bondable than a good deal of the simplistic pap he has been offering.
For example:
1. "The surest way to make jobs is to make jobs."
2. "I believe we should bring American troops home by bringing all of them home."
This sort of "wisdom" might send a Zen Buddhist into rapturous contemplation of his navel, but it's hardly adequate for the American taxpayer-citizen who wants to know precisely how these things are to be done, how much they will cost and what their long-range domestic or international effects will be.
The "jobs" issue, it turns out, amounts merely to expanding the existing program of making the Government the employer of last resort.
And the "bring the troops home" issue, Muskie says, means he'd stop bombing North Vietnam and offer to withdraw all U.S. forces from South Vietnam by a fixed date in exchange for release of American prisoners and guaranteed safety of the withdrawing forces. This seems to be a tactical, rather than strategic difference with an Administration that already has made significant strides toward bringing the troops home.
Likewise Muskie proclaims: "I think what we want once again is a country we can love, a country we can believe in, fight for and die for. If we build that kind of country nobody will have to die for it."
We think even the candidate himself might have axed that ringing line if he had had an opportunity to think about it a bit.
The only way to construe that statement is that Muskie thinks that right now "we" no longer love our country, no longer believe in it and are unwilling to fight and die for it as we once did.
That, in our opinion, is hogwash. The fact that Muskie and a horde of fellow Democrats are scrambling for the nomination is evidence that the great majority of the citizenry loves and believes enough in the American dream to work toward it through the two-party system.
To simply, as Muskie does, say that "we" are unwilling to fight and die is a gross insult to the hundreds of thousands of American military men who as careerists or draftees today serve the nation at home and abroad.
Credibility is a legitimate enough issue. But the candidate who chooses to make it one carries an extra burden of proof of his own credibility. And we suspect Muskie is a more credible man than much of his oratory thus far would indicate.