THE POLITICAL ODYSSEY OF SPIRO T. AGNEW

For many American conservatives, the past few years have not been especially happy ones. Although public opinion on various crucial issues has been drifting steadily to the right and the liberal-welfare voting blocs have fallen into disarray, conservatives have yet to realize the political gains which these developments seemed to promise. At a time when a number of spokesmen on the Right expected to savor the fruits of victory and enjoy long-denied political power, they have found themselves on issue after issue quite stunningly repudiated—the cherished positions of weary decades of pain and struggle neatly vaporized in mere months.

Most of this has occurred, of course, at the hands of a Republican Administration elected with the backing of these very conservatives, which has caused the more intransigent among them to seek new options. But looking across the partisan aisle, they see an alternative sufficient to make them blanch with horror: The wraith of George McGovern, risen from a witches’ sabbath at Miami Beach, hovers above the once proud keep of the Democracy. Through this particular looking-glass, they find a party that embraces the foreign policy of the radical Left, refuses to turn its back on busing, and takes its forensic pleasure in deciding how, exactly, to word its plank pertaining to homosexual liberation.

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M. Stanton Evans

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For many American conservatives, the past few years have not been especially happy ones. Although public opinion on various crucial issues has been drifting steadily to the right and the liberal-welfare voting blocs have fallen into disarray, conservatives have yet to realize the political gains which these developments seemed to promise. At a time when a number of spokesmen on the Right expected to savor the fruits of victory and enjoy long-denied political power, they have found themselves on issue after issue quite stunningly repudiated—the cherished positions of weary decades of pain and struggle neatly vaporized in mere months.

Most of this has occurred, of course, at the hands of a Republican Administration elected with the backing of these very conservatives, which has caused the more intransigent among them to seek new options. But looking across the partisan aisle, they see an alternative sufficient to make them blanch with horror: The wraith of George McGovern, risen from a witches’ sabbath at Miami Beach, hovers above the once proud keep of the Democracy. Through this particular looking-glass, they find a party that embraces the foreign policy of the radical Left, refuses to turn its back on busing, and takes its forensic pleasure in deciding how, exactly, to word its plank pertaining to homosexual liberation.