70 Year Magazine Archive

National Trends

by L. Brent Bozell

The Chance to be Different

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Hold on to your hats, Ladies and Gentlemen, and live it up while it lasts. We are enjoying—for these two weeks anyway—a genuine two-party system!

It is entirely possible, of course, that the Republicans will ruin it all at Chicago by imitating the Democratic platform. It is also possible— should the Republicans hold their ground—that the Democrats’ nimble- footed leader will eventually skip away from that platform of his. For the moment, however, events and people have conspired to make our two political parties look different. This does not mean that either party looks attractive to, say, conservatives —only that degrees of unattractiveness are now clearly discernible. At Los Angeles the Democratic Party carved out positions for itself in three major areas of national policy—a set of “images,” if you like—that are recognizably different from those with which the Republicans are generally identified in the public mind. It did so, moreover, deliberately, with the idea of creating campaign “issues” over these disagreements—of daring the Republicans, in effect, to defend the status quo.

LB

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