One can understand the impatience of the voters of Idaho to do better for themselves than Senator Frank Church. He is the gentleman best forgotten for his dreadful keynote address at the Democratic convention of 1960. Now his views on Vietnam are not those of the Administration or of the leaders of the Democratic Party, -or. it appears, of the citizens of Idaho— who now desire to replace Senator Church by. recourse to the populist extreme of recall. My own hope is a) that the recall movement will fail; b) that if it doesn’t, that the courts will knock it out; and c) that Senator Church will be conventionally defeated at the polls in the fall of 1968 when he is due to run for re-election.
Although the recall movement is being backed primarily by conservatives, it is a most un-conservative thing that they are doing. It is especially strange that some of the people who have associated themselves with the movement adopt as their principal political slogan the motto “This is a republic, not a democracy. Let’s keep it that way.’ One of the more important differences between a republic and a democracy is rule by representatives of the people rather than rule directly by the people themselves. If the latter were truly desirable, we could have running democracy without any difficulty at all by simply plugging in Dr. Gallup to a big IBM machine and turning on the dial. Do you prefer Johnson or Nixon? If the answer on Monday is Nixon 51, Johnson 49, we could simply flash the helicopter to jettison Lyndon, and pop up to New York to fetch Nixon, who then would be President until. Do you prefer Nixon or Romney? Tuesday, when Romney comes in. And so for all the senators, and for all the congressmen, until someone stopped to ask the question: why have any elected officials at all? Why not just constantly submit questions about everything to the voters, and let them decide directly?
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