The Conservative Party’s candidate for mayor offers this fact, free, to Messrs. Beanie and Lindsay, who, whenever the subject comes up, tend to vanish from the studio in a cloud of integrated dust.
Prudence is, as the catechism teaches, a virtue. It doesn’t happen to be the virtue I am myself best at. But I do greatly honor it, and do believe that prudence plays, or ought to play, an important role even in the development of paradigmatic political platforms, such as the Conservative Party’s has sought to be. A newspaper editor in New York wrote a few weeks ago an editorial in which he admitted that he felt constrained to agree with “Mr. Buckley”—he meant myself, not the gentleman in the Bronx who used to go by the same name—that Mr. Lindsay’s platform for the economic rejuvenation of New York City was an immoderate exercise in nothingness. So far, said the editor, only Mr. Buckley, of all the candidates, has come out with “meaningful proposals, many of them of course rash, because as a minority candidate he can afford to be rash.” I wrote to the editor and told him that I am in fact even more anxious than either of the two underdog candidates—by the laws of deduction, I am the favorite candidate—anxious not to make any rash proposals. Of all the candidates, I said in my letter, I am the most anxious not to make any rash proposals, because I have, looking over my shoulders, not only the voters, but also my muse; to whose service I have been devoted for lo these many years.
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