The Keynote

The Democrats chose Idaho's U.S. Senator Frank Church, 35. as their keynote speaker because his boyish good looks promised television a new generation's outlook. True to the promise, handsome Frank Church, the Senate's youngest member, keynoted a change in Democratic policy--of a sort. Instead of the economic gloom that had sustained his elders since he was a toddler, he promised global doom; instead of the old "Don't-Let-'em-Take-It-Away" theme of 1952, he urged "Don't-Let-'em-Spend-It-That-Way" for the prosperous 1960s.

The Administration's so-called prosperity, cried he, is a "pitchman prosperity, the kind that results when Government is run by hucksters not unaccustomed to selling inferior products by wrapping them in bright packages." It has sent the farmer on "the road to ruin." Tight money policies "have sapped our vitality and shackled our economic growth. Our urgent needs at home have been left untreated like festering sores."

Don't Be Half-Safe. The "sores," according to the Church doctrine, all can be traced to the Federal Government: "Private slums are spreading through the rotting core of our big cities. Our private automobiles are stalled in traffic jams, while rapid public transportation, for lack of funds, lags 20 years behind. Public education flounders. The classroom shortage has not been met. To sweeten private life, our stores display a billion bottles of deodorant; yet a modest bill to reduce the stench from our polluted public rivers was vetoed. We have cared so much about 'conspicuous consumption' that our lives are cluttered with gadgets," while "switchblade delinquents haunt the public streets" and the aged go without adequate medical care. "Such has been the direction of our course--under this Republican Administration."

While the U.S. is going to hell in a hand basket--and only half-safe at that--the Democrats in Congress tried to save the nation by adding two new states, buying medical research, and bringing in a civil rights bill. "If only there had been a Democrat in the White House," said Church, "there would have been plenty of money to enact housing, unemployment, school construction and other such bills without deficit spending and new taxes."

Oil the Hinges. Similarly, said Church, the U.S. has lost out in the fight against Communism in the past seven years. "The hinge of the future swings on the U.S.," but the Republicans have let it rust, leaving the nation's principles, prestige and power acreaking. "We have pinned medals upon the chests of hated dictators, furnished weapons to other petty tyrants. A tide of suspicion and hostility rises against us. By failing for too long to implement an imaginative 'food-for-peace' program, this Administration has wrongfully permitted the ugly image to spread of a fat America hoarding food in a hungry world. Somehow we lost, and have yet to recapture, the initiative in space," and at the same time have lost the edge in military strength to the Russians. "Is it possible that the richest nation in history can no longer afford to be the strongest?" Instead of "speak softly and carry a big stick," as Theodore Roosevelt advised, the Republican motto is "talk tough and carry a toothpick."

In his peroration Church almost gave the game away. "I shall never forget," said he, "the words of a Polish lady spoken to me last year on the square of the inner city of old Warsaw. 'Senator' she said to me, 'America is truly the hope of the world.' " But lest the Republicans claim any credit for the Polish lady's faith, he called for an "awakened and rededicated America" under a Democratic party which "will once again lift our country upon the high road of destiny."

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