Backdown on the Farm

At the outset of his presidential campaign, Barry Goldwater figured that the best way to handle the farm issue would be to ignore it. After all, he had already set down his views in Conscience of a Conservative, where he advocated "prompt and final termination of the farm subsidy program." Barry thought he would just stand or fall with that. As it turned out, he is falling.

The U.S. farm program has, of course, long been a national scandal, but no one yet has come up with a workable, politically viable solution. Farmers themselves are fond of talking about free enterprise-but they are even fonder of collecting subsidy checks, and they show their proclivities at the polls.

One who realized the danger signals early was Nebraska's Republican Senator Carl Curtis, himself a farmer's son. Soon after the campaign began, Curtis implored Goldwater to spell out his farm views. Barry simply issued a rehashed version of the G.O.P. platform's farm plank. Getting frantic, North Dakota's Senator Milton Young and South Dakota's Senator Karl Mundt insisted that Goldwater draft at least one major farm-policy statement, for delivery Sept. 19, at the National Plowing Contest near Casselton, N. Dak. Goldwater showed up and spoke, but said little of substantial value; Young, who had seen an advance text, refused to sit on the platform with Goldwater, has since declined to campaign for him.

Finally, sensing that he could no longer afford to let Conscience be his guide, Barry began backing away. On a whistle-stop trip through Illinois, Indiana and Ohio, Goldwater told audiences that while he was sticking by his guns on ending price supports, he knew that it had to be done gradually.

Such assurances were hardly enough to allay farmers' fears, so Goldwater summoned G.O.P. leaders from eleven farm states to a secret strategy meeting at Des Moines' Municipal Airport. He listened to their views for nearly an hour. A few days later, at the National Corn-Picking Contest at Sioux Falls, S. Dak., Barry told some 20,000 farm folk: "You and I and all good Americans, we all want a free and prosperous American agriculture, with a minimum of federal controls and intervention. That is the direction in which we must move-forward, toward freedom and progress." To accomplish this, he said, price supports must go, but only after "something better has been developed that can gradually be substituted for it." Just what that something better might be, Goldwater did not specify, but he did promise: "I will never jerk the rug from under the American farmer."

Farmers remained far from assured -and that fact is likely to cost Goldwater dearly on Election Day.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.