The Vice President's Voice

Excerpts from Spiro Agnew's speeches last week:

WE have more than our share of the nattering nabobs of negativism. They have formed their own 4-H Club--the hopeless, hysterical hypochondriacs of history. These men are hard up for hard times. They can only make hay when the sun does not shine. The objective of this campaign is to replace those who moan endlessly about what is wrong with their country with men and women of the wit and will to stand up and speak out for what is right in America. This campaign presents us with a clear choice between the troglodytic [cave-dwelling] leftists who dominate Congress now, and the moderate, centrist and conservative supporters of President Nixon.

My far-left friends in Congress never weary of telling me they are the good Samaritans; that they are more sensitive to the needs of the impoverished. Well, we believe in representing the poor too, and we do. But the time has come for someone also to represent the workingmen of this country, the Forgotten Man of American politics. The President and I are applying for that job. The workingman has become the cornerstone of the New Majority.

Whenever the President or I raise the anticrime issue, the chorus comes back from Capitol Hill: "The Nixon

Administration wants repression." Well that's either slander or stupidity. No citizen who respects the law need fear anything from this Government. No Administration is more committed to the civil rights of every American. But the President's definition of civil rights encompasses the right of black Americans to be secure in the central city, the right of small businessmen to be free of violence at the hands of drug addicts, and the right of women to be free to walk the streets and parks without being attacked or molested by hoodlums and thugs. Clearly those civil rights are not going to be restored until we get a new Congress that cares about law and order.

The inflated prices you now have to pay in your supermarket can be directly traced to the huge budget deficits incurred before President Nixon took office in 1969. You are paying more for your food and clothing because fiscally myopic and politically irresponsible men were unwilling to live within the limits of federal income during a time of furious economic activity. The party and the men who fed that inflation have made careers of professing their heartfelt concern for the very poor and the elderly in our society. I know of nothing more cynical, more cruel, in American politics. It is always the poor and the elderly who suffer the most in the kind of inflation generated in the past.

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