ustxtxb_obs_1970_10_02_50_00006-00000_000.pdf

and he campaigned successfully for the Democratic primary defeat of a pro-war congressman, Philbin of Massachusetts. As a result of all this, the Democratic National Committee is up in arms. Treasurer Robert Strauss, a Dallas conservative and longtime enemy of the Kennedy wing of the party with which Galbraith identifies, called him a “Kamikaze Democrat” and demanded his resignation from the Democratic Party’s policy council. Strauss’ demand was quickly endorsed by a host of party bureaucrats as well as by that quaintly “Texas Democrat” newspaper, the Dallas Morning News. In a letter to the Washington Post, commenting on the furor, Galbraith called Strauss one of “those wonderful people who gave us the Vietnam war, the Chicago convention, made Mr. Nixon, of all people, New Party Austin Well, the New Party has organized. Again. Sort of. You see, there was a Texas New Party formed in 1968 out of the shambles of the Kennedy-McCarthy-McGovern forces. But most potential members thereof were siphoned off into efforts to reform the Democratic Party, particularly the New Democratic Coalition. So the Texas New Party has been dormant, if not dead, and when Bob Kunst, national organizer for the New Party, arrived in the state three weeks ago, he wasn’t even aware of its existence. Kunst spent about 10 days swinging through the major cities in the state, shoestringing together a series of meetings to get a state convention set up for Sept. 13 in Austin. About 40 people showed up for the Austin meeting and most of them were ready to go back to being dormant by the end of the day. There was nothing wrong with Kunst’s rap. “The New Party is a coalition,” he said at least a zillion dozen times during his Texas tour. “A coalition of blacks and browns and Indians and poor folks and progressives and liberals and radicals and revolutionaries and intellectuals and everyone else who’s fed up with the Republicans and Democrats.” And he said we had power but had never used it, that it was time to get into plurality politics, that we could never win a two-way race because there’s more of them that there are of us, so we should start nominating our own people and finally 6 The Texas Observer president in 1968 and who aim to give the Senate Lloyd Bentsen.” In a later interview with the News, Galbraith said Strauss’ effort to remove him from the council was “something new in the political game it’s the batboy firing the batters.” But columnists Evans and Novak see the attempt to purge Galbraith as “the clearest and most dramatic evidence of the transformed mood at Democratic national headquarters . . . no mere factional dispute but quite possibly a symptom of returning sanity.” They pointed to another book, The Real Majority by Richard M. Scrammon and Ben J. Wattenberg, which maintains that if Democrats are to win in the future they must appeal not to a black-young-poor minority coalition but to the wife of the machinist in Dayton who is concerned about crime, drugs and student disorders. Bill Hamilton rises again vote for people we really believe in and let the majors slug it out on who’s more reactionary while we win it with like 35% of the vote. He kept saying we could win, we really could win, and Yarborough and Lindsay and Duffey in Connecticut have shown that the strategy works and all these people like Willard Wirtz and George Wald and Paul Erlich and F. Lee Bailey and Gore Vidal are for it and the 18-year-old vote is ours and the ecology vote is ours and in Texas we can get together with La Raza Unida and get a senatorial candidate on the ballot and let’s MOVE. So the 40 people at the state convention of the new New Party moved their chairs into three circles to discuss, respectively, student rights, a party constitution and a platform. The people in the platform caucus said we should stop bullshitting and start organizing. But they couldn’t get past the first paragraph in the statement of purpose. After discussing it for 40 minutes they moved on to the platform. They agreed that the discussion was going too slowly and so if there were any suggestions for changes, additions or deletions in the national platform they’d be put off to be discussed after we went through the whole platform. At the end of that process, 90% of the platform was up for debate. More people left. The delegates spent so much time discussing the platform, which they didn’t finish, that they had no time to set up any party machinery. But they did nominate a senatorial candidate. His name is Ben Russell. M.1. 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