ustxtxb_obs_1988_06_17_50_00007-00000_000.pdf

7a SEA. FR Q-keicrur- Tile Official Langnage Movement Brings You: Texas in Translation . . \(Poster Size is 10″ x Finally! The Texas Map you EnglishSpeakers have been waiting for. Here is the New Texas, free of all those hard-topronounce place names. Here is Texas in English like God intended. Remember, it may be too late for English First, but not for English Now! YES. SEND ME JEFF DANZIGER’S AMENDED MAP OF TEXAS I ENCLOSE $5 TO COVER PRINTING, POSTAGE, & HANDLING state zip The Texas Observer, 307 W. 7th, Austin, TX 78701 to spend more promoting economic growth at home. Similar landslide percentages \(82 registered in favor of additional spending on education. In stark contrast, only 28 percent of the total sample \(27 percent in a result consistent with a Gallup Poll taken in January that showed exactly eight percent of registered voters listing defense as the most important campaign issue. \(Nine percent indicated U.S.-Soviet relations as most important scarcely an argument for a Nunn Vice Presidency, since polls consistently show huge margins of support both for improving relations with the Soviets and the INF Treaty that Senator Nunn has It is not even true that swing voters are uniquely concentrated in the South. A recent New York Times essay repeating many of the bromides about the key role of Southern white “moderates,” for example, contained a striking table breaking out “swing voters,” defined as those who had voted for Reagan in 1984 and now were either uncertain or inclined toward the Democrats. The table, however, did not contain a regional breakdown. When asked, the CBS/Times staff readily supplied the information and, as usual, the differences between the South and other regions were not significant. \(The results, indeed, suggested that a higher percentage of swing It is true that Southerners are often a bit more likely than the rest of the country to approve of the way President Reagan is handling his job. But the difference, again, is not large and in some recent Los Angeles Times polls virtually vanishes when one combines responses for what the Times distinguishes as the “new” and the “deep” South. Southerners are also less likely to call themselves “liberals,” by about three percent. It is well known, however, that in American politics, labels predict very little about behavior that, for example, many Americans who shy “instinctively” from identifying themselves as liberals in ideological terms nevertheless are deeply attached to liberal policies. THIS BRINGS US to the real choice that Dukakis must now make, and which accounts for the insistent Bourbon Street beat in the Democratic Party. What are perhaps the most accurate evaluations of the sources of the recent Democratic decline in public esteem \(and here, perhaps not surprisingly, I feel inclined to mention my own coauthored account, but also Professor Stanley Kelley stress that public support for “New Deal” issues has not diminished at all in recent years \(and, I might add, that Kelley’s unpublished data confirm, as usual, the unimportance of South/non-South differ What has changed, however, are public perceptions of the Democrats on these questions. Put bluntly, after the brutal austerity of 1980 and the fiaSco of 1984, when the Democrats promised to do nothing for anyone except raise their taxes, the party has squandered most of the good will it derived from the New Deal. As a glance at the polls will show, it has contrived to blow what should be its natural advantage its identification as the obvious party of prosperity. It has done this less because of anything the Republicans have done the Reagan economic record is not impressive and in some respects is truly alarming than because of what the Democrats themselves have failed to do. At this moment, enormous majorities in all regions of the country favor raising the minimum wage \(77 percent in all Democratic voters on Super Tuesday mentioned fears about Social Security as a reason for their vote. More than 80 percent of the public in all regions also favors plantclosing legislation, and there is strong support for national health insurance as well \(interestingly, the Gallup Poll suggests that Southerners are more likely than other Americans to worry about medical exLast year, as he inspected his three percent standing in the national polls \(eleven some lessons from the stirring mobilization that induced most Southern Democratic Senators to vote against the Bork nomination, Sam Nunn prudently chose to be right rather than President. If the Democratic elites who gave us the War in Vietnam, the alliance with the Shah, Paul Volcker, and the Contras persist in their determination to put Nunn or some other conservative Southern foreign policy music man on the ticket instead of someone who can identify convincingly with the economic problems of ordinary Americans, they had better be prepared to face the music: essentially no appeal to swing nonvoters, the loss of many of Jesse Jackson’s supporters, and no cross-cutting reply to the inevitable GOP symbolic appeals in short, another self-induced electoral disaster. As they get set once more to come before the public empty-handed, therefore, let them ponder again the meaning of 1986 and the fate of Glenn and Gore. In the words of the most memorable slogan to. come out of the 1988 campaign, this time there had better be “no excuses.” FOR LIBERAL PORTIONS AT CONSERVATIVE PRICES * REMEMBER SCHOLZ GARDEN * * 1607 San Jacinto * 477.4171 * THE TEXAS OBSERVER 7