1972 Democratic Party Platform is so progressive as to be off the scale today

[Gabi Hayes]

26. whoaaa there, boy! Carter was hamstrung from the getgo by his own PARTY, led

by Tip ONeill and Robert Byrd ambushed his, uhhh, progressive agenda even BEFORE he took office. I just posted about this recently, and am not in the mood to slog through it again

take the time, please, and see how misinformed you are about your assertion, and read this, an excerpt from Liberty Under Siege, by Walter Karp

just one thing, to show you how bad it was. in nominating Ted Sorensen, cold warrior compatriot/aid de camp to JFK, he ran afoul of the bi partisan committee for the present danger, an agglomeration of war mongering, profiteering maniacs in and out of government. the upshot of it was, that despite a filibuster proof senate majority, Carter was told in no uncertain terms NOT to dare bring his name up for the nomination. after being savaged in the liberal media for being soft on communism (!!!!) Carter withdrew, and the battle lines were drawn. he never learned how to play the game against congress (and his own Party!), failing to carry out his threat to go over their heads to the public.

it's all here:

Senator J. William Fulbright, in 1969 was frantically warning the Senate that "our government will soon become what it is already a long way toward becoming, an elective dictatorship."

p19
"I felt I was taking office at a time when Americans desired a return to first principles on the part of their government." The thought occurs to President-elect Jimmy Carter as he sifts, in his methodical way, through all the Inaugural addresses ever delivered. The awakened democracy is exacting, all too exacting, and has almost cost Carter the election. When independent voters began seeing the tribune of the people rushing around the country embracing Democratic Party leaders, they had deserted his banner almost en masse.

So the President-elect-a suspect tribune now-knows well enough what the great bulk of the American people expects of him: They want the democratic movement to go forward. What else is an outsider President for? The real question facing Carter, the terrible nightmarish question, is, 'What will the Democratic Congress allow him to do? Suppose party leaders in Congress give him no support at all? What then? "It was bad enough," says Hamilton Jordan, the President-elect's chief political aide, "that they didn't know him and had no stake in his candidacy, but to make matters worse, Carter had defeated their various darlings in the battles around the country" 'When Carter meets, post-election, with Democratic congressional leaders in Georgia, fear and hostility, fear masked as hostility, seem to roll off Carter in waves. "You'd sit at a meeting with Carter," Representative Morris Udall recalls some six months later, "and he felt the compulsion to remind you that he also had your constituents as his constituents and that he wouldn't hesitate to take Congress on .... It was almost like he felt a compulsion to do this, as though he felt it was inevitable, or looked forward to the conflict, or thought it was unavoidable."

"I can get to your constituents faster than you can by going on television," Carter reportedly warns the visiting party leaders. A dire threat indeed, an empty bluff, never to be carried out, but already necessary, or the first hostile shots have already been fired. Nine days after the election [1976]-Veterans' Day-the Committee on the Present Danger makes its first public appearance with a declaration of war against Carter's hopes for arms control and improved relations with the Soviet Union. "The principal threat to our nation, to world peace and to the cause of human freedom," goes the martial declaration, "is the Soviet drive for dominance based on an unprecedented military buildup"-in fact, a 3 percent average increase yearly since 1970, 2 percent since 1974, but America's "will"-and America's oligarchy can be strengthened only by "massive understandable challenge."

The committee members, it is said, form a "who's who of the Democratic Party establishment." Chairman and founder is Eugene Rostow, Lyndon Johnson's Under Secretary of State, head of the foreign-policy task force of the Coalition for a Democratic Majority, some twenty of whose members have become Present Dangerists. "We started over, but with the same people and the same ideas," explains Rostow. To discredit the democratic reforms in 1972; to discredit détente in 1976. The same "ideas" indeed: rule by the few, oligarchy restored, one way or another. Cochairman of the Present Danger is Lane Kirkland, secretary-treasurer of the AFL-CIO and "heir apparent" to its president, eighty-three-year-old George Meany; heir to the votes of 14.5 million powerless union members; heir to trade unionism's unswerving devotion to the Democratic machine and the endless Cold War; oligarchy revived, one way or another. Chief counsel of the Present Danger is Max Kampelman, once one of the chief political advisers to Hubert Humphrey, now gravely concerned, among other worries, over the excessive "power of the press." The nine-man executive committee includes Dean Rusk, Secretary of State under Kennedy and Johnson, one of the first American officials to argue that a President's authority as Commander-in-Chief of U.S. forces allows him to make war at will. What loathing of liberty burns in these hearts! 'What scant love of truth! Chairman of the committee's "policy studies" is Paul Nitze, former Deputy Secretary of Defense under Kennedy and Johnson, arms control negotiator for Nixon, who quit in "disgust" in June 1974, now a member of Team B, the tumorous appendix to the CIA. Nitze has lived for twenty-five years in an atmosphere of ever-present danger: principal author in 1950 of a momentous State Department warning to President Truman that unless the U.S. embarked at once on the largest military buildup in its peacetime history, the Soviet Union would launch its drive for world conquest around 1 956-Nitze's "year of maximum danger"; principal concocter of the fictitious "missile gap" in 1957; principal author in 1972 of the newest present-danger: Allied "perception" of Soviet nuclear superiority will bind them in terror to the Soviet will unless the U.S. demonstrates its "will and resolve" with a renewed race for nuclear supremacy.

http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Walter_Karp/Reaction_Launched_LUS.html

much much more there

and, what do you know about his prescient, ground breaking (and torpedoed once again by his own party) energy speech?