Word: agnew
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...should also pose the sharpest choice on basic issues of any modern U.S. election. No matter; in the euphoria of the convention, the Republicans are acting as if the voting were already over. Four years ahead of time, conservatives are maneuvering to put their ideological favorite, Spiro Agnew, at the top of the ticket when Nixon steps down...
...contrast to the discordant Democrats. "The convention will be short, compact and precise," declared Republican National Committee Chairman Robert Dole. "We want a convention that will be watched-and not just by insomniacs." Everything is under control, observes the wry Dole, including a "spontaneous floor demonstration for Nixon and Agnew." Dissent is muted, polite, served up in small doses. There is no Bella Abzug storming around denouncing the nominee; instead Jill Ruckelshaus, wife of the director of the Environmental Protection Agency, makes a discreet, ladylike case for more lenient abortion laws...
Behind the battles over arithmetic were maneuvers aimed at controlling the convention in 1976. Some conservatives accused the liberals of trying to push Agnew out of contention for the presidency by reducing his power base in the South and West, where his photograph figures more prominently in Republican offices than the President's. It is true that two of the leaders fighting for larger delegations, Charles Percy and William Brock, are known to harbor presidential ambitions. But Oregon's Bob Packwood denied that it was a "dump-Agnew movement. It will become one only over my dead body...
...divide. It has been proved that only a consensus Republican candidate-an Eisenhower, a renovated Nixon-can appeal to enough groups to get elected. In a party that claims the allegiance of only 30% of the nation's voters, a divisive candidate inevitably goes down to defeat. Yet Agnew and the forces behind him are following the same well-trodden sectarian route that leads nowhere except to a certain ideological satisfaction. It would be an irony indeed if in the very year that Longtime Loser Richard Nixon finally joins the roster of the big winners, his party should start...
Spiked Mace. Even Spiro Agnew is to be reined in. For much of Nixon's first term, the Vice President's principal duty seemed to be to go after the Administration's enemies and critics with a spiked mace. In alliterative swings he denounced Democrats, liberals, radicals, protesters, the press, the Eastern Establishment, even dissident members of his own party, with an assiduousness and acidity that would hardly have been becoming of the President. There were liberal Republicans who thought it unbecoming even in a Vice President, and who saw in Agnew few qualities that would make...