Word: frostes
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Before the primary Frost had said that if he polled 20 per cent it would be a substantial expression of discontent with the war. He got 16 per cent. Adams had offered no predictions, but the Boston newspapers were surprised he received as much as 8 per cent, which the Globe termed "surprising strength for a peace candidate here...
These facts the Times chose to ignore, producing a political analysis as polluted as the air over New Jersey. In truth neither Frost nor Adams ran a one-issue campaign. Both demonstrated their credentials as progressives on all issues, domestic and foreign, and both sought to overcome a press that dismissed them in much the same terms used after the fact by the Times...
Adams and Frost certainly did prove that dissent on Vietnam is no super-highway to political power --in Massachusetts, New Jersey, or anywhere. But they knew that from the start. What doomed both campaigns was the fact that in American politics these days personality, organization and money are essentials; issues come into account only when the other factors cancel themselves...
This is not to say that either man could have won had he only possessed more money and better organization. But for lack of these essentials neither campaign brought out anything approaching the full force of voter dissent on Vietnam--to say nothing of the other issues Adams and Frost tried to raise. The failure of both men reflects not the inevitable fate of "one-issue candidates" but the current political bankruptcy of the United States...
...from this phenomenon -- the substitution of conservative and moderate Republicans for vaguely liberal Democrats -- that the supporters of Adams, Frost, and Congressional candidates Robert Scheer, Ted Weiss and Edward Keating can derive a perverse sort of optimism. The current purge of American liberalism -- so damaging in the short run -- proves that the concept of liberal politics we have been living with since Roosevelt may at last be in its death throes. And the way may soon be cleared for a new politics in which a broad spectrum of halfhearted "liberalism" gives way to the necessity for radical action...