Word: planking
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...accuses Humphrey of tardiness in supporting civil rights; as early as 1948 he forced the Democratic convention to throw out a milder civil rights plank and include his stronger version. No one accuses him of a superficial interest in disarmament; in 1955 he proposed and helped pass a resolution to set up a disarmament subcommittee of which he became chairman. And no one accuses him of representing limited interests, of lacking imagination: he was first, for example, to suggest a Peace Corps and Medicare under Social Security...
...second issue was extremism. It had produced the major conflict of the convention when the G.O.P. moderates sought to insert an anti-extremism plank in the party platform. Goldwater's delegates shouted them down, and Barry threw the issue back in the moderates' faces. "I like those lines," he said, and he ordered them underlined in his printed text. "I would remind you," the lines went, "that extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice! And let me remind you also that moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue...
CIVIL RIGHTS. In a brief plank, the platform promises "full implementation and faithful execution of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and all other civil rights statutes" and "improvements of civil rights statutes adequate to changing needs of our times." It commits the G.O.P. to helping "assure equal opportunity and a good education for all." At the same time, the platform takes advantage of the burning issue popularly known as "bussing" by placing the G.O.P. on record as "opposing federally-sponsored 'inverse discrimination,' whether by the shifting of jobs, or the abandonment of neighborhood schools, for reasons...
MEDICARE. Unlike the 1960 platform, the plank summarily rejects a medical-aid plan financed and administered through social security. The G.O.P. favors "full coverage of all medical and hospital costs of needy elderly people, financed by general revenues through broader implementation of federal-state plans, rather than the compulsory Democratic scheme covering only a small percentage of such costs for everyone regardless of need...
...White-Sneakered Amateurs." But even as the torrent of testimony continued to flow in public, the real shaping and shuffling of the platform planks took place in the nighttime privacy of hotel rooms, where drafting subcommittees worked till dawn. Frustrated by the Goldwater forces' kill-'em-with-kindness strategy, anti-Goldwater leaders fell to squabbling among themselves. Scranton-supporting committee members, led by Pennsylvania's Senator Hugh Scott, wrote 31 different drafts of a proposed civil rights plank before they could agree...