Word: voters
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...black in the South in the '50s, Angela was aware of and involved in the civil rights movement. "When I was 12," she says, "I helped organize interracial study groups...but they were busted up by the police." As a teen-ager she worked for SNCC in the voter registration campaigns and on the picket lines during the long struggle in Birmingham...
...party loyalty. "Never before has partisanship meant so little," noted California Pollster Mervin Field. "I just don't see a coalescing back to the traditional loyalties." Larry O'Brien, former Democratic National Chairman, saw a more ominous sign in the balloting. Citing the alarmingly low national voter turnout,* he observed: "Half the population is turned off on both parties and on the system itself...
Perhaps the most striking feature of the campaign was the emergence of Wählerinitiativen (literally voter initiatives), tied to no specific issues and outside the regular party framework. Breaking with an old tradition of leaving politics to the politicians, tens of thousands of voters devoted their time and money to the campaign. A Citizens for Brandt movement branched out into 338 groups; they canvassed and passed out campaign materials-including one door plaque that read "God protect this house/ From Barzel and Franz Josef Strauss." Only in the last few weeks of the campaign did the Christian Democrats manage...
Credo of Ignorance. The voter-initiative movement actually began in 1965, when Novelist Günter Grass traveled around the country drumming up votes for Brandt, who was then opposition leader. This year Grass again took to the roads in a Volkswagen bus, speaking to as many as four or five rallies a day, and often attracting bigger crowds than the party candidates. Brandt also had the notable support of Nobel-prize-winning Novelist Heinrich Böll and Film Stars Curt Jurgens and Romy Schneider, while the Free Democrats were endorsed by Swiss Playwright Rolf Hochhuth and Actor Hardy...
...official party organizations were clearly surprised by the rapid growth of the voter groups and welcomed them with varying degrees of gratitude and skepticism. Economics and Finance Minister Helmut Schmidt observed that "campaigns on behalf of the Social Democratic Party by persons outside the party can easily lead to misunderstandings." Several Social Democratic voter groups announced their intention of becoming a "critical partner" of the official party organization after the election; others might easily be revived for a compelling cause. Conceivably, that could be almost as important a result of the election as the contest between the parties...