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The specific amendment headlining the hearings was one that would limit a president to a single six-year term, an idea that not many people have given much thought to in recent years. We've mulled the question over editorially in times past, but we haven't gotten any feedback as to how Brevardians really feel about it.

Although Sen. Bayh contends that the single six-year presidential term is a subject too long ignored by scholarly investigation, the issue has had a long and controversial history. Since the Constitution was adopted in 1788, nearly 160 amendments have been proposed to change the term from four to six years.

The great majority of these. would have made a president ineligible for reelection. Andrew Johnson and Rutherford B. Hayes were among presidents favoring a single six-year term. The most recent legislation affecting the presidential term was the 22nd amendment, ratified in 1951, which limited a president to two four-year terms. The sentiment which led to this was based largely on Franklin Roosevelt's election to four four-year terms.

Arguments supporting the single six-term center around the idea that it would tend to remove "politics" from the nation's highest office. Political consequences and not statemanship dictate too many decisions under the present system.

Proponents of the change contend that, beginning with the latter half of his second year in office, a president spends a disproportionate and ever-increasing amount of time on election strategy and mechanics, rather than affairs of state.

Because of this situation, both congress and the public tend to dismiss many worthy programs as political ploys. If a president could not succeed himself, it is argued, people would be less likely to treat his programs as partisan maneuvers. Opponents argued that a president who is ineligible to run again would in effect be a "lameduck" from the beginning of his term, and unable to exercise the full powers of his office. They also contend that, following a period of crisis, the people should have the opportunity to elect the same president again, as they did Roosevelt.

Some think that a single four-year term would be sufficient. They doubt that two extra years to carry out programs would make much difference.

Others fear the six-year term because they think it might put a strain on public patience with an unpopular president in office.

We don't pretend to have the answer to this one, perhaps none of the answers are really better, all things considered, than the others.

One thing is certain, there is nothing magic about a four-year period. If political scholars can present sound arguments in favor of the single six-year term, we shouldn't be so hungup with tradition that we stick with four.

[From the Wall Street Journal, Oct. 28, 1971]

ELECTORAL POLITICS V. PERSUASION POLITICS

(By Arlen J. Large)

WASHINGTON.-People in a representative democracy decide public questions in

two ways.

Voters elect to City Hall or Congress or the White House those representatives who are predicted to act in a certain desired pattern. The choice of candidate becomes a policy choice: If you want out of Korea, vote for Ike; if you don't want gun controls, defeat Sen. Tydings.

Between elections, people can try to persuade their representatives to make choices agreeable to them. If you're against the ABM, write your Congressman. If you want a constitutional amendment on school prayer, sign a petition. Testify at a zoning board hearing. Picket the White House sidewalks.

Often the final decision comes from a mixture of electoral and persuasion politics. Of the 56 new Representatives elected to the House in the 1970 election 37 later voted against the SST. Many had so promised the voters during their campaigns so the electoral method was a factor in the SSTs ultimate death. Other members were persuaded by an avalanche of anti-SST mail, or were catching hell at visits to Garden Clubs back home. And there's a blatantly direct link between electoral and persuasion politics when a labor union or doctors' organization or farm group informs a representative he'll lose a bloc of votes and campaign money at the next election if he ignores their persuasion

AN IMPORTANT DISTINCTION

Despite the blurred line between decisions-by-election and decisions-by-persuasion it's instructive to keep the distinction in mind, because there's a constant tug on citizens to snap to attention during elections and take it easy between them. Whole industries of election specialists have sprung up under the concept that who decides in these official chairs is more interesting and entertaining than what's decided. Electoral politics is a diverting spectator sport; persuasion politics is a drag.

This between-elections lassitude cuts down an individual citizen's authority over his representatives in the White House, Congress and City Hall. A citizen can combat his sloth head-on : by taking more of a daily interest in public affairs, for instance.

Another way to counter this is with institutional changes in government that reduce the importance of elections as a way of making policy choices, while leaving persuasion politics free to make whatever gains it can. Senate hearings open today on a change affecting the U.S. presidency that could accomplish this in some small degree. The proposal is a constitutional amendment limiting future Presidents to a single six-year term, instead of the two four-year terms permitted now.

The idea has been kicking around a long time (the Senate actually approved it once), but it's being revived now by two respected lawmakers, Senate Democratic Leader Mike Mansfield of Montana and George Aiken of Vermont, the Senate's senior Republican. The two became converts to the idea after a series of official visits to Mexico, where the president must quit after serving six years. By the nature of things, the question will be debated mainly in the frame of reference of politicians and political scientists who specialize in analyses of pressure and power. A six-year limitation might affect both.

"It would remove the political pressure," says Sen. Mansfield. "A President wouldn't be forced to make some move because he's looking forward to his second term. He could do what he thinks is best for the national interest."

The amendment isn't aimed at President Nixon; it would exempt at the time of ratification any incumbent's attempt for a second four-year term. Indeed, Sen. Aiken has portrayed the change as shielding Presidents from political attack: "It would go far in discouraging would-be successors to the office from wasting their time in harassing him or trumping up unwarranted charges or impeding his work, because he could not run against any of them, anyway."

A LAME DUCK HANDICAP?

If there's any advantage in that, it would be offset in the opinion of some power analysts by an incoming President's handicap of being a "lame duck" from the moment he took office. Such a President would lose "raw political leverage," in the opinion of Thomas Cronin, a close student of the presidency at the Brookings Institution here. "Congress might listen to him less, and the resistance of the bureaucrats to his policies might be greater." Mr. Cronin believes the presidency already is weaker as an institution than most textbooks educate the public to believe, and a further weakening of the office would just cause "more disappointment and alienation" when a Chief Executive failed to deliver.

But some Washington power observers don't buy the lame-duck argument, among them Jack Valenti, former White House aide to President Johnson. Mr. Valenti has written: "If a particular President is weak, 10 terms won't sustain him; and if he is strong, one six-year term, lean, boned and sturdy, is all he needs to leave his mark on the future." Mr. Valenti notes that after LBJ announced he wouldn't try for a new term, he still was able to get Congress to adopt the 10% income-tax surcharge in 1968.

Political pressures, lame ducks and balky Congresses are all Washington preoccupations, common to professionals who operate and analyze government. It might be interesting to explore the way a Mansfield-Aiken limitation could affect politics as seen by citizens in some other line of work. A longer stretch between elections for a less politicized presidency might help everybody resist the alltoo-human tendency to decide things in terms of personalities, and it would reduce the number of times the voters must predict the actions of unpredictable

men.

In a republic where the whole electorate doesn't vote directly on policy choices, there's no way to avoid magnifying the views and personalities of individuals

who stand as the public's representatives. But this, in turn, tempts people to suspend independent judgment on problems and just key on the positions of selebrity-politicians. After Ted Kennedy and Strom Thurmond have expressed themselves on a racial problem, everybody knows better where to line up.

Policital personalities are magnified, too, by the American tradition of regarding elections as diverting sporting events. It's no accident that two of the most famous events in American politics were the Lincoln-Douglas debates in 1858 and the Kennedy-Nixon television confrontations of 1960, in which hard questions of the day were reduced to political showbiz. Newspaper and TV reporters gladly portray elections as suspenseful entertainment; beyond daily journalism is the ideology industry, which for the price of a magazine guarantees to make clear the difference between the good guys and bad guys.

In electoral politics the nation's problems become "issues" for candidates to use as raw material. The TV-oriented consultants who coach politicians on campaign techniques usually warn them to keep the "issue" list short and snappy, lest the audience become bored. And one school of consultants contends that compaigns should be based more or less on the candidate's media-filtered personality alone. Hal Evry, a Los Angeles campaign adviser, has this to say in his new book on winning techniques: "The public as a whole doesn't care about or understand issues, party ideology or political philosophy. They vote for the man they like or they vote against the man they dislike."

Yet it's central to the elections industries-candidates, party officials, TV consultants, newsmen, ideologues-to convince "the public as a whole" that elections are important as collective decisions about what the government should do. Voters vote, and think they've done their bit in guiding the nation's destiny. That's almost always partly true, but electoral politics can be a clumsy rudder.

Woodrow Wilson, after all, didn't keep us out of war in his second term. People who were uninterested in the dictatorships of Southeast Asia saw a clear policy choice between Lyndon Johnson and Barry Goldwater, and cast their votes accordingly, and in vain. Hubert Humphrey might slap controls on the marketplace and play footsie with Moscow and Peking, but never Richard Nixon.

Persuasion politics, the kind used between elections, can be somewhat more precise in setting a predictable government course. At the federal level, Congress almost always is in session and the Executive bureaucracy grinds away, both subject to persuasion by citizens. The result can be a specific law or agency ruling, not a campaign promise or a subliminally comforting face on television. The old complaint that persuasion politics is available mainly to special-interest lobbyists and people with big clout is gradually becoming less valid. The growth of publicinterest law groups, consumer and environmental crusaders and reformist lobbies like Common Cause may often just make pests of themselves but they're opening up the way government decisions are made.

In its pure form, persuasion politics grapples with a problem without regard for the next election or the identity of individual office-holders. The argument over air bags as an auto safety boon or bust is going along rather nicely among federal bureaucrats, Ralph Nader and Detroit without anyone threatening-yet--to settle it on some future election day.

It's in this sense that one can understand an odd-sounding remark by Clark MacGregor, a veteran politician and former Congressman, whose current job as White House lobbyist gives him a specialized, persuasion-politics role. Asked a question on high GOP strategy for 1972, Mr. MacGregor ducked it: "My job is legislation. Politics is somebody else's business." Mr. MacGregor naturally hopes success for the administration's legislative program will help the re-election of Republicans next year, but his answer showed that it is possible to distinguish them.

Electoral politics would be just harmless entertainment for those people who like it, except that it keeps getting in the way of others who care more about solutions than the identity of the solvers. Persuasion politics suffers when an issue becomes an "issue." Last year Democratic congressional candidates were almost palpably rooting for new increases in the unemployment rate, while Republicans couldn't wait for the next campus riot.

The Vietnam war has provided some of the worst examples of how anyone attempting to play persuasion politics can get accused of "playing politics" in the electrol sense. John Gardner, head of Common Cause, has been one such target. After one Gardner slam at the war, he got slammed back by Sen. Robert Dole of Kansas, chairman of the Republican National Committee: "I must assume he has political ambitions either for himself or for someone else, although obviously not for Richard Nixon."

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'PLAYING POLITICS'

Among office-holding politicians, mutual accusations of "playing politics with the war" at times has almost drowned out serious discussion of what should be done. For what he must consider good reasons, President Nixon is stretching Vietnamization into next year for the further protection of the Saigon government. The 1972 election may be a factor in his calculations, but some politicians are unwilling to credit him with caring about more than that. Sen. Kennedy has judged the President's motives as wanting "to play his last great card for peace at a time closer to November 1972, when the chances will be greater that the action will benefit the coming presidential election campaign." So preoccupied is Washington with electoral politics, even some of the President's allies predict lifeand-death decisions on Vietnam strategy will be governed by the 1972 political calendar. Charles Chamberlain, a conservative Republican from Michigan, offered the House this interesting argument last week against a Vietnam withdrawal deadline set by Congress: "Common sense dictates that if the President expects to be reelected, our involvement in Vietnam must be ended within the next few months. Why? Because the primary elections throughout the country require that the President make his accounting well before next November."

Few could argue that the system is working as it should if the lives of American soldiers somehow depend on the date of the New Hampshire primary. It's to save Presidents from such motivations, real or imagined, that Sens. Mansfield and Aiken want a constitutional bar to their re-election. There would be an added bonus if this downgraded the electronic flimflam of electoral politics, giving persuasion politics a more important role in public policy decision. Contests over who holds what office can be a diverting show, but the time to turn the volume up high is when the winners report for work.

[From the Washington, D.C. Evening Star, Nov. 24, 1971]

SMITH HEMPSTONE: A SINGLE SIX-YEAR TERM FOR OUR PRESIDENTS?

Sens. Mike Mansfield of Montana and George D. Aiken of Vermont have a point.

They contend that it would be better for the president, Congress and the country-in short, for all concerned-if the chief executive were limited to a single six-year term in the White House. Their proposal, in the form of a constitutional amendment, is bottled up in Sen. Birch Bayh's subcommittee on constitutional amendments.

The idea is hardly original. In the past 183 years, there have been no fewer than 160 similar proposals, none of which has gotten off the ground. In 1951, the 22nd Amendment, limiting the president to two four-year terms, was adopted. At least five presidents-Andrew Jackson, James Buchanan, Rutherford B. Hayes and the two Johnsons (Andrew and Lyndon)—are on record as favoring a single six-year term. Perhaps it is significant that of these only Jackson served two full terms.

Advocates of a single six-year term base their support on the effect such a system would have both on the president and the Congress. Aiken, the Senate's senior Republican, maintains that the proposal, if adopted, would "allow the president to make decisions free from the temptation of political expediency." permitting him "to wear at all times his presidential hat and forget for a while that he also owns a politician's hat."

Aiken further asserts that Congress could do a better job if it didn't feel it "had to spend so much time preventing the re-election of a president." Mansfield, the Senate's Democratic leader believes that a single six-year term would effectively remove the president from the "pedestrian partisan arena," allowing him to devote all his energies to affairs of state.

There is just enough truth in the Aiken-Mansfield proposal to make it alluring. First-term presidents, including the present occupant of 1600 Pennsylvania Ave., certainly do spend a disproportionate amount of their time and energy working to ensure their own re-election, as indeed do senators and representatives. And congressmen of the opposing political persuasion, including those of the 92nd Congress, devote an equally large percentage of their time and energy to frustrating the president's design.

And yet it is nonsense to suggest that the scheme would remove the president from partisan politics or that, if it could be done, it would necessarily be a good

thing (Mexican presidents serve a single six-year term and are hardly apolitical animals). For the president would remain titular head of his party and the struggle would only be refocused on the question of the succession.

In any event, the need to be responsive to an electorate compels a president to take into account public opinion in the country, and the public is not always wrong. If President Nixon were not facing re-election in 1972, would he, in response to public opinion, be winding down the Vietnam war with the speed he is? One wonders.

Opponents of the proposal further maintain that a president limited to a single six-year term would be a lameduck from the time of his inauguration, upsetting the delicate balance of the democratic process. He would in effect become (as Clark Clifford has put it) a glorified "country manager," beyond popular reach and without popular appeal. Lost would be "a vital driving force for progress, for change, for reconciliation of conflicting social forces."

And, as the record shows, given anywhere near normal conditions, any president worth his salt does not have a great deal of difficulty in winning a second term. It is in the nature of his office that an incumbent president has immediate and virtually limitless access to the media, and virtually all other factors favor his re-election. The odds are that a man who could not build in four years a record adequate to ensure his re-election would accomplish little of consequence in two additional years.

Frequent elections are wasteful of the nation's time and energy and of those of the men who lead it. This is particularly marked in the case of members of the House of Representatives, who, with two-year terms, have to begin running for re-election the day after their election. But somehow, despite all its weaknesses, incongruities and paradoxes, the system works, and it does so well as or better than any other system in the world.

When all is said and done, the Aiken-Mansfield amendment amounts to a vote of no confidence in democracy, the principal effect of which would be to guarantee two additional years in the White House to mediocre presidents and deny the country two years of service from those chief executives who had done their job and done it well.

[From the Washington Post, Jan. 11, 1971]

6-YEAR PRESIDENT BIGGEST U.S. NEED

(By William S. White)

The one change in the American political structure that would be incomparably the most useful-and is by far the most imperatively needed-evokes no attention in these days of incessant chatter for this or that reform.

What this country requires more than anything else is a constitutional amendment to grant the President one six-year term; and one only.

The conclusion is reached by this columnist after years of pondering and in the light of intimate to reasonably intime observation of the inside actualities of the presidential institution in at least three administrations-those of John Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon.

To put the thing in one sentence, the present four-year term is too short, whereas the rarely broken habit of the people to grant a total of eight years, by way of the reelection process, makes it much too long.

Any newly chosen President, however able, needs at least a year to shape his own cabinet and White House staff to his needs and liking. However brilliant, he needs at least an additional year to flesh out the programs and policies that were in his mind in his campaign.

Thus, he becomes a genuinely functioning President only in the last two of his four years-and then is either excessively engrossed in politicking and balancing and counterbalancing group pressures or is almost universally assumed to be doing just that. While this, in fact, is rarely the case-indeed it has never been so in this correspondent's experience-everybody supposes it to be.

What may be the truth of it is thus irrelevant. Our folklore positively demands that any and every White House action after the first two years be put down as 90 per cent vote-catching in motive and 10 per cent designed for the county's good.

It is too bad, parenthetically, that this is true. It is that way, again parenthetically, because the one thing worse than the open-mouthed total credulity of the

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