AMERICAN NOTES: Electoral Fumbling

A welcome outcome of the Watergate scandal was the creation by Congress of a Federal Election Commission. The six full-time commissioners, at salaries of $38,000 a year, would be charged with the administration of the 1974 federal campaign-finance law. The measure puts strict limits on presidential campaign gifts and provides for public financing (through funds collected from taxpayers) of presidential campaigns. Though some experts fear the public-financing provision may be unconstitutional, the law’s passage was hailed as a landmark in political reform, and the elections commission was due to begin its work on Jan. 1,1975.

The commission has not even been formed yet. President Ford, who must nominate two of the six full-time members, has still not submitted any names to Congress. The House and Senate have done their part by each nominating a Democrat and a Republican. However, all four notably lack national stature and expert knowledge of electoral practices.

To date, four Democratic presidential hopefuls have announced their candidacies; yet there is no agency in place to respond to their queries about complex election regulations. A recent seminar on Capitol Hill generated 40 questions on the new law, and there is no commission to answer them. Says Fred Wertheimer of Common Cause: “If you get first-rate commissioners and a first-rate professional staff, then you’re going to have the law enforced. If you don’t, you’re going to get a series of scandals down the road.”

Alternate Service

The five well-tailored defendants rose for sentencing in the U.S. District Court of Judge Carl Muecke in Phoenix, Ariz. All executives of large milk companies, the five had pleaded nolo contendere to charges of price fixing dating back to 1966. Muecke indicated that he would exact fines on each of as high as $4,000 and impose jail sentences of up to 45 days. Instead, Muecke was taking his cue, he said, from the ancestral Indian practice of demanding reparations for a crime, as well as from the Anglo-Saxon concept of wergild (“mangold”), which translates roughly as payment or satisfaction. “Any fine I would levy would go to the Government, and that would be like spitting in a blast furnace,” went Muecke’s tart reasoning.

Thus he gave the men the alternative of serving 45 days working for community agencies that provide help for the needy. He ordered each man to donate the fine that could be imposed on him to the charitable organizations, and asked the dairy companies the men worked for to do the same with their $175,000 in fines. “I always look for the constructive alternative,” Muecke explained. “Except for the real tough guys, prisons don’t do any good.”

No News Is Good News

Recession? Depression? Yes, we have one every day for one hour . . . But all the other hours of the day things are just great here in Wichita. We. . . believe the best way to keep on top is to accentuate the positive and minimize the negative. . . a continuing bright outlook will keep it that way.

The advertisement by a men’s store in the Wichita newspapers was arresting, topped by photographs of the anchormen from the evening news programs of the three major networks. The point was, of course, that the nightly fare of dismal national economic news so far means little to Kansas’ largest city, where unemployment is only half the U.S. average and industry is still healthy (TIME, Dec. 9).

Similar ads in other pockets of prosperity around the U.S. have been popping up since the middle of December, along with bumper stickers reading I’M NOT BUYING RECESSION and even an occasional billboard. Read one in Charleston, S.C., where unemployment was only 3.2%: WELCOME TO CHARLESTON. THE RECESSION ENDS HERE. Charleston, in fact, is where the contagious campaign originated with Manley Eubank, a Ford automobile dealer. Worried that Americans were talking themselves into a recession, he decided to do something about it. The first spate of ads and bumper stickers appeared after Eubank got the Charleston Automobile Dealer Association to pay for an ad.

It would be nice, of course, if the recession were simply a figment of pessimists in remote broadcast studios and wire rooms, but for millions of Americans it is all too real. And those who still live in relatively prospering communities are unlikely to take the advice of the ads and tune out. There is doubtless a certain guilty gratification in tuning in every night just to see how well off they are.