THE CONGRESS: The Big Target

The clangor of political strife resounded in Washington last week—not Democrats attacking Republicans, or vice versa, but Democrats flailing at Democrats. With time running out on the first session of the 86th Congress, Democrats exploded with pent-up frustration at their inability to make a partisan record and get hold of an issue. Their No. 1 target: their own shrewd, well-tailored Senate majority leader, Lyndon Baines Johnson.

In a flurry of manifestoes and speeches, the party's liberals roared out their annoyance at Compromiser Johnson's policy of trimming Democratic plans to fit political facts of life—such as Dwight Eisenhower's popularity, his veto weapon, and the appeal of his balanced-budget goal to the U.S.'s current conservative temper. Pennsylvania Democrat Joseph S. Clark, who sounded a call for a lot of bold new spending programs after the Democratic victory last November, stood up in the Senate and denounced the Johnson approach as an effort to "block that veto" by turning out "legislation which renounces or blurs or fuzzes or muddies the Democratic Party platform, policies and program. 'Block that veto' is a euphemism for 'Give the President what he wants,' whether or not we think it is good for the country."

Why a Change? The people, said Clark, had given the Democrats "a mandate to write a Democratic program ... I suggest it is our responsibility to write that kind of program and send it to the President today, next week, and every week until this Congress adjourns, and to come back and do it all over again at the second session." To capture the White House in 1960, Clark said, the party would need to write a Democratic record. "If the people cannot detect any difference between the parties, why should they wish to make a change?"

Illinois' Paul H. Douglas, another outspoken advocate of big-spending welfare programs, rose to "agree with the Senator from Pennsylvania." Also chiming in: Wisconsin's William Proxmire, Oregon's Wayne Morse and Minnesota's Hubert H. Humphrey, who promised the farm belt an entirely "new" Democratic farm program, which is now discreetly buried in Humphrey's desk.

Democrats outside of Congress joined in the attack. Left-leaning Americans for Democratic Action charged that the Democratic leadership in Congress "surrendered before a shot was fired." The A.D.A.-ish National Committee for An Effective Congress accused Johnson and House Speaker Sam Rayburn of "liberal talking, conservative legislating." And in the latest Democratic Digest, National Chairman Paul Butler took the inside cover to urge the congressional Democrats not to let the veto threat scare them into "watering down our vital programs."