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About The Battalion. (College Station, Tex.) 1893-current | View Entire Issue (Dec. 1, 1980)
Viewpoint The Battalion Monday Texas A&M University December 1, 1980 r < By. In 1824 obably k Slouch By Jim Earle A&M 24 t.u. 14 “That makes it four out of six. Next year it will be five out of seven, then six out of eight, then seven out of nine .... We could—and did—do tions wouk national at without taunting refrain But He hat one an lame wou I’m glad I didn’t have to listen to “Poor Aggies” Saturday afternoon. Some of you — Class of’83 and ’84 members primarily — are lucky: You haven’t had to sit through a bleak fourth-quarter and post-game celebration that includes thousands of Univer sity of Texas students chanting that haunting refrain. Other schools do it, sure; but no one does it with the unanimity and contempt that the UT throng does. It makes me kind of smug when a crowd of UT partisans doesn’t get the chance to rub it in. So I’m glad. I’m even more glad, though, that turnabout wasn’t fair play. I didn’t hear “Poor tea-sips,” either. I heard that one last year, and it bothered me more than it does when Texas students chant their little ditty. “Aggies just don’t do that sort of thing,” my traditionalist cqnseience screamed. My consci ence quickly got an education. Sidebars By Dillard Stone Forget the Aggies-as-good-sports concept I was brought up on. When the tables were turned, the Aggies rubbed it in just as unmerci- hilly as the Longhorns ever did. High irony prevailed. Two years ago, after being blown out yet again in Memorial Stadium, I heard many Texas A&M backers comment on the “Poor Aggies “That just reeks of poor sportsmanship. I’m glad we don’t do that sort of thing. ” Oh, but we do. We used to be able to pride ourselves on being the best sports in the conference. To a high degree, we still can; Aggies are downright benign when compared to the folks Fayetteville or Lubbock. They say imitation is the sincerestl flattery. Well, I guess sO. I can think of better people am us to imitate, however, than Texas studei: their “Poor Aggies. It doesn’t make us to criticize them for poor sportsmansli then turn right around and do the ^Neither !shman a “It’s a sh je recent ler his hi Adams, ndson o ited Sta Althougl eive th< efather’; icles ha\ ferest in A< thing to them. Ben he I didn’t hear "Poor” anything SatiT ^didn well, I did hear traces of “Poortea-i didn’t catch on. We were too busy celel whooping and having fun to worry ing the other guys feel miserable. 'the last co safety en mston. ?! Despite and conn We were having too great a time oura! pros’ n really care that we could kick dirt ini iar| dsman ghorns’ faces. lention f We were supporting our team, not: I down the other one. Supporting the team: After all, isn ttl |rx 1 it’s all about? ‘Reagan steamroller’ won t accomplish much By BRIAN GROSS Much has been written of the remarkable Reagan election victory: what it symbolizes, what it will mean. One of my highly partisan friends wrote me, trying to collect a debt, gloat ing that the “Reagan steamroller had made its presence known ...” The “Reagan steamrol ler?” Reagan won with 51 percent of the popu lar vote; fully 49 percent of the voters refused, apparently, to be steamrolled. The election was not so much Reagan’s victory as it was Carter’s loss. — even Reagan — promising to shut down Social Security, end Medicare/Medicaid, ele- minate AFDC, or abandon the aged and Meals on Wheels. If anything, the candidates, and especially Reagan, promised to restructure these programs, to make them “work.” I spoke with numerous people before the election, most of whom (not surprisingly) were “for” Reagan. When asked whether I was going to vote for Reagan, I responded “No!” and usually “No way!” I was then usually accosted with a most interesting argument (for voting for Reagan): “You’re not going to vote for Carter, are you?” The argument was never positive, i.e., “Look, Reagan is a great guy; he was a great actor, and he’ll make a great president because...” In fact, it was Jimmy Carter, at least four years ago, who was the “reform” candidate: Elect me, an outsider, who knows nothing ab out the federal government, who owes nothing to no one (and expects the same), and I’ll straighten out the system, I’ll reform the civil service, I’ll eliminate graft, I’ll whip the bureac- racy into submission. At least that’s what Carter said then. ies, witf iere the Jm. Mun beheld at Places £ idland, I less, D iuilding The survey with the fringe on top Now, many political pundits, commentators, and strategists are heralding a “new” era in government. The New Deal/Fair Deal/Great Society programs, they tell us, are (finally) de ceased. The public has rejected liberalism. The ’80s (and, implicitly, Reagan’s election) repre sent the advent of conservatism, the rejection of collectivism, and the abandonment of welfar ism. Really? Was this the election, then, that nailed the New Deal/Great Society coffin shut? Was this the election battle to end all others? The battle of conservatism vs. liberalism? (Jimmy Carter is about the farthest thing from a liberal I can imagine.) No, friends, don’t expect Reagan to reform the system, at least in the conservative sense, or abandon liberalism. More than any thing else, Reagan is the “relief’ President — the rejection of a sometimes pathetic, bumb ling, discredited incumbent. Polls didn’t detect voter swing By DICK WEST United Press International There’s really no telling what Ronald Reagan has said over the past twelve years, during which time he has been campaigning, on and off, for the Presidency. He may have indeed argued against liberalism and the welfare state. (In fact, I’m sure he did.) But, politics is a tricky game: what, in fact, elected Reagan and defe ated Carter? I don’t remember any candidate As Sens. Paul Tsongas (Massachusetts) and Gary Hart (Colorado) both point out: people aren’t abandoning liberalism so much as they are reacting to inflation, a declining standard of living, unemployment and an unworkable/un bearable bureacracy. It is the liberal “program matic” approach to poverty, unemployment, inflation, productivity and energy which people reject. WASHINGTON — Here it is three weeks after the election and despite tenacious win nowing of the returns by political analysts some aspects of the voting remain indistinct. For one, the question of why the polls were so wrong is still largely unanswered. For two, we still have no clear picture of how the lunatic fringe voted. Speculation that the lunatic fringe might be in a position to tip the scales one way or the other proved groundless, as we know. The elec tion was so one-sided that even cohesive voting by a single faction would not have made much difference. And the lunatic fringe is anything but cohe- Even a small error in the sampling can knock the projection out of kilter, and that apparently is what happened in most of the polls this year. My analysis of the crackpot vote leads me to believe that representatives of the lunatic fringe who participated in the polls listed their position as “undecided” whereas, in fact, they had already made up their minds. That bit of duplicity caused the polls to give an inordinately high number of percentage points to the “undecided” column. Moreover, ,it now seems evident that lunatic fringe voters who were misclassified as “unde cided” changed their minds a lot during the final stages of the campaign. We ll see what Reagan ends up doing, but I predict the big government-welfare system is here to stay: too many people have vested in terests in it to let it fail. Brian Gross is a senior economics major. The schizophrenic vote is always split and this year it appears there was a great deal of vacillation in the other components. It could be, however, that a misreading of the crackpot vote was what threw the pre-election polls so far off. To be scientific, a poll must accurately reflect the views of the electorate in miniature. By projection, the percentages are then applied to the body politic as a whole. These switches were never picked up by the polls, and hence further distorted the estimates of relative strength among the candidates. Let’s examine this a little closer. What apparently happened was that fringe voters depicted by the polls as cided” but who actually had decided to Carter ultimately voted for Reagan. And those listed as “undecided” w made of their minds to vote for Reagan voted for Carter. Putting this another way, presumably] cided ” voters were telling pollsters just they entered the voting places that the going to vote for Carter. Then, as! emerged, they reported they had volt Reagan. Or vice versa. Either way, it was a mess. And until opinion sampling technkji come sophisticated enough to detect s trends within the “undecided” factor, II polls will remain suspectible to error, Meet me Call 846- Thursday bring yen order to the fair! 3609 1 E. 29th 1 BLENDS C Warped By Scott McCullar AH, IT'S GOOD TO B£ FOR TH£ HOLiPAVS, TO to just e/vxoy 5oa\e FOOTBALL OA/ TV, AA/I> emu, C'MON, CATCH it CATCH it you fool! au LMfSat OF COURSE I'VE LEARNEP SOME /VEW WAVS of EXPRESSING MVSEL F COLLEGE . . 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