Viewpoint
The Battalion
Monday
Texas A&M University
December 1, 1980
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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 . .
The Battalion
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