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Detroit, only a small fraction of the 1,000 people invited to a breakfast bothered to turn up. The group drew a mere 30 spectators at a gathering in a backyard in Brooklyn. G.O.P. National Chairman Bill Brock told the Brooklynites: "The average New Yorker pays $800 more in federal income tax today than four years ago. I think that's insane." His audience agreed, but still seemed a bit baffled by the Kemp-Roth 33% solution. As Ann Hickey told the Republicans at a subsequent stop in Upper Darby, Pa.: "I just don't see how you can cut taxes without cutting services, and I want to know what services are going to be cut." The still untested Kemp-Roth theory may prove to be reasonably correct, but G.O.P. Congressman John Anderson of Illinois sardonically admits: "The average voter does not understand how the Laffer curve works, and neither do I."
Offered such a host of plans and proposals, a certain number of voters will respond by not responding. "People are going to vote with their feet by not going to the polls," asserts Caddell, who anticipates an alltime low turnout. Others will focus all their attention on a single issue. Former President Gerald Ford, for one, worries that single-issue interest groups — for and against abortion or gun-control or environmental regulations, etc.— will increasingly determine election outcomes. He told TIME Chicago Bureau Chief Benjamin Gate that such groups pose "dangerous ramifications for the two-party system." Business associations, he feels, are also becoming too narrowly focused on single issues. The proliferating political action committees, financed by private corporations, unions or associations, are solely concerned with the passage of particular legislation, not with broader party and national problems. "Our professional managers," said Ford, "have become political neuters."
How long will the conservative climate last, and how far will it go? Few political experts will hazard a guess. They are all too aware of the dizzying changes in U,S. politics.
Only a decade ago, many prophets were foreseeing an era of accelerating radicalism; that did not occur.
Perhaps there is no more consistent conservative in Congress than Texas Republican Senator John Tower, a laconic politician who uses a pithy campaign slogan, HE STANDS FOR TEXAS, and that, son, speaks for itself. On a campaign flight between Texarkana and San Antonio, Tower expressed a sense of vindication at the turn of events: "What is happening is what we said would happen all along. Eventually, Government would get so big that it would become oppressive."