Noel Day and Jack Molesworth, who are running for Congress against Speaker of the House John McCormack, spent most of their time discussing the presidential election at a "Debate Among Candidates" last night.

McCormack had also been invited, but, as many expected, he did not attend. The two others candidates mentioned him only occasionally.

Republican Molesworth began by ridiculing President Johnson's plans for "The Great Society," claiming that the Democrats "want to wrap up every American in a cocoon of red tape. That's the trouble with the welfare state. You can't get the benefits without giving up some of your freedom. The land-of-milk-and-honey boys want to tell you what to do."

A Concerned Society

Day, whose campaign buttons read "Part of the Way with LBJ," took a different tack: "I am concerned," he said, "not with building a great society, but with building a society that is concerned with human needs."

Describing the choice in the presidential election as one between "a highly skilled professional politician and a zealot," Day spent most of his time attacking Barry Goldwater as "unrealistic and insensitive to human needs."

Freedom to Exploit

Although he scored Goldwater's ideal of "total victory" over Communism, he concentrated mainly on the Arizona Senator's domestic policies, and his selective reverence for the Constitution. "Freedom according to Goldwater," he said. "Is freedom of a small group of people to exploit the others."

Day specifically criticized Sen. Goldwater for attempting "to link the Negro freedom movement with crime in the streets," and for pointing to the rising crime rate in New York and Washington, D.C.,--"both of which have high Negro populations--when the crime rate in Pheonix, Arizona is actually higher than in either."

Violence in Streets

Nevertheless, Molesworth mentioned "violence in the streets" several times in his rebuttal, attributing it to the "soft attitude towards law breakers of LBJ, John McCormack and a liberal Supreme Court."

Seemingly in answer to Day's charges, Molesworth ennumerated several examples of Goldwater's pro-Civil Rights attitude, however. "How many of you know," he asked, "that long before civil rights became an issue, Mr. Goldwater bought pews and baptismal fonts for all the Negroes in his area?"