May the Best Man Win

The trumpet sounds for the campaign of 1980

"It's just like the days before the war in 1861. Families are getting together for the last time, shaking hands and going off to do bitter battle. People are having to decide their loyalties." --Pollster Pat Caddell

For months they have been assembling their volunteer armies and their mercenary advisers. They have been filling their coffers with treasure for the long campaign. In Los Angeles and Houston, in Boston and in Washington, they have assembled in their homes for secret meetings, planning strategy, discussing tactics, analyzing their foes' strengths and weaknesses, measuring and guessing (with the help of the Merlins of opinion sampling) the mood of the great populace they hope to court and conquer. Now they are about to burst forth into full-scale battle.

The prize to be won exactly a year from now, on the first Tuesday after the first Monday in November of 1980, is, of course, the presidency of the U.S. And the struggle for that prize promises to be extraordinarily long, expensive, bitter and important. There are many reasons for this, one being that the holder of the crown, President Jimmy Carter, intends to keep it and very much wants to govern until 1985.

But Carter, who once promised a wide range of populist reforms, including revisions of the tax and welfare systems, has been a great disappointment to many voters. He has presided over one of the worst outbreaks of inflation in American history (currently 13%, the highest since price controls were lifted at the end of World War II), and now, in an attempt to control that inflation, he is supporting policies that have caused the prime interest rate to rise to unprecedented levels (currently as much as 15 1/4%). The energy crisis, despite Carter's attempts to offer solutions in "the moral equivalent of war," is hardly less severe than when he came to office. In many ways it is worse. Prices of gasoline have risen from 60-c- to $1 a gallon; severe shortages have occurred and threaten to return. The price of oil to heat homes has risen, since his sunny Inauguration Day, from 44-c- a gallon to more than 80-c-. Carter can and does blame the nation's economic difficulties partly on a greedy OPEC, partly on a fractious Congress, partly on the profligate American public, partly on the limitations of presidential power. But the fact remains that he seeks public endorsement of his presidency in the face of highly unfavorable economic circumstances.

Because of these circumstances and as a result of an unsure style of leadership, Carter fell to levels of popularity lower than any other President in the history of polling, despite the absence of any major scandal in his Administration or any international catastrophe. His restrained and at times erratic performance has won him neither personal nor ideological devotion. His political weakness has attracted a large number of challengers in the Republican Party. More important, it has drawn onto the field a reluctant Senator Edward M. Kennedy, the flawed heir of Camelot.

In a rush to launch his campaign so that he can combat the power of the Carter incumbency, Kennedy this week will make the official announcement of his candidacy at historic Faneuil Hall in his native Boston. California Governor Jerry Brown, who has been planning his own run against Carter for more than a year, is expected to follow suit the next day at the National Press Club in Washington. Republican Howard Baker, the minority leader of the U.S. Senate, last week made his candidacy official. Next week former California Governor Ronald Reagan will announce his latest attempt. On this, his third time round. Reagan will enter the race as the early favorite for the Republican nomination.

Underlying all specific issues as the full-scale campaigning begins, and with less than three months left until the first key test in the Iowa caucuses, are the role and power of the Government the candidates want to lead. On the Republican side, there is a considerable harmony of views about reducing the size and influence of the Federal Government, lowering taxes, unfettering the private sector of the economy and increasing industrial productivity. Republican candidates are also generally calling for much heavier defense spending and a more aggressive, bolder stance by the U.S. in foreign affairs. These candidates frequently note the turn to the right taken by voters in England and Canada this year and predict the oft-predicted end of the New Deal era of Big Government and big spending on lavish social programs. Says Baker: "There is a sea change coming in American politics. The country has been building toward it for years, but was frustrated by Watergate." Says John Connally: "This will be the most important election in this century." And from the Democratic side, Ted Kennedy predicts: "This will be a watershed period." Long-Shot Candidate Brown agrees: "America is ready for a pattern shift in its political thinking. There will be some kind of political realignment. The nation is not governable without new ideas."

A colossal struggle is now under way for control of the Democratic Party. Carter and his troops regarded their victory in 1976 as the first step toward moving the party to a more centrist position. Carter's defeat of Alabama's George Wallace, they felt, saved the party from moving too far right. And their battle with Ted Kennedy is already seen from the White House as saving the party from New Deal liberalism. All over the country. Democrats are being pressured to pick sides.

Former Iowa Senator Dick Clark, an ambassador-at-large for refugee matters in the State Department, whom Carter had just designated as head of the new Cambodian relief effort, resigned last week to join the Kennedy campaign. Carter accepted the resignation with a snappish note. Chicago Mayor Jane Byrne told Carter three weeks ago that she would support him, according to John White, chairman of the Democratic National Committee, but last week she announced her pledge to Kennedy. This gives the Massachusetts Senator an important advantage in the critical Illinois primary next March. Morris Dees, Carter's chief fund raiser in 1976, switched sides to join Kennedy. Said he: "I am not disaffected with President Carter, but philosophically I'm much more attuned to the views of Senator Kennedy."

Concerned that his own re-election apparatus may not be adequate, Carter appears on the verge of some major shakeups. Campaign Manager Tim Kraft is a likely victim. Former Democratic National Chairman Robert Strauss is considering abandoning his job as Special Ambassador to the Middle East to assume direction of the Carter-Mondale Committee.

Vice President Walter Mondale, once a liberal ally of Kennedy's in the Senate, heightened the Carter Administration's criticism of Kennedy and declared that the Senator has yet to give "an issue-based reason for seeking the presidency." Said Mondale: "The real danger is that it [the nomination battle] will be so bitter, so poisonous to the Democratic Party that no Democrat can win."

Indeed, Kennedy will need to justify his candidacy with reasons beyond his personality and ambition if he is to hold his lead over Carter in the polls. Already he has suffered some serious slippage against Carter (see following story). But the power of the Kennedy personality still makes him the most popular of all the presidential contenders.

Larger-than-life personalities are highly prized television commodities in this campaign, partly in contrast to Carter's low-keyed approach and partly because of the seemingly insoluble problems the nation faces. Kennedy used the word leadership 17 times in a recent speech in Philadelphia. On the Republican side, former Texas Governor and Nixon Treasury Secretary Connally managed to use the word five times in a 4 1/2-minute television commercial that was aired last week across the nation on CBS at a cost of $31,000.

The Connally advertisement was the symbol of another element in the 1980 race: its length. The spot was one of the earliest national television advertisements ever purchased for a presidential race. But network executives have had to refuse to sell larger chunks of time to Reagan and Carter, saying that they do not want to give candidates access to the nets until 1980. Last week the Carter-Mondale Committee filed a complaint with the Federal Communications Commission, charging the networks with denying them reasonable access to air time.

The troublesome early start of campaign '80 is the result of the incredible burden the candidates face in having to compete for convention delegates in 36 primaries across the nation. In 1968 there were only 17 primaries, but now the need to organize in so many places, and the need to campaign personally in all sections of the country, has forced the rivals into ever earlier activity. Will the seemingly endless electioneering burn out both the workers and the voters long before next year's Election Day? In Florida, where Democrats are just recovering from the struggle over delegates to a state convention at which a meaningless straw vote will be taken, National Committeewoman Hazel Tally Evans laments, "It's totally out of hand, everything is happening much too early. There's no chance to catch your breath. We're on a continual merry-go-round." The protracted campaign will also seriously disrupt the normal business of Government and perhaps lead to ill-conceived action in order to win votes.

Republican Front Runner Reagan risked the irritation of his supporters and the concerted challenge from such early entries as Connally and George Bush by delaying all serious campaigning. But now he too must enter the action. Says Reagan Campaign Manager John Sears: "Politics is motion and excitement. We must now run harder than if we were behind. Our biggest opponent is us. If we do our job right, nobody can catch us."

Reagan still claims the loyalty of about one-third of his party in state after state. The large number of Republican candidates (nine) challenging him tends to split the anti-Reagan vote and thus strengthen the front runner. Reagan, however, carries some weighty burdens. He is 68 years old. If he wins, he will be the oldest President ever elected in U.S. history. Perhaps more important, the theatrics of American politics tends to make any three-time candidate seem shopworn.

The 1980 campaign will soon be a pitched battle among the candidates. But among the people who do the voting, the candidates will be viewed through a prism of what they seem to offer in the way of help on energy and inflation and America's place in the world. More than in any recent election, the country will be looking at the candidates skeptically, doubting their promises, almost cynical about their abilities to alter fundamentally the nation's course. Says Maine's Senator Edmund S. Muskie, himself a failed presidential candidate in 1972: "People no longer believe the system exists to solve problems. There is a quiet kind of bitterness out there."

Nonetheless, the system does exist to solve problems, and it is the only system by which the nation's problems will be solved. That makes campaign '80 a contest of true importance.

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