Primaries: Leaning Toward the Right

READING primary elections as a flow chart of political and ideological trends is risky. The primaries are scattered in geography and time, often poorly patronized by voters and more vulnerable to local loves and hates than are general elections. In last week's round, nonetheless, a few clear lines were discernible among the conflicting results. On balance, the week was better for the right than the left, kinder to incumbents than challengers. Where the outs prevailed, as in Alabama and New Mexico, they represented a kind of local orthodoxy. Where the relatively progressive candidates won, as in the New Jersey Senate primaries, they stood for their party establishments. Radicalism on the left and restlessness in the middle may be rising, but they have yet to submerge the ballot box.

Cracker Base. The most significant contest by any measure pitted George Wallace against Albert Brewer in Alabama. That Wallace's bluntly racist comeback campaign succeeded in toppling the comparatively moderate, attractive Governor both showed the density of white resentment in the Deep South and broadcast ripples that will be felt in other states and in 1972.

Wallace's victory will doubtless be an inhibiting factor for Deep South candidates who might consider moving toward a moderate position on racial issues. But Alabama is neither the whole South nor the region's bellwether. Along with Mississippi and Louisiana, Alabama may in fact represent a vestigial resistance with far more past than future (see following story). Kevin Phillips, a theorist and codifier of the Nixon Administration's largely misnamed Southern strategy, believes that "Wallace has become too gross for the Southern middle class. Where before he was a conservative regional candidate, he had to get down to his cracker base to win in his home state."

Still, incumbency will obviously make Wallace a stronger third-party presidential candidate in 1972 than he would otherwise have been, particularly if he concentrates on the South rather than carrying his campaign nationwide, as he did in 1968. Said one Nixon aide after Wallace's victory: "We just wrote off 30 to 50 electoral votes." While Wallace's success revived interest in abolishing or modifying the Electoral College in order to eliminate or reduce his influence, it is doubtful that a constitutional amendment could be ratified in time to affect the next election. Hence Nixon will again have to put up with pressure on his right.

Many factors will determine how Nixon responds to that pressure over the next two years. The consensus in Washington now is that the Southern strategy --more accurately the Middle American melody long played by Nixon--will continue pretty much unchanged. The Upper South and the Border states will still be winnable by the President. The approaches he has taken on race and law-and-order remain as relevant in Southern California and South Dakota as in South Carolina. Both philosophically and politically, Nixon will find it impossible to move right of Wallace or left of the national Democrats. Therefore he is expected to cling to his rather conservative concept of the center.

Dubious Victory. One state that Nixon and the country will be watching closely for guidance is California, where last week's primary set up clear-cut liberal-conservative contests. Republican Governor Ronald Reagan was unopposed for renomination. He will now face Jess Unruh, a liberal Democrat who easily defeated Los Angeles Mayor Sam Yorty, a maverick and a hawkish conservative. In the Senate races, two challengers on the left were defeated when Republican Incumbent George Murphy and Democratic Congressman John Tunney won nomination.

Actor-turned-Politician George Murphy, 67, had an unorthodox opponent: Norton Simon, a 63-year-old multimillionaire (Hunt Foods, Canada Dry, McCall Corp.). He jumped in hours before the filing deadline after failing to persuade HEW Secretary Robert Finch to take Murphy on. A pensive and quixotic man, Simon came across poorly in public but spent more than $1.5 million of his own on a well-executed TV, radio and newspaper advertising campaign. He took 33% of the vote in losing. "The reason I went in was not impulsive," Simon told TIME afterward. "It was frustration with a lot of problems --the economy, the university and, perhaps most of all, youth. We have a helluva problem with the young people: the problem is the old people. In other words, how do you get the Establishment working again? Winning was the last thing I expected. I wanted to raise some questions, and I wanted to open some lines of communication to the young people. It was worth every penny."

Both Tunney and his principal opponent, Congressman George Brown, vehemently opposed the war (see box opposite page). But Brown hit that issue from the beginning and won the active aid of antiwar student volunteers. How much they helped or hurt is uncertain. College-age campaign workers were more successful in a Democratic House primary in the Oakland-Berkeley area, where they worked for Ronald Dellums, a black member of Berkeley's city council. But Jeffery Cohelan, the incumbent whom Dellums beat, is himself an antiwar liberal, making the victory a dubious one for the campus activists.

Princeton's Movement for a New Congress has been active in a number of primaries, with mixed results. Lewis Kaden, one of the more promising candidates backed by antiwar collegians, was easily beaten in a New Jersey congressional primary by a routine organization candidate who did little campaigning. However, the antiwar students did not begin serious organizational work until this spring and still have much to learn. Says Princeton Political Science Professor Henry Bienen: "We're after more nuts and bolts now, and getting more professional advice off the campus." Among the advisers are aides to New York Mayor John Lindsay.

The Party's Own. Kaden's defeat was not typical of New Jersey's results. Democratic Senator Harrison Williams, who also had help from the MNC, easily won renomination against a law-and-order candidate put up by the Hudson County machine, an organization that never got word about the demise of Tammany-style politics. On the Republican side, Nelson Gross, former state party chairman and a progressive who has moved away from the Administration on the war issue, handily defeated two lesser-known opponents to his right. In New Mexico, the circumstances were dissimilar. Governor David Cargo, one of the few Republicans ever to hold high office in that state, went after the Senate nomination. His opponent was Anderson Carter, a staunch conservative ideologically much closer than Cargo to the state party's heart. Carter won by 2 to 1. Discussing the New Mexico results, G.O.P. National Chairman Rogers Morton observed: "I guess you would have to say that the party takes care of its own." That judgment could stand for the rest of the week's balloting as well.

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