The Judge Gets an Argument

The landscape of New York State Democratic politics is like a long-contested battlefield, littered with the bones of fallen warriors, marked with monuments to victorious but transient knights, occupied in places by warring if ostensibly fraternal tribes. Leading Democrats themselves have described the factions of the state party as "feudal baronies," cannibalistic and almost nonexistent as an organized force. One leader on the party's left says simply: "It's a legal fiction." The very real cast of characters includes organization conservatives and liberals, anti-organization insurgents and reformers, some in and some outside the organization entirely.

Last week, to take command, Arthur Goldberg came over the horizon blowing a trumpet muted with the first note that he ventured. The owlish, dignified former Supreme Court Justice, hoping that he could summon broad Democratic support to challenge Nelson Rockefeller, began his crusade instead with only a narrow primary victory. He defeated Howard Samuels, an attractive upstate plastics millionaire who has been a frequent office seeker, by 45,000 votes in an election for which only 26% of the state's enrolled Democrats roused themselves to vote. Samuels campaigned strenuously in person and spent lavishly on television. After the vote, he pledged to support Goldberg.

Dove Formation. Goldberg's victory was not the only important decision the Democratic voters rendered. His running mate for Lieutenant Governor will be Basil A. Paterson, 44, a highly regarded state senator and the first black to run for so high a state office on a major party ticket. Though challenged by a white town supervisor from suburban Long Island, Paterson ran far better than Goldberg, winning 69% of the vote. In a four-man contest for the U.S. Senate nomination to oppose Republican Incumbent Charles Goodell, an expensive barrage of polished television advertising turned obscurity into victory for Westchester Representative Richard Ottinger. Theodore Sorensen, once John Kennedy's speechwriter, wound up a weak third.

Both Ottinger and Goodell fly in formation as doves. New York's Conservative Party, which polled more than a million votes in one recent election, will provide an outlet for voters who support President Nixon's Viet Nam policies. The Conservative senatorial candidate is James L. Buckley, familial and philosophical brother of Editor and Columnist William Buckley. Ottinger, however, plans to attack Goodell for his record as r conservative upstate Congressman in the days before he gained prominence as a leading Republican critic of the President on the war.

A third primary verdict may have halted a long and stormy political career. Adam Clayton Powell, already out of grace with his House colleagues, was finally defeated by the voters of Harlem after 24 years in Congress. By a mere 150-vote margin, they nominated instead Charles Rangel, a black state assemblyman (see box, opposite).

Not Like Toothpaste. The Goldberg ticket, which emerged from months of Democratic infighting, confronts a Republican apparatus that is by comparison a model of propriety. More important, it is totally responsive to Rockefeller's three-term winning record, his patronage and his campaign money. When a few small, hawkish voices were raised in protest last December over Rockefeller's demand that Senator Goodell be renominated, the Governor thwarted the rebellion by simply threatening to pick up his assets and go home. Last week, while the Democrats enacted their ritual bloodletting, Rockefeller's seasoned and skillful staff watched from the full floor of offices in a Madison Avenue building where they have been fashioning his campaign since January.

Rockefeller is generally regarded as one of the best campaigners in recent state history. On the basis of his performance during the primary, Goldberg is rated by his fellow Democrats as one of the worst. To many, he is reserved to the point of arrogance; he is also pedantic in his approach to the voters and the issues. "I am what I am. I won't be packaged and sold like toothpaste," Goldberg insists. Nonetheless, party managers are already planning to emphasize small-group appearances for Goldberg in conservative upstate New York, where Democrats neglected him in droves on primary day.

Ethnic Problems. Goldberg has already made clear that one of the main lines of his attack will be to try to lump Rockefeller with Nixon and Vice President Agnew. In 1968, Nixon lost to Hubert Humphrey in New York. The traditional but far from reliable calculus of ethnic voting blocs assigns Goldberg some automatic advantages. The Goldberg-Paterson combination, in theory, will win a large vote from blacks and Jews. Yet Rockefeller has repeatedly done well with both groups, even in an earlier campaign against a Jewish opponent.

Furthermore, Republicans make the point that Goldberg heads a ticket that may have some ethnic and geographical problems of its own: four Jews and a black, all from New York City or neighboring Westchester County. Two large ethnic groups that are bound to get considerable attention from both candidates are the Irish and Italian voters, mostly nominal but conservative Democrats, who are today's urban Middle Americans-- resentful of economic pressure from blacks, unaided by Government programs for the poor, squeezed by inflation. In New York City, they have already made plain that they are more right-wing than either Goldberg or Rockefeller would like them to be: they strenuously opposed Mayor John Lindsay for re-election last year.

Goldberg's mathematical advantages on paper may not count for much in the end. Democrats have won major statewide office only twice in 16 years --with Averell Harriman for Governor in 1954 and Robert Kennedy for the U.S. Senate in 1964. Still, the Democrats are desperate. "We're going for broke," says State Chairman John Burns. "We either do something great this year or we go back to utter chaos." Rockefeller's people consider Goldberg their toughest opponent since Harriman, but Rockefeller--always an underdog at the start--has yet to bring to bear his generally good record as Governor, his well-filled treasure chest and his formidable campaign personality.

More important still are matters over which neither man has complete control. Goldberg's seeming inability to project himself as an exciting leader may leave Democrats sitting on their hands. The course of the Viet Nam War could affect the election. Rockefeller has generally supported the White House on the war, but during his bid for the Republican presidential nomination two years ago, he outlined an alternative program. Goldberg, on the other hand, argued a relatively dovish position within the Johnson Administration, but, as Rockefeller has pointed out, he was the Administration's spokesman at the United Nations. Neither Goldberg nor Rockefeller can influence the faltering economy, and that could turn out to be the most decisive factor of all.

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