Nixon's Convenient Vacuum

ASJYONE predicting the key issues of the 1972 presidential campaign a year ago would rightly have put the economy close to or perhaps at the top of the list. But since President Nixon announced his New Economic Policy last August, Democratic candidates generally have found it difficult to mount an effective attack. Last week the chairman of Nixon's Council of Economic Advisers, Herbert Stein, went so far as to declare that "at the moment there is no issue" in the economy. He added: 'There is no serious, coherent policy that is an alternative to the one the Administration has initiated." That convenient vacuum could be filled well before November. But for the time being, Stein appeared to be right.

None of the Above. The absence of issues last week made a rather dull affair out of what normally in an election year would be a highly charged political confrontation--the annual hearings of the congressional Joint Economic Committee. The committee's Democrats zeroed in on the current unemployment rate of nearly 6%, the Administration's gravest economic problem by far. Stein argued that Nixon had inaugurated "the strongest program to reduce unemployment that there ever has been in this country." It includes, he said, not only a huge, employment-building deficit in the federal budget, but also the stabilizing wage and price controls. After Democrats suggested that the Administration start a program of mass hiring for public service jobs. Stein scoffed that they were merely "rediscovering the WPA."

In a speech at the National Press Club, Stein challenged the Democrats to come up with a better program than Nixon's for reviving the economy. He listed the choices: impose even stricter wage and price controls or increase a budget deficit already pushing toward $40 billion by more spending. Presumably a third would be to raise taxes. Democratic presidential contenders, he predicted, will choose a none-of-the-above option and talk only generalities. At the JEC hearings, Budget Boss George Shultz moved to nail down the Republican position on one of these alternatives by demanding a "moratorium" on any thought of raising taxes.

There are, to be sure, some potential economic issues that the Democrats may later be able to exploit. One is what seems to be the growing unpopularity of Nixon's Phase II controls. According to a recent Gallup poll, a majority of

Americans (55%) are dissatisfied with the way these "yardsticks" are working, undoubtedly because they believe that store prices are rising faster than paychecks. Stein gave a hint of Nixon's future response by remarking that "the possibility of permanent price controls, until they break down of their own contradictions, is probably enhanced by the election of someone other than Mr. Nixon." His comment raised the intriguing possibility that the President, having imposed the broadest economic controls since the Korean War, might campaign for re-election on a promise to abolish them.

Stein felt that the economic issue was well enough under control to indulge in some humor about it. In his speech, he admitted that the economy is still a matter of intense interest, especially to candidates for the presidency. Each, he said, must have "at least three economists" to advise him--a hard requirement for the large field of Democratic hopefuls. Cracked Stein: "Senator Muskie has offered Senator McGovern Arthur Okun [a member of TIME'S Board of Economists] and a first-round draft choice from the 1972 crop of Ph.D.s in exchange for Kenneth Galbraith." Stein's witticisms, while outwardly testifying to a remarkable G.O.P. self-confidence, may come back to haunt him. If unemployment stays high. Democratic generalities could yet seem more appealing to the voters than Nixon's policies.

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