The Wallace Factor

The Wallace delegates were bug-eyed. There on the podium at the convention was a certified member of Gay Liberation nonchalantly addressing the party while a small claque cheered him on. "Goddam," said Jess Lanier, mayor of Bessemer, Ala., though the gay plank did not pass. "Goddam. If that's what they're going to talk about, we're never going to get this party together again. They haven't got a dog's chance of electing a President on this platform. Damn, do they need Wallace!"

Which is just what Wallace is counting on. No one can predict what the rambunctious Governor, even confined to a wheelchair, will do. His campaign manager, Charles Snider, says that Wallace may lead a third party in 1972, and Wallace has been invited to give the keynote address at the American Party Convention next month. But this is probably no more than a threat to keep his leverage within the Democratic Party.

The surprisingly big primary vote that he won convinced Wallace that he speaks for the average man.

He does not want to forfeit all the credits he has built up within the party. While endorsing neither McGovern nor Nixon, he will play his own game, aimed at helping local Democratic candidates who stand clos er to him than to McGovern. Particularly in areas where the party's pro-busing platform will be a burden, candidates may call on Wallace. He fully expects McGovern to lose badly; then he hopes the party will be restructured more to his taste.

He still harbors the desire to become President, and that could be accomplished, if ever, only within the Democratic Party. The attempt on his life, as much as the primary votes he got, has given him a credibility and a respectability he did not have before. He is no longer a regional fringe candidate. As he says: "The other candidates are speaking in different tones of voice about me than they did four years ago." Despite the trauma of the shooting, both Wallace and his wife Cornelia show signs of boredom with provincial life in Montgomery and appear to yearn for a larger stage.

The biggest deterrent to his ambitions remains, of course, his physical condition (see MEDICINE). Wallace is far too weak to think seriously of launching a third-party campaign. Some of his aides suggested a media campaign that would let the Governor stay at home in his wheelchair, but that is not his style. If he led a third party, he might take electoral votes in the South away from Nixon, and keep enough conservative northern Democratic voters from switching to Nixon to give McGovern a chance in states like Michigan. That he intends to remain a good Democrat is bad news for McGovern.

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