Some Political Sparks But Still No Fire

THE political talk in Baltimore was not of the presidential campaign, but the whimsical fate of Mayor William Schaeffer, who stuck his arm out of his car window--and had someone snatch off his $42 wristwatch. Nixon bumper stickers were appearing in Nebraska, but they were vastly outnumbered by bright red NEBRASKA NUMBER ONE signs plugging the university's football team. The big debate in San Francisco was over the attempts of a school dietician to ban graham crackers for milk breaks on the grounds that they stick to tots' teeth and cause cavities.

The campaign had been under way --haltingly--for weeks, and now the traditional Labor Day launch date came and went with much of the nation in a curiously apathetic and unpolitical mood. TIME correspondents exploring voter sentiment last week kept catching a counter-question: "What campaign?" Such indifference could only please Richard Nixon, whose own campaign may not be exciting anyone, but it commands such a lead that his only concern is to preserve the status quo. It is bad news for George McGovern, who is in dire need of igniting some fires, of conquering the fatal idea that the 1972 election is a foregone conclusion.

McGovern could hardly be faulted for not trying. Last week he began his proselytism in earnest, working 18-hour days as he crisscrossed the nation. He barged boldly into settings where his reception was not likely to be friendly: a meeting of rabbis in Los Angeles, an aerospace plant in San Diego, the Manned Spacecraft Center in Houston, the Southern Governors' Conference in South Carolina. He earned grudging respect in those quarters but not enough to give his lagging drive much of a lift.

The overall image was that of a man still searching for a consistent theme, striking a spark here, but turning weary at the lack of response there. He attacked forcefully one moment, appeared overly defensive the next. McGovern was sharp on economic issues, slashing at the inflation under the Nixon Administration. "The Nixon inflation is ground into every pound of hamburger you buy," he cried.

He assailed the uneven application of wage and price controls, working a traditional Democratic campaign theme of the little man fighting the party of big business. While worker salaries are in "a deep freeze," he claimed in Dallas, the president of Dow Chemical Co. received a pay raise of 196% and has to "eke out an existence on $305,000 a year." He inveighed against tax loopholes for the rich. "You pay for every martini lunch that a businessman deducts--while you eat a bologna sandwich." (Later, travelers on his campaign plane ceremoniously presented McGovern with a martini--which he declined--and a single bologna sandwich.)

Fear. Some of his crowds were large, including a rally of some 3,000 enthusiasts in conservative Dallas--a tribute, among other things, to efficient advance work. Some friendly audiences tempted McGovern to overwrought prose. He told a crowd of 4,000 in Seattle that the Nixon Administration consisted of "wiretappers, warmongers and purveyors of racial fear." He seemed to hold Nixon responsible for everything from heroin addiction to the plight of "lonely old people living in poverty." In Seattle he employed a rare personal reference to his family, reading the words of a Bob Dylan song When the Ship Comes In, which his daughter Mary, 17, had given him: "And like Pharaoh's triumph they'll be drownded in the tide/ And like Goliath they'll be conquered." Added Mary's note: "I know on Election Day you'll surprise the world. Your ship will come in."

That ship still was riding rough seas, fighting to find its course. There remained the candidate's own strangely persistent staff problems. Running one of the most decentralized and uncontrolled national campaigns in history, McGovern had to persuade two of his key aides to stay on board. Gordon Weil, a top but not very successful troubleshooter (it was he who was assigned to check out rumors about Vice Presidential Nominee Tom Eagleton's background, and was the staff man responsible for the ill-fated $ 1,000-for-every-citizen welfare plan) threatened to quit because a news letter was prepared without the usual printers' union symbol. The top man on issues, Ted Van Dyk, quit briefly in disgust over the intrastaff jostling, but returned.

One aide whose resignation stuck was New Jersey Congressman Frank Thompson Jr., a veteran voter-registration expert, who was credited with adding some 8,000,000 new Democratic voters to the rolls for John Kennedy in 1960. McGovern had promised him that he would have complete control of registration funds if he would take on the same task this year, but McGovern failed to inform his campaign manager, Gary Hart, of that fact. Thompson discovered last week that Hart had distributed some $400,000 to field workers, most of it funneled into some of the 800 storefront headquarters set up since the convention. Thompson did not blame Hart ("His priorities and mine are not the same"), but was sufficiently angered to resign his position.

There was some evidence that both the registration drive and the storefront offices were impressively organized, despite the leadership squabbles. "It's the best grass-roots registration thing I've ever seen," claimed Campaign Chairman Larry O'Brien. Nevertheless, the infighting left a disquieting impression of McGovern's administrative abilities. As a Boston dock worker expressed his doubts last week: "You know, this is the big league now for McGovern. This isn't like a college campus. He's gotten into it with the big boys, and right off, he got a kick in the croakies."

President Nixon ran his campaign effort partly by remote control, dispatching his daughter Tricia and her husband Edward Cox to New York City for some politicking. He ordered his entire Cabinet, except for Defense Secretary Melvin Laird and Secretary of State William Rogers, to hit the trail on his behalf. Since Laird and Rogers have already assailed McGovern in harsh terms on defense and world-affairs proposals, Nixon is using his Cabinet on a scale unprecedented in recent presidential campaigns. On a tour billed as "nonpolitical," Nixon teamed up in San Francisco with such environmentalists as Pioneer Aviator Charles A. Lindbergh and Astronaut Frank Borman to make a ferryboat inspection trip of the proposed Golden Gate National Recreation Area and to assail the Democratic Congress for its failure to pass some of his environmental control bills.

When Nixon did venture personally into the battle, he was guilty of some of the same oratorical overkill that occasionally marred McGovern's speeches. To a group of Republican congressional leaders, for example, he issued a flat pledge that if re-elected he would not seek any tax increase throughout the following four years. Since fiscal needs are almost impossible to predict that far in advance, this may wind up in the same category as his 1968 pledge to end the Viet Nam War. Even in the current fiscal year, in which the federal budget deficit may reach an estimated $35 billion, Nixon is fighting to start a program that will turn over some $30 billion in revenue-sharing to states and localities over five years; he has promised to seek a cut of 50% in local property taxes by increasing federal aid to schools. Where that money, an estimated $16 billion, will come from without raising taxes is a mystery.

In a Labor Day speech taped for radio, Nixon claimed with a certain truculent piety that he advocated a "work ethic" based on the principle that "everything valuable in life requires some striving and some sacrifice," while McGovern was pursuing a "welfare ethic," which "says that the good life can be made available to everyone right now and that this can be done by Government." In fact, both the McGovern and Nixon welfare-reform proposals are strikingly similar in principle. Both stress the need for persons who can work to be given jobs, both would increase rather than decrease the number of persons on welfare, and both embrace the idea of some kind of guaranteed minimum income.

Stigma. The Nixon campaign leaders were on shaky ground in trying to shed the stigma of the Watergate bugging exposures by charging the McGovern organization with similar violations of campaign-fund laws. The most serious was that Playboy Publisher Hugh Hefner was advised to split his $50,000 Democratic contribution among various committees so the total would be hidden. That hardly compared with the General Accounting Office's charges that the Committee for the Re-Election of the President may have mishandled some $350,000 in campaign funds, including $114,000 routed through secret channels to the Miami bank account of a former CIA agent arrested in the Watergate.

Neither side was off to an edifying start. The presidential campaign remained, for the moment, one oddly without definition, without as yet any real sense of issues in intellectual collision. The pressure, of course, is all on McGovern now, and he has yet to find his campaign rhythm. Some of his backers were holding, with fading conviction, to what might be called the Primary Mystification Fallacy: McGovern started far behind in the primaries and he won the nomination; therefore, because he is far behind in the general election campaign, he will win the presidency. In Seattle, McGovern argued: "I've had to fight uphill every single step of the way in 16 years of public life, so this is nothing new to me." But as the time until November was diminishing, that hill was getting steeper.

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