Nader's Guide

Having taken the measure of the major automobile manufacturers, meat packers and industrial polluters, Ralph Nader now has sized up every incumbent Senator and Representative in Congress. He offers 486 separate profiles researched and written at his direction by 250 paid staffers and 750 volunteers, including housewives, graduate students, professors and freelance writers. Through their work, Nader attempts to tell the consumers of American democracy--the voters--exactly what they will be getting should they decide to return their local Congressmen and Senators to Capitol Hill. The profiles are billed as Part 2 in Nader's three-stage raid on Congress. Part 1 was a rather superficial paperback overview called Who Runs Congress? (TIME, Oct. 16), and Part 3 will be a study of congressional committees, rules and procedures.

The project is marred by unsubstantiated innuendos and unconcealed bias. But the profiles, called Citizens Look at Congress, lay out for the voters about as much as they might want to know about their Representatives and Senators--and perhaps more. They detail the voting history and characteristics of each state and district, where each subject got his financial backing in the past several campaigns, how he voted on the floor and in committee, how much time he devotes to committee work and how he is "rated" by various interest groups. It tells how often a Congressman returns to his state or district, whom he sees there, and how to reach him in his Washington office--either by letter or telephone.

Even Nader has not yet read all 486 reports, which range from 20 to 30 pages each. But the exhaustiveness of the project, and its inherent strengths and weaknesses, are clearly limned in a few choice examples:

> Edmund Muskie's profile suggests that if enough people were to read the report, the Senator from Maine would be a long way toward recovery from the blows he suffered during his disastrous presidential primary campaign. The profile not only corrects the "wishy-washy" image he picked up last spring but also contradicts an earlier Nader study-group report that accused Muskie of foot dragging on environmental issues. This time around, Nader's researcher gave "Mr. Clean" high marks on environment and almost everything else. He is, the report notes, "a crack prosecuting attorney" possessed of "native intelligence," courage and an ability to weave a kind of seamless web out of seemingly inharmonious strands of ideas." It does rap an occasional knuckle--charging Muskie with naivete on the war, for instance--but it restores much of the Honest Abe image Muskie enjoyed before the primaries.

> Eligio de la Garza, Democratic Representative of Texas' 15th Congressional District, is treated less generously. The report claims that there are 25,000 people in the 15th District who do not have potable water but that de la Garza seems uninterested in alleviating the situation. His district is extremely poor, populated largely by Mexican American farmers and migrant workers; yet, according to the report, 90% to 95% of the federal funds coming into the district are channeled to the interests of the 25% "Anglo" portion of the population. The conclusion drawn from the profile is inevitable: de la Garza, a Spanish American, looks out for the well-off Anglos and is indifferent to the needs of his poor Mexican American constituents.

> Mississippi Senator John Stennis' profile represents one of the Nader report's major lapses. It points out that Stennis has a reputation as a modest pork barreler, and that despite his role as chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, Mississippi has only four military installations and three defense contractors. Nevertheless, the report suggests darkly that Stennis "may be taking the pork back to his economically beleaguered state." Although the report writer eloquently describes the poverty in which many Mississippians live, he seems to resent the fact that HEW and the Department of Agriculture respectively pumped $549,622,946 and $372,261,953 into the state. Would he have preferred that Stennis, who sits on the appropriations committees for both departments, oppose such appropriations for his own state?

> The profile of George McGovern leans too far the other way--it is so uncritical as to seem reverential. Where it does point up what it considers a flaw, such as McGovern's backing of the Gulf of Tonkin resolution, it suggests that it can be forgiven as being "politically realistic," an excuse granted to few other subjects. The language of the profile is laced with panegyric phrases like "that kind of humility" and "unassuming preacher-like authority." Those who know McGovern well find him neither humble nor unassuming.

On balance, however, Nader's sweeping view of Congress is both useful and fascinating. If nothing else, his appraisals of the country's legislators should start voters thinking about the wisdom of returning some of their Senators and Representatives to office.

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