A Message for the President

Returning to Washington this week from the Easter recess, Republican Representatives and Senators are in an anxious and anguished mood. The reason is Richard Nixon, who in defending himself against impeachment seems increasingly to be endangering the Republican Party hi this election year. Whatever the Republicans learned from their own constituents during the ten-day recess, the immediate cause for concern was the result last week of a congressional by-election in Michigan's Eighth Congressional District. For the fourth time in the past three months, the Democrats took a supposedly safe seat away from the Republicans. The loss in Michigan was a particularly heavy blow because the Democrats had pointedly made Nixon the issue in the election, Nixon himself had journeyed to the district to campaign, and a Democrat has not been elected to the seat since 1932.

Michigan's Republican Senator Robert P. Griffin grimly declared: "No Republican should assume that he has a safe seat any more." Looking ahead to November, Vice President Gerald Ford warned that the Democrats could end up with an overwhelming majority in the House that would constitute "a legislative dictatorship." Talking to Maine Republicans about the party's problems, G.O.P. National Chairman George Bush confessed: "My idealism has been all messed up, just as I'm sure yours has, by the recent goings-on in Washington. Every Republican feels a certain sense of betrayal."

Illinois' Senator Charles Percy, a Republican presidential hopeful for 1976, said it would "probably" be best if Nixon resigned. Percy stopped short of actually calling for resignation, believing that was a matter for Nixon to decide himself. But Massachusetts' G.O.P. Chairman William A. Barnstead, once a strong Nixon backer, last week became the first state party leader to ask the President to step down.

The discussions among Republicans in private are even more alarmed and are likely to intensify this week when Congress reconvenes. Warns one of the most knowledgeable and influential Republicans in Washington: "In the next few days there are going to be some very strong messages sent from the House to the President of the United States." The messages will warn that unless he resigns the House will vote his impeachment and send him to trial in the Senate. If enough Republicans join in those messages, the Republican leader believes that Nixon will step down. He explains: "The President would have a legitimate reason for resigning. He could say, 'I'm not guilty, but I owe a duty to the American people to preserve the two-party system.' "

Winning Populist. The defeat that set the Republicans to brooding so darkly came after a vigorous campaign that turned Michigan's Eighth Congressional District along the shores of Lake Huron into a political battleground. The by-election was held to fill the seat relinquished by Republican Congressman James Harvey, whom Nixon appointed a federal judge in Michigan.

The Democratic winner was Jerome Bob Traxler, 42, son of a rural mail carrier and a mod-coiffed extra vert who had a strong record as a populist in the Michigan legislature. Traxler dug into the issues of high taxes, the high cost of living, the power of the oil companies--all stands that got him the full backing of the unions. Most of all, Traxler struck at Watergate and Nixon. "We said all along that this election was a referendum on the President," Traxler later noted. "The man we had to beat was the man who lives in a big white house on Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington."

It was no trick for Traxler to drape Nixon round the neck of his opponent, James M. Sparling, a former newsman and an aide for 13 years to Congressman Harvey. Last summer Sparling worked for the White House as a legislative aide and had been quoted as saying that he was "fully, totally, 100% committed to the President."

To buck up Sparling, and the cause of the G.O.P., the Republican Congressional Campaign Committee gave $35,000 to the fight. The Michigan G.O.P., as State Chairman William McLaughlin later lamented, "put every penny we had into this race." Percy paid a visit to help out. But there were early intimations of disaster. Volunteer workers were hard to come by. Vice President Gerald Ford, whose home district lies some 100 miles southwest, could not assist, it was said, because of "scheduling problems." Most disconcerting of all, a local Republican chairman took off on the eve of the election for a month's vacation and business trip.

Flip-Flop. Win or lose, Sparling decided to stick with Nixon and issued a surprise invitation to the President to enter the fight himself. Nixon spent a day whooping up Republican support in the safe rural areas, acting at times as though he were the candidate while his host stood aside and listened. Nixon apparently helped Sparling a bit as a campaigner-but he had already lost him the race as an issue. Traxler took 51.4% of the vote, a startling flip-flop from the results in 1972, when the Republicans captured 59.3% of the ballots in the district's congressional race.

After the debacle, only the White House remained serene, announcing that the President was "neither dismayed nor disheartened" by the vote. Indeed, Nixon remained willing to accept other invitations to campaign for candidates--a hint that was declined with alacrity by Missouri Republican Thomas Curtis, a former Congressman who will be challenging Democratic Senator Thomas Eagleton.

One candidate did ask the President to enter his fight, but the request hardly came from the kind of campaigner Nixon had in mind: Nicholas Johnson, a former member of the Federal Communications Commission. Johnson is a liberal Democrat who wants to win a congressional seat in Iowa this fall. Said Johnson: "I'm hopeful that the President will come out to the Third District as soon as possible and campaign for any Republican he chooses."

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