Getting Up to Date in Kansas City

Fresh from their triumph at the polls in November, the Democrats will assemble in Kansas City, Mo., this weekend for a national conference that could strengthen or seriously weaken the party's chances for the presidency in 1976.

The purpose of the meeting is to adopt a charter that will spell out the ways in which the party should conduct its affairs. The worry is that conservatives and liberals will exacerbate all their traditional differences by arguing over the document in full view of the TV news cameras. "God, we don't want a confrontation right now," says one state organizer for Senator Henry Jackson, a leading prospect for the nomination.

Rigid Rules. If adopted by the 2,038 delegates in Kansas City, the charter would be the first constitution ever accepted by either of the two major parties, which have been run by sets of rules that could be changed with relative ease as various factions gained power. The Democrats' proposed charter would give the party a formalized and comprehensive set of rules that would be more difficult to alter. Provisions deal with such basic issues as the power of the national organization over state parties; proportional representation in primaries v.

winner-take-all; and, most important, how special groups--blacks, women, the young--should be enabled to participate in key party affairs like nominating conventions.

Faced with these fundamental issues, Democratic National Committee Chairman Robert Strauss has been diligently trying to work out middle-of-the-road compromises that will avoid a split in Kansas City. His prediction: "The story of Kansas City will be that the Democrats adopted a party charter and left town unified."

If so, it will be the first time that the party has agreed on how it should be run since 1968, when liberals and minority groups charged that they had been underrepresented at the bitter convention that nominated Senator Hubert Humphrey. In the aftermath, the Democratic National Committee created a commission, initially headed by Senator George McGovern, to rewrite the guidelines for choosing delegates for the 1972 convention. The commission's sweeping reforms are now generally accepted by the party and appear in the proposed charter. In some states, party officials used to select convention delegates; now all party members can take part in the process. But one provision of the guidelines turned out to be explosively controversial: a quota system for minority groups, youth and women.

In 1972, thanks to the quotas, New Politics liberals dominated the Miami convention that nominated McGovern. Nine out of ten delegates had never attended a convention before, and even Chicago's Mayor Richard Daley, a staunch symbol of the old-line party machine, found himself without a seat. After McGovern's disastrous loss to Richard Nixon, the Democrats set about writing a charter that would be fairer to all factions. A special commission was well along with a draft for the minicon-vention when it ran into trouble in August over the role of minorities. Charging that organized labor and party regulars were out to return bossism to the party, a contingent of blacks and white liberals stomped out of a commission meeting. Declared Willie Brown, a black member of the California legislature: "This is the nail that closes the coffin on the charter commission."

To prevent a similar blowup in Kansas City, the Democratic leadership seized upon a compromise on the minorities issue that had been worked out, almost unnoticed, by a commission chaired by Baltimore's Barbara Mikulski, Baltimore's champion of the ethnics, who lost a bid in November to beat Maryland's Senator Charles McC. Mathias Jr. Mikulski's ticklish job was to work out new rules for selecting delegates for the 1976 presidential convention. Her commission was loaded with so many factions that she quipped: "I felt like I was Premier of the French government."

But the commission--and the national committee--unanimously approved a vaguely worded compromise that skirted the issue of quotas in the interests of holding the party together. The commission recommended abolishing mandatory quotas in favor of "affirmative action" intended "to encourage full participation by all Democrats, with particular concern for minority groups, native Americans [i.e., Indians], women and youth in the delegate selection process and in all party affairs." Short of a revolution in Kansas City, this rule will govern the Democrats in the 1976 election.

Social Tinkering. Last month a group of Democratic Governors and Governors-elect heartily recommended that the Mikulski formula for affirmative action be incorporated in the charter. A caucus of black Democrats also approved the provision. One major critic remained: Alexander E. Barkan, 65, the crusty director of the AFL-CIO's Com mittee on Political Education (COPE).

Barkan, who is backed up by his boss, AFL-CIO President George Meany, fears that Mikulski's wording implies setting quotas, a practice that he feels is the kind of social tinkering that loses elections.

Barkan has threatened to fight the compromise on the floor in Kansas City.

If he does--most Democratic leaders doubt he will go that far--he could provoke an angry counterattack by women and blacks determined to write a specific quota system into the charter. In a flash, the Democrats could have the spectacular fight that they have been worrying about.

The provision that affirmative action should pertain to all levels of party life, including those in the precincts, is expected to stir some debate. In theory, local officials would have to make sure that all minority groups were properly represented before they could hold a district meeting or raise funds.

But ready approval is expected for the other sections of the charter, including banishment of the important winner-take-all "unit rule" that caused the pivotal floor battle in Miami over the California delegation. After McGovern won the California primary, his right to all 271 delegates was challenged by supporters of Senator Humphrey, who argued that the delegates should be divided proportionately among the candidates according to how well they had run. By a vote of 1,618 to 1,238, the convention gave the whole slate to McGovern. Under the proposed charter, candidates in presidential primaries would be awarded delegates in ratio to their vote totals.

With Unity. Proportional representation will apply to the primaries in 1976, according to the Mikulski commission's rules. All of the likely candidates prefer the certainty of proportional representation to the risk of losing everything under winner-take-all. If no clear leader establishes himself in the primaries, the nomination could be decided by negotiations between the various candidates. Says Chairman Strauss:

"We have reformed ourselves right back into the smoke-filled rooms."

To a man, the potential Democratic candidates are as eager as Strauss to get through the miniconvention without a flap. "I want a smooth convention with unity and a charter people can live with," says Alabama's Governor George Wallace. Adds Governor-elect Hugh Carey of New York: "Between 6:30 and 8:30 on Saturday morning, we should resolve the procedural problems and then move to the people's business."

But there is likely to be more talk about the rules than about the basic issues in Kansas City this weekend. With a faltering Republican President in the White House, the Democrats still face the job of defining their own program for meeting the foreign and domestic problems that confront the nation.

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