A-a-a-a-n-d They're Off!!!

For a month Ronald Reagan did no public politicking. Instead, he girded himself for the launching of his campaign for the Republican presidential nomination. He consulted with experts on the economy and foreign policy. He met frequently with aides to discuss strategy. Above all, he husbanded his energy, winding up with a long weekend at the Palm Springs estate of an old friend, Publisher Walter Annenberg. Finally, looking rested and ruddy, Reagan last week pulled on an off-white sweater and green ski parka, gave a final flick of the comb to his dark brown hair and stepped off his rented Boeing 727 into the snows and freezing temperatures of New Hampshire. Campaign '76 was officially under way.

It was an auspicious time for Reagan to sound the opening gun for the primary season. He leads President Gerald Ford in the public opinion surveys. Last week the Gallup poll reported that Ford's approval rating among Americans slid seven points in late December, to 39%, only two points above his low last April. Reagan's national campaign staff has meanwhile doubled, to about 25, and his 40-odd state organizations are rapidly recruiting volunteers. In contrast, Ford's supporters are still relatively disorganized, though the President is shortly expected to name outgoing Commerce Secretary Rogers Morton as campaign coordinator in an effort to pull them together. Reagan's fund raisers have collected about $2 million in private donations, against the Ford organization's $1.7 million.

Thus Reagan was confident as he put into action Campaign Manager John Sears' dictum, "Politics is motion." Running counter to his past image as a diffident campaigner, the candidate in 48 hours appeared in 22 New Hampshire communities, mainly sparsely populated northern sections. In one stretch he shook hands with a grand total of six registered voters at three stops. He greeted voters at grocery stores, banks, schools and ski areas. He posed for photographers in a sleigh, aligned his profile with the granite outcropping that forms the state's best-known landmark, the Old Man of the Mountains, and threw snowballs at a speed-limit sign along a highway. In subsequent visits--he plans to spend 15 days in the state before the Feb. 24 primary--Reagan will concentrate on the more populous southern counties. "By the time he's through," pledges State Campaign Manager Hugh Gregg, "every voter in New Hampshire will have had a chance to meet him without driving more than half an hour."

Biting Questions. It is one thing to make exciting statements before friendly audiences; it is quite another to be quizzed on a wide range of domestic and foreign affairs by tough questioners.

Said Reagan: "Where before they were just nibbling around the edges, they come in biting now." Even without questions from the press, he got into trouble. Expressing disapproval of the Ford Administration's policy of detente with the Soviet Union ("a one-way street"), Reagan urged that the U.S. tell the Russians to get out of Angola "or you're going to have us to deal with." But he was unable to explain just what he would do. Later he implied that the U.S. might respond by cutting off wheat shipments. That idea is anathema to export-dependent Midwestern farmers, who were last week assured by Ford at the American Farm Bureau Federation convention in St. Louis that the U.S. would do no such thing. Hours later Reagan backtracked, explaining that wheat was the wrong "diplomatic lever." Said he, rather lamely: "No one on the outside with no access to information about the negotiations going on in the international chess game can speak with authority" about the Angola situation.

It was the kind of performance that in the long run could make Reagan look weak compared with Ford, who, for all his shortcomings, is an active and informed President.

Nor was Reagan much more successful in explaining his controversial scheme to cut about $90 billion in Government spending by abolishing the federal role in welfare, education, Medicaid and a wide range of other programs (see box following page). Many of his listeners feared that the program would require either a disastrous reduction in government services or a sizable increase in state and local expenditures that would force New Hampshire to enact its first general sales or income tax. For the most part, Reagan failed to persuade the voters that his program would not end New Hampshire's coveted status as the only state with neither tax. After he voiced repeated assurances during an hour-long session at a high school in Whitefield, an unconvinced student demanded: "Now, Mr. Reagan, what is the straight scoop?"

The skepticism was typical; New Hampshire residents are blase about the quadrennial blandishments of national politicians. But TIME correspondent Jess Cook, who accompanied the candidate, reported that Reagan seemed generally attuned to New Hampshire conservatives on most matters. What is more, his organization claims committees in 236 New Hampshire communities. On the other hand, Ford generates little enthusiasm. One sign: there is little or no visible volunteer activity on the President's behalf, lending substance to Reagan advisers' private claims that the Californian now leads Ford in New Hampshire by about the same eight-point spread that Gallup reported nationally in early December.

Name Problems. Before Reagan left for appearances in the early-primary states of North Carolina and Florida, two of the six major candidates entered in New Hampshire's Democratic presidential primary followed him into the state: former Governors Terry Sanford of North Carolina and Jimmy Carter of Georgia. Both have name-recognition problems among New Hampshire voters.

Carter's campaign cochairman, William Shaheen, admitted that 40% of the people his man met during his two-day swing had never heard of him before. To help matters, some 100 Carter supporters from Georgia canvassed Democratic households for five days, making contact with more than 10,000 voters, by their own count.

Carter can probably hope to pick up no more than a handful of New Hampshire's 17 delegate votes at the Democratic National Convention. The situation was made more complicated for Democrats in the state when delegate slates were entered for two additional contenders, Senators Henry Jackson and Hubert Humphrey. The Humphrey delegates will run as "favorable" to him rather than "pledged" to vote for him at the convention--a hairsplitting legalism that will allow him to preserve his official stance as a noncandidate (see story following page). But Jackson actually made a token campaign appearance in the state.

The Democrats were joined by an eleventh announced contender for the nomination last week: Senator Robert Byrd of West Virginia. Byrd is not thinking seriously of a run for the presidency but would welcome the nomination for Vice President.

In Washington, meanwhile, Gerald Ford took steps to foil the Democratic and Republican efforts to unseat him. To encourage his supporters, whose enthusiasm has been flagging, he made his first visit to his national headquarters. He gave a pep talk to some 130 campaign aides and later delivered another cheering message to 45 state campaign chairmen at the White House. At week's end, White House sources indicated that Ford might make a two-day visit to New Hampshire beginning February 7th.

Ford also took more substantive action. He told his Cabinet that the fiscal 1977 budget that he will submit to Congress next week will total less than $395 billion, which is $25 billion higher than the budget for the current year. He handed over to Speechwriter Robert Hartmann two thick notebooks of ideas for the State of the Union speech that Ford will deliver to Congress next week.

Said Ford: "This will be the most important speech of my Administration." The message may prove to be just that, if Ford intends to provide needed direction for his policies, focus for his Administration and a platform for his campaign.

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