Senator Sunday School's Slow Start

As the chartered bus last week chugged along a Nebraska road, a jack rabbit darted out from the underbrush and ran by its side. For a while the race was close, but the bus finally gained on the hare and outdistanced him. Inside the bus, Presidential Candidate Frank Church chuckled over the good omen: "The tortoise is doing it again!"

Idaho's Senator Church, 51, is certainly the tortoise of this year's presidential race. The latest candidate to enter the contest, Church announced only last month, when the real-life rabbits were already well ahead. Before the primaries began, Church's strategy was to offer a fresh face and funds just when the other candidates would presumably be starting to wear out. He has adhered to that strategy, but at this stage he finds Jimmy Carter still looking remarkably bushy-tailed and shrewd old Br'er Rabbit Hubert Humphrey poised to jump into the brier patch of presidential politics.

Five Minutes. Much depends on this week's Pennsylvania primary, where Carter claims that his rivals have a "last chance" to stop him. Carter not only has the support of Pittsburgh's mayor Pete Flaherty but also benefits from the fact that Philadelphia's mayor Frank Rizzo, who is Henry Jackson's chief local backer, is under heavy fire at home (see story page 18). Moreover, despite his "ethnic purity" remark, Carter last week won a firm endorsement from Atlanta's black mayor Maynard Jackson, which will not hurt him among Pennsylvania's black voters. Said the Atlanta mayor: "Jimmy Carter appears more liberal than many of those who use the liberal label."

Should Carter eke out a victory in a state with an equal distribution of blue-and white-collar workers and as great an ethnic mix as anywhere else in the nation, he will be well placed to defeat Favorite Son Lloyd Bentsen in the Texas primary at week's end. That would build a perhaps irresistible momentum for Carter--unless he can be slowed by the forces gathering behind Humphrey.

Nothing has quite worked out the way Frank Church intended. He was forced to delay his entry into the race because he was chairing the Senate investigation of the CIA and other intelligence agencies. If he had seemed to wrap up the hearings too hastily, he would have been accused of playing politics with national security. He had hoped his performance as chairman would give his campaign a solid if belated boost, but it did not really get him off the ground.

Church hoped to win attention with a half-hour speech over national TV last week. But he could only wangle five minutes of network time, just before the 11 p.m. newscasts. It was an odd time in an odd week--one of the few throughout the spring without one or more primaries. With voters taking time out from the campaign onslaught, Church's pivotal speech went all but unnoticed.

Church anticipated making a solid splash in his first primary in Nebraska on May 11 and then going on to other victories in Western states. But his strategy was damaged when the Republican secretary of state put the names of two noncandidates on the Nebraska ballot: Edward Kennedy and Humphrey. "It would be a political miracle for me to win," Church concedes. "To come in second would be extremely good." Nonetheless, Church is spending more money in Nebraska than any other candidate--some $100,000 out of a war chest of $450,000, with an additional $225,000 in federal matching funds. He was expecting $100,000 more, but the Supreme Court last week refused to order the release of funds to any candidate until Congress reconstitutes the Federal Election Commission. He is also spending more time in the state--eleven days--than anyone else.

Church is in search of the "folks," as he puts it, and they are not always easy to find in the great open spaces. In one hour's stretch, while campaigning in Nebraska, his caravan came across a herd of antelope, some buffalo and two horsemen who were moving too fast to be approached. There was not a single human hand to grasp until he reached the "cowboy capital" of Ogallala (pop. 4,976).

To make an impression in places like Ogallala, Church plays up his Western antecedents--though almost 20 years in Washington have largely obscured them. He comes across more as a natty Easterner than a rugged son of the frontier; his speaking voice is too fastidious to have been shaped out of doors. But even if his elocution has developed during years of formal debating, he slips comfortably into a "Howdy, folks" approach. Though he has been a conventional liberal supporter of Big Government programs for most of his Senate career, he claims that he too is mighty suspicious of Big Government. If elected, he promises to cut inheritance taxes so small farms and businesses will not be endangered when their owners die. He pledges to appoint "a farmer, a rancher, a real dirt farmer" as Secretary of Agriculture. He emphasizes his work on the environment and the problems of the aged. Hunters and sportsmen, he declares, have no firmer friend in the Senate--no idle boast since Church is an eloquent and effective Capitol Hill opponent of gun control.

Earnest Oratory. Church stresses his early--1964--opposition to the Viet Nam War. He takes pride in being coauthor of the Cooper-Church amendment, which put a limit on American troop participation in the war. Though he insists that he is not a "neoisolationist," he argues that the U.S. must recognize the "failure of the prevailing attitude that anything that happens around the world is our business. It has cost us so much in men and money. And we've only changed the rhetoric since Viet Nam. The Ford Administration remains compulsively interventionist."

Church first won a political victory in 1956, when he challenged Republican Senator Herman Welker, a supporter of Joe McCarthy. Though Idaho is a conservative state in which Republicans outnumber Democrats, Church scored an upset victory. Arriving on Capitol Hill at 32, with the cherubic face and beatific smile of a choirboy, he was often mistaken for a Senate page. His earnest oratory won him the sobriquet of "Senator Sunday School." He proved to be industrious, competent and meticulously attentive to Idaho's interests. He was returned three times to the Senate.

His current presidential try is unlikely to gain him much more than useful publicity, but he is slated to receive a handsome consolation prize. In 1978 Senator John Sparkman, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, is expected to retire--and Church is in line to succeed him.

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