What Worries The Voters?

Congressmen hear about fish, corn and hound dogs

The problems that were worrying Jimmy Carter last week are by no means uppermost in the minds of most Americans In state after state, members of Congress who returned home for the August recess found voters preoccupied by personal, local concerns rather than headline-grabbing, life-and-death issues. Occasional gusts of passion were stirred over the Panama Canal treaty and the economy, but voters mentioned the President only rarely and Bert Lance hardly at all. TIME correspondents joined five members of Congress on their recess rounds. Their reports:

Democratic Congressman Gerry E Studds, 40, found that fish remained the chief concern of his constituents in Massachusetts' water-girt Twelfth District, which includes Cape Cod. Happily for Studds, the fish were biting, and he was given much of the credit. Known as the "fisherman's Congressman," he sponsored the bill that extends exclusive U. S. fishing rights to 200 miles off the coast Thus Massachusetts seamen no longer have to compete with better-equipped foreign trawlers for the dwindling supply of flounder, cod and haddock. Appropriately, Studds boarded the buoy tender Bittersweet for the annual blessing of the fishing fleet off New Bedford--and also to remind his audience that he had cleared the waters for them.

His constituents were troubled by conditions on land, especially Social Security. Many were stunned by Commerce Secretary Juanita Kreps' suggestion that it might be better for an individual to wait until age 68 rather than the current 62 or 65 to receive benefits. An irate woman complained: "The working class has really been overburdened with taxes and inflation. Now you're taking away our playtime." Hastily dissociating himself from Kreps' trial balloon, Studds responded that many of his constituents wanted to lower the age for receiving payments to 60 or even 55. Said he: "The toughest tax on people is the Social Security tax."

Republican Representative Arlan Stangeland, 47, has spent much of the recess visiting the farms in Minnesota's sprawling Seventh District. On the road at 7 a.m. one rainy day, he drove from his 850-acre farm to a barn more than 100 miles away for a talk with a dozen farmers and their families and a spread of cold milk, homemade blueberry cake and chocolate chip cookies. "You must be a good man," said Dairy Farmer Robert Regnell. "You brought rain." Added Lawrence Wimmer, owner of the barn: "A Republican can be a good man too."

That was good news for Stangeland, who won an upset victory in a special election that was called last February after Democrat Bob Bergland went to Washington to become Agriculture Secretary. Stangeland's constituents were downcast about the drought that had scorched and stunted the corn crop. At the same time, the price of corn kept dropping because it was being abundantly harvested elsewhere. "We've lost sight of the priorities," said Wimmer. "Everyone wants a boat and a cabin, but they're unwilling to pay a fair price for food. I think that those who don't like farmers just shouldn't eat." Stangeland plainly sympathized. "Part of the pleasure of farming," he reflected, "is tilling the soil with your own hands and watching the progress of your crops. A drought is pretty depressing. It's hard to get up in the morning and take care of a ten-bushel crop."

Democratic Congressman Bob Krueger, 41, decided to sample voter sentiment in his 21st District in the Texas hill country by visiting Fredericksburg (pop. 5,900). Most of the townspeople are of German descent, and people still say "Guten Tag." Krueger does his best to reply, but as he confessed at a local social, "Mein -Deutsch ist nicht so gut." Gushed one woman: "I just love za vay he talks." The townspeople feared for the future of oil and gas. They especially resented the possibility that the Federal Government might allocate Texas natural gas to the North in the event of another winter fuel crisis. "We were cold last winter too," said Annabell Lindner, a hospital worker. "I don't want them to take our gas."

Krueger's constituents fretted over the rising cost of energy when there is so much oil and gas available in Texas. He conceded that the cost of energy would probably go still higher. "If you still have them," he quipped, "don't throw away your windmills." After his visit, he reflected: "There is now more hope and less depression than a few months ago. But there is still a sense of distance from Government that seems so very, very large and very, very puzzling."

Republican Senator Bob Packwood, 44, glimpsed one cause of this alienation when he toured the big fir country in southern Oregon. The hardy loggers of the timber companies were fuming over a recently released environmental-impact statement. Penned by a social anthropologist with the National Forest Service, the report characterized Douglas County as being "provincialism carried to the extreme, the redneck capital of the world " Packwood laughed off the report as another bureaucratic excess: "That is ridiculous." A moderate Republican, Packwood agreed with the loggers that timberland must not be reduced too much to appease environmentalists.

Oregon timber may be far from the Panama Canal, but only in a geographical sense. Many of Packwood's constituents called the proposed treaty a "giveaway" or a surrender to "blackmail." One woman promised to spend the next three years working for Packwood's defeat because he supports the pact. Packwood stood by his position. "I try to represent the people, but if an issue comes up that I feel strongly about and if I were asked to vote against it, I'd have to cross my conscience, and I couldn't look at myself in the morning."

Democratic Senator Dick Clark, 47, came from virtually nowhere to win election in 1972 by taking a 1,313-mile walk around Iowa. During the recess, he is out strolling the state again. "People feel a little remote from their Government," he explains, "but when you talk to 300 or 400 a day, you get a pretty good idea of what's on their minds." Nothing too special, it turned out. A man chatted with him for an hour about the problem of heartworm in hound dogs. A small boy talked about the preservation of whales.

Drought was on many people's minds.

"You can go 60 miles and not see any corn," a farmer told Clark, "and this is the heart of corn country." Welfare cheaters also bothered his constituents, as did the Panama Canal treaty. Clark believes that a small majority opposes a new treaty, which he favors. "Until and unless there's a greater understanding and agreement, there's not apt to be a vote on the treaty," he says. "It's an easy issue to demagogue. But people are prepared to listen. It's an issue on which they want more information." Clark, to his delight, found most of them ready to listen--as did his fellow Congressmen.

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