What's on the Voter's Mind

Legislators get an earful

Jimmy Carter, who gained power in Washington as a political outsider, has renewed his 1976 campaign charge that the nation's capital is an "isolated" city, out of touch with the rest of America.

None of the Washington insiders resents that contention more than the members of Congress, who insist that their duties --indeed, their political survival--require them to know what is on the minds of their constituents. As evidence, they point to their recesses as a time when they renew contact with the folks in their home districts. While many of the legislators actually use the work break for personal vacationing or global junketing, an impressive number do get around their regions and interrogate the voters about their views and their gripes.

As TIME correspondents last week followed some 14 Congressmen and Senators around their home districts, it was clear that many people who took the trouble to see their legislators did so out of special concerns, like seeking help to untangle some federal red tape. Yet also apparent was a more general worry about inflation and energy and the ability of Congress and the Carter Administration to deal with the two problems. There was not much talk about Carter or his recent actions. Ordinary problems were what worried ordinary people. The range of complaints and criticisms was illustrated by the travels and travails of a sampling of legislators:

> Democratic Congressman Albert Gore Jr., the Harvard-educated son of Tennessee's former Senator, drove through towns with names like Pleasant Shade and Goose Horn, some of them consisting of only a few houses and stores surrounded by ripening tobacco and tassling cornfields. Goats climbed on rocky outcroppings, and vultures swooped down on dead animals. Gore stopped to talk to five people in Eagleville. Said Linda Vincion, the city recorder: "I'd like to know why you voted as you did on busing." Gore, who had voted against a constitutional amendment to ban busing, explained that while busing is not always the best way to desegregate schools, he felt that such issues should not be resolved by tampering with the Constitution. In nearby Farmington, a dozen people, men in overalls and mothers with children, perched on stools in an empty grocery store as Gore greeted them. An 11-year-old boy asked the Congressman's opinion of Big Oil, and a grocer complained that the commodities market was being manipulated.

About two dozen people strolled past a quartet of toothless old men outside Cothern's General Store in Riddleton to meet Gore inside the combination grocery store-post office-lending library. Bill Cothern, 30, the store's proprietor, protested the inflation. "How is the common man going to make it?" he asked. "The prices of stuff on my shelves is climbing. It's just disgusting. How much longer can we stand this?" Gore responded by asking how many in his small audience favored wage-and-price controls. All but two raised their hands.

Fuel shortages were most on the minds of some three dozen people who engaged Gore in a lively discussion at a school in Willette. Asked a lean farmer in blue overalls: "Are we going to be able to get enough fuel this fall to harvest our crops?" A long-haired, bearded farmer, Jeff Poppen, wanted to know: "If they build this nuclear plant down here in Hartsville, are we going to be able to eat from our garden?" One oldtimer responded: "The question is, do we want to live the life-style we are used to living or do we want to go back 100 years?"

> Republican James Leach drove out into the cornfields in his district in southeastern Iowa. He stopped at the home of Merle Glenney, who coaxed the Congressman into a pickup truck for a tour of his farm. Glenney urged Leach to seek lower inheritance taxes on farms that pass from one generation to another. He said the price of land is so high (up to $3,000 per acre in this area) that young farmers can rarely buy a farm and those who inherit one, as his son Dwight will one day, are hurt by heavy taxes.

Getting out of the truck, Glenney led Leach into a barn. The farmer pointed to a battered 1955 International Harvester tractor. "See this tractor," he said. "I bought that for $3,600 when corn was selling for $3 a bushel. Now this here new one," he said, indicating a bright green and yellow John Deere, "costs $30,000, and I bought that on $2 corn. That's what I mean by the squeeze." Leach was duly impressed. "I'm glad to get some of these things off my chest," Glenney said.

Leach's shoes still bore dirt from Glenney's fields, when, wearing a blue suit and yellow shirt, he faced some 30 people seated on yellow plastic chairs in a bank basement in tiny Columbus Junction. Complained one farmer: "Everything that comes out of Washington these days violates the American free-enterprise system." The farmer said the problem could partly be countered by abolishing the income tax on corporations.

Replied Leach wryly: "That is a unique and thoughtful approach, but I doubt whether it would be widely embraced." At several stops, Leach asked for a show of hands on whether the Federal Government should help the ailing Chrysler Corp. in its financial troubles. Insisted an insurance man in the town of Washington: "They should have the same right to go broke as I do." Nevertheless, the vote there was 18 to 10 in favor of a federal loan guarantee for Chrysler.

> Democratic Senator Paul Tsongas of Massachusetts was pleasantly surprised by the turnout of some 250 people in a hot, stuffy school auditorium in Harwich, on Cape Cod. He caught not a single question about foreign affairs or even about next year's presidential election--despite the fact that Ted Kennedy's Hyannis Port home is only twelve miles away and Tsongas has said that he might run as a stand-in for Kennedy in the Massachusetts Democratic primary. The dominant topics, instead, were inflation and energy. "What specific steps do the President and Congress plan to take about inflation?" asked Selig Bernstein of Chatham. The shirt-sleeved Senator drew chuckles by replying: "If I were king and I controlled the world, inflation would be easy."

Tony Austin, a Cape fisherman, wanted to know whether the oil companies and the Government were telling the truth about the reasons for the high cost of oil. A woman broke in to declare: "We don't believe the Federal Government." When the crowd applauded, she added: "And the oil companies are beyond the pale." Austin rejoined the dialogue, insisting: "If diesel oil gets to $1.25, we fishermen will go broke." Tsongas answered by launching into a lecture about powerful lobbies in Washington.

The town's financial committee chairman Sheldon Thayer said that even the upper-middle-class residents in the area resent paying 84-c- a gallon for fuel oil and well recall the recent gas lines. Then he voiced another recurring theme. "People are disgusted with big big Government. On the local level we keep running into state and federal regulations. We're told we can't do this, we can't do that." He noted that Harwich (pop. 10,000) recently tried to get federal funds to build a jetty but was told it must first finance a study of prevailing wind directions. Complained Thayer: "We knew which way the winds blew, but we had to spend $7,500 of the taxpayers' money to find out what we already knew."

> Democrat William Gray, a black Baptist minister and Representative from Philadelphia's Second District, sat at a battered wooden desk as he talked to visitors in his blue-walled, newly renovated office. He leaned across his desk and took notes on his constituents' complaints. Four youth leaders sitting on mustard yellow chairs pleaded for more federally subsidized programs to create jobs for urban young people. Argued Curtis Jones, 22, a former West Philadelphia gang member: "It's no longer a matter of careers that young people are talking about. They are just waiting to get old enough to collect welfare. There is a hopelessness there that scares me." Wholly sympathetic, the Congressman predicted candidly that adult unemployment in his district may rise as high as 20% and that it could soar to nearly 80% among minority young people.

> As Republican Congressman Silvio O. Conte worked his district in western Massachusetts, he admitted that his meetings with voters often depressed him. "These sessions are very draining for me, and I often head right home for a double bourbon," he said. Yet he listened patiently as people with problems trooped into his office in Holyoke, waiting like dental patients in an outer reception room before facing him across a desk.

Three women from South Hadley asked Conte's support in combating hunger around the world, including an affirmative vote on a bill to set aside U.S. grain reserves for use against famine abroad. Mark Sugrue, a woodcutter, wanted more federal and state lands opened to "intelligent professional harvesting" of trees as a partial answer to energy shortages.

But the high point of Conte's day was the regular visit from Frank Jones, 86, a veteran of two wars and resident of the Holyoke Soldiers Home. As always, Jones slammed his cowboy hat on the table, wielded his silver filigreed pipe like a dagger and railed against "the total lack of attention to the Viet Nam veteran. They are the forgotten American soldiers. What the Government has done for them is nothing." Explained Jones as he left Conte's office: "I come in every time he's here and I just wear him down until he gives me what I want just to get rid of me. Just like water on stone, water on stone."

> Democratic Congressman Morris Udall sat for three hours in a stark, bare-walled community center in a Mexican-American section of Tucson, hearing out the residents of the neighborhood, most of them poor. They, too, were worried about the high cost of fuel. Late in the afternoon, two of them presented their own ideas of what might be done, on a small scale, to reduce the problem. First, an elderly white-haired man, trembling with Parkinson's disease, spread frayed and crumpled papers on the table in front of Udall. They contained his rough proposal for a steam engine that could power an automobile. Pleaded the petitioner: "I only need someone who can draw up the plans for me. Is there someone in the Government who can do that, Mr. Udall? The Chrysler company could go into something like this, you know." Udall solemnly promised to see if he could enlist the help of a Government designer.

Finally E.M. Henry, a local physicist specializing in solar energy, made a strong plea for federal support of practical systems to apply solar research. Then he gave the Congressman a solar-powered music box. Udall took it outside, held it up in the receding sunlight--and the box broke into a familiar tune: You Are My Sunshine.

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