On the Frosted Campaign Trail

By Hugh Sidey

Out in Iowa, Ted Kennedy is not so bad a performer as his Eastern drama critics make out. He has his bad days and hours, his dismal speeches, his tangled syntax. But traveling along the frosted campaign trail in those wide spaces, one can pick up echoes of some of the old magic from John and Bob.

Ted is a presence. When he arrived outside the Perry city hall one morning last week, the small shock wave of anticipation that precedes an energetic personality reached the corners of the stuffy meeting before the candidate did. Young women shifted, craned, raised themselves to tiptoe. Wisecracking high school students shut up. Then a little of the Kennedy legend walked through the door. There was impact. He looked presidential in his dark blue suit, so much in contrast with the work-clothed audience. He was polite, deferential, but very much in charge. Things are out of control at home and abroad, he fairly shouted, pumping the air in that familiar Kennedy gesture, fingers folded, thumb on top. Brow furrowed, age and care showing deeply in the youngest Kennedy face, he went quickly to questions. "Yes, you ... in the red shirt," he half commanded. The smile had sparkle, but there was the hint of Irish toughness behind it.

In Boone a midmorning slump had hit him and some of his power waned. He gave rambling answers to questions about the Soviets and about abortion. But his adrenaline was pumping again among Iowa State University students in Ames. His speech was good, though undistinguished; a firm call for a restoration of America's control over its own destiny. There was an impatience about Ted Kennedy, as if he were rushing away from the past into a dangerous but strangely exhilarating future. Something calling him. It is clear he does not have the depth and breadth of intellect of John.

Ted's answers do not have the rich mix of history, fact and humor that J.F.K.'s years of reading produced. Nor does Ted possess the genuine interest in his surroundings that Bob carried everywhere. Ted is vaguely indifferent to Iowa, a state that takes learning to love. Yet, all things considered, Kennedy is up to the family tradition in political performance. He could have held his own in 1960 or 1968.

Therein may be his real problem. Kennedy is not up against Wayne Morse or Gene McCarthy or, for that matter, Richard Nixon. Nor is he performing in an experimental and not quite matured communications environment. Indeed, television may be one reason why America tends to disparage all the men running for President. They are very good in this bizarre world of show-business politics--and there are a lot of them. But they also have become electronically (meaning superficially) well known to their audiences. In such a crowded and intense drama, nobody really stands strikingly above the others.

The murmured comments in the rooms before and after Kennedy appeared revealed that the Republican debate of the previous Saturday had a remarkable impact on the audience. It seemed that every person had watched it. Some of those Iowans liked Philip Crane's fast, hard answer against the grain embargo better than Ted Kennedy's hesitant objection. Moreover, the Crane jaw was just as finely formed and the hair was equally abundant. John Anderson's eloquent appeal for compassionate government had more fact and fervor than did Teddy's. Anderson's endorsement of the grain embargo, while not liked by those folks, nevertheless set him up as a more creditable figure than Kennedy.

While Teddy may not have realized it, he was battling far more than Carter. He was contending against an entire wide screen filled with articulate and forceful Republicans, television's insistent commentators and an audience that considered itself part of the action, not mere spectators. A lot of those farmers came to the rallies with their FM radios tuned to hear Chicago commodity markets and news about Jimmy Carter and Leonid Brezhnev. For Ted Kennedy, winning attention, let alone devotion, is a job bigger than that faced by his brothers.

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