Looking forward to ’88: Here’s how Democratic presidential hopefuls have done since February, according to Arthur Finkelstein poll: Gary Hart up 4.2 points, to 27.9 per cent; Mario Cuomo down 2.5, to 12.6 per cent; Jesse Jackson up 4.2, to 10.6 per cent; Sen. Bill Bradley up 5.1 (following vote on Packwood-Bradley tax bill), to 8.2 per cent. . . . How do they stack up in Iowa and New Hampshire, the first major ’88 battlefields? Brad Bannon poll (N.H.) gives Hart 42 per cent, Mass. Gov. Michael Dukakis 27 per cent, Cuomo 16 per cent, former Va. Gov. Charles Robb 2 per cent. In Iowa (Des Moines Register), it’s Hart 44 per cent, Cuomo 24 per cent, with Jesse Jackson and Bill Bradley tied at 2 per cent. . . . Meanwhile, Evans & Novak report that both Cuomo and Joseph Biden have let it be known they won’t negotiate with Jesse Jackson, as Mondale tried to do in 1984. “The perceived wisdom inside the Democratic Party,” says E&N, “is that you can’t do business with Jackson.” . . . Charles Robb’s star is on the rise: Victor Lasky, in American Politics cover piece titled “The Man Who Could Be King,” suggests Robb should be taken seriously as presidential rather than vice-presidential candidate. . . . On Republican side, the Finkelstein poll finds George Bush up 2 points since February, to 46.4 per cent; Jack Kemp up 1.3, to 6.6 per cent; Bob Dole about the same, 7.3 per cent; Howard Baker down 2.7, to 5.2 per cent. … In New Hampshire, conservative former Gov. Meldrim Thomson has come out for fundamentalist Pat Robertson, says he believes Robertson will win New Hampshire primary. . . . Newcomer to Republican lists, former Delaware Gov. Pierre du Pont, is pitching for conservative support. He supports vouchers not only in the schools, but also for Medicare patients; deregulation; private-sector development —in sum, the Reagan program. . . . How’s the present resident of the White House doing? He topped the 70 per cent approval mark right after Fourth of July hoopla in Richard Wirthlin poll, getting an astonishing 82 per cent approval rating from young people.
Daniel Ortega has managed, by the expulsion of Bishop Pablo Antonio Vega, to do something no one thought possible: to convince the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops that the Church is under attack in Nicaragua. “The bishops of the United States,” says Father Daniel Hoye, general secretary of the USCCB, “stand in solidarity with Cardinal Obando and his colleagues in the church of Nicaragua.” . . . U.S. Ambassador to the UN Gen. Vernon Walters points out that 11 of the 15 judges of the World Court, who recently condemned the U.S. for aggressive actions in Nicaragua, come from nations that reserve the right to refuse the Court’s jurisdiction. . . . The International League for Human Rights in New York has brought out devastating 162-page report on human-rights violations in Nicaragua. Among its findings: that strikes are forbidden and that all seven directors of a major independent labor union are in jail. … It was findings of this sort that convinced three recent congressional visitors, Reps. Olympia Snowe (R., Me.), Albert Bustamante (D., Tex.), and Richard Ray (D., Ga.), to change sides on Contra aid. . . . The Communist People’s Daily World headline on closing of La Prensa and exiling of Catholic clerics read: after CONTRA VOTE, NICARAGUA MOVES TO DEFEND REVOLUTION. . . . Across the world, in Moscow, Soviet authorities picked up Dr. Yuri Medvedkov of the peacenik Moscow Trust Group and threw him in jail for ten days on charges of “hooliganism” lest he try to preach peace to spectators and contestants at Ted Turner’s Goodwill Games. . . . And South Korea, which fears above all that something will bollix up its 1988 Olympics, has cravenly banned Rocky IV “as not in the interest of international reconciliation.”
Comments