The Mayagüez incident hasn’t totally dissipated conservative criticism of Gerald Ford. At Washington meeting last week of so-called St. Michael’s Group, Senators Buckley, Helms, and McClure, and GOP Congressmen Ashbrook (Ohio), Bauman and Holt (Md.), Lott (Miss.), and Crane (Ill.), plus other conservative leaders (NR Publisher William A. Rusher, ACU Chairman M. Stanton Evans, influential Mississippi Republican State Chairman Clarke Reed), came out for an open convention in 1976 since, they said, “neither the President nor the Vice President was elected to office.” . . . The new Conservative Digest—that’s a Richard Viguerie operation and Viguerie is George Wallace’s direct mail money man—reports its poll of its own readers shows that 91 per cent hope Ford won’t run again, 71 per cent think Ford is doing a poor job. . . . South Carolina’s Governor James Edwards— the first GOP governor in that state since Reconstruction—says if Ford doesn’t drop Rockefeller as his running mate, then he “can write me off.” When Edwards was asked if he would join a “dump Rockefeller” move at the convention he replied that he hoped it wouldn’t be necessary. The South Carolina governor stopped just this side of giving his endorsement to Ronald Reagan.
On the Democratic side, National Chairman Robert Strauss has said what no one has wanted to think about, that George Wallace will arrive at the convention with between 30 per cent and 40 per cent of the delegates. “If he doesn’t end up on the ticket,” says Strauss, “we are in for massive defections.” . . . Sargent Shriver, who doesn’t seem to know when he’s been steamrollered—he was No. 2 man on the McGovern ticket—has the bug, says his friends are urging him to run for President, and admits that none of the friends he is talking about are important political leaders, which would presumably exclude pressure to run from brother-in-law Teddy Kennedy. Kennedy, Shriver now says, might run if his “family situation changed” between now and convention time.
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