70 Year Magazine Archive

For the Record

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■ So far so good. In early June, Evans & Novak say if elections were held today Reagan would get 326 electoral votes to 212 for Carter, zero for Anderson. . . . The Christian Science Monitor’s top man in Washington, Godfrey Sperling Jr., wonders whether Carter is wise in debating Reagan. Sperling says Reagan showed up very well in debates with two masters, Robert Kennedy and Wm. F. Buckley Jr. (Panama Canal), thinks Carter may “rue the day” he agreed. . . . Carter still heads Reagan, if narrowly, in most polls, but when Gallup asked about Democratic alternatives the answer was: Reagan, 48 to 39 per cent over Fritz Mondale and 52 to 37 per cent over Teddy Kennedy. . . . Gerald Ford’s endorsement of Reagan has done much to appease moderate wing of party. . . . Last week, Rep. Barber Conable (N.Y.) and 22 other congressmen who had backed George Bush switched to Reagan and immediately urged Reagan to pick Bush as his running-mate. . . . Alan Baron, writing from the liberal Democratic angle, believes Bush is first among probable VP candidates, Ford second (he probably wouldn’t accept), and Howard Baker third (but that would mean a fight with New Right-Right to Life forces). Says Baron: if Rep. Jack Kemp, Sen. Richard Lugar, or former Treasury Secretary Bill Simon gets it, it will mean “the New Right has veto power in the Reagan campaign.”

■ Major worry for Carterites: will Raymond Harding, the ambitious new leader of New York’s dwindling Liberal Party, throw his party’s support to John Anderson? If that happens, say Washington insiders, New York could go to Reagan and so could the nation. . . . Look for Carter to move sharply Left in an attempt to win back the groups he must have to win: blacks and Hispanics, organized labor, the welfare constituency, and, at the other end of the economic scale, middle-class liberals and the Jews. . . . Not much chance that Carter will make the November 4 election a referendum between detente and the renewed cold war, as Sen. George McGovern is urging. McGovern, Sec. and ex-Sec. of State Muskie and Vance, and others are trying to bring up SALT II in the Senate again, but Majority Leader Robert Byrd, a man who knows where the votes are, says not a chance in this session.

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