Nothing to shout about for the Republicans on election day 1979. They lost both gubernatorial races, to John Brown in Kentucky, to William Winter in Mississippi; might have picked up one. . . . Many familiar names in the mayoral contests. Peck’s Bad Boy, Dennis Kucinich, finally pushed the people of Cleveland too far; they dumped him in favor of Republican George Voinovich. … In Philadelphia former U.S. Attorney David Marston ran against former Congressman William Green. Green, the Democrat, won. (Remember Marston? he had a moment in the national limelight when Carter Justice Department fired him during an investigation of Democratic corruption in Philly.) . . . The indestructible Kevin White made it to a fourth term in racetorn Boston, and, in Minneapolis, former very liberal Rep. Donald Fraser beat independent Charles Stenvig for mayor. That could mean a comeback for Hubert Humphrey’s shattered Democratic-Farm-Labor Party, which lost two (2) U.S. Senate seats in 1978. . . . What the Republicans didn’t do, taxpayers did: By and large they were successful in attempts to cut or tamp down state spending, picking and choosing their way carefully among bond issues. Most important victory was in California, where Paul Gann’s Prop. 4 passed going away. By and large it is designed to limit increased government spending to the inflation rate (see “The Week”). . . . California also passed a complicated anti-busing measure that will bear on L.A. busing.
The assumption is that, having entered the race, Edward Kennedy will now paddle Right and obscure his big-spending, big-government image. But how is he going about it? By surrounding himself with Left ideologues, many of them key wheeler-dealers of the McGovern 1972 campaign. Morris Dees, McGovern’s talented direct-mail fund-raiser, has turned down a bid to join Kennedy; so has Moynihan staffer Martin Katz, another McGovern fund-raising veteran. Katz predicts they will spend $16 million in the “six months of the primary campaign.” . . . Ben Wattenberg, the sparkplug of the Committee for a Democratic Majority— founded by centrist Democrats in 1972 to try to rescue the party from McGovernism—is worried. He warns that if “the Democratic Party candidate turns a cold shoulder to CDM principles [he could lose] millions of American voters.” . . . AP poll of Democratic Party chairmen around the country a fortnight before Kennedy made it official shows the politicos are still suspicious of him. They said they preferred Carter to Kennedy by a better than 2 to 1 vote (1,233 to 574). . . .
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