Letter from Washington

Damn! That’s the post-Watergate morality for you: you don’t even get what you paid for out of politics. Democrat John Durkin had been New Hampshire’s junior senator for just three hours when he cast his first vote. He voted to support President Ford’s proposal to cut a federal pay raise from 8.66 per cent to 5 per cent. The Ford proposal was ardently opposed by organized labor, which had poured tons of money and regiments of workers into the Durkin election campaign. Said an AFL-CIO lobbyist: “This is going to make an awful lot of people who worked their tails off for him very mad indeed. That’s some show of gratitude.”

New Hampshire still has the distinction of holding the first primary, but it is a devalued distinction. One week after New Hampshire awards 17 delegates to one or more of the mob of candidates, Massachusetts, next door, will award 104 delegates. Because most residents of New Hampshire watch Boston television, and many read Boston newspapers, there is a tendency to treat the two primaries together as a slow-motion, two-step single primary. Whoever wins in New Hampshire may acquire valuable momentum for Massachusetts. This is the not-so-hidden hazard in Senator Birch Bayh’s (D., Ind.) tentative plan to skip New Hampshire, thereby leaving Representative Morris Udall (D., Ariz.) alone—and vulnerable—as the “frontrunning” liberal in the New Hampshire contest.

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Damn! That’s the post-Watergate morality for you: you don’t even get what you paid for out of politics. Democrat John Durkin had been New Hampshire’s junior senator for just three hours when he cast his first vote. He voted to support President Ford’s proposal to cut a federal pay raise from 8.66 per cent to 5 per cent. The Ford proposal was ardently opposed by organized labor, which had poured tons of money and regiments of workers into the Durkin election campaign. Said an AFL-CIO lobbyist: “This is going to make an awful lot of people who worked their tails off for him very mad indeed. That’s some show of gratitude.”

New Hampshire still has the distinction of holding the first primary, but it is a devalued distinction. One week after New Hampshire awards 17 delegates to one or more of the mob of candidates, Massachusetts, next door, will award 104 delegates. Because most residents of New Hampshire watch Boston television, and many read Boston newspapers, there is a tendency to treat the two primaries together as a slow-motion, two-step single primary. Whoever wins in New Hampshire may acquire valuable momentum for Massachusetts. This is the not-so-hidden hazard in Senator Birch Bayh’s (D., Ind.) tentative plan to skip New Hampshire, thereby leaving Representative Morris Udall (D., Ariz.) alone—and vulnerable—as the “frontrunning” liberal in the New Hampshire contest.