■ The Democratic scenario next year as National Chairman Robert Strauss sees it: The early primaries will knock out all but five or six of the Democratic aspirants; by convention time only two or three will have enough strength seriously to contest the presidential nomination. This means, says Strauss, that it won’t be a stalemated convention: he doesn’t see Humphrey, Kennedy, or Muskie as the winner. . . . Other juicy tidbits from Chairman Strauss: 1) He was “shocked” to see how well George Wallace looked recently. 2) President Ford is talking about Rockefeller these days “the same way FDR did about Henry Wallace” before FDR dropped Wallace from the ticket in ’44. . . . The scenario as Big Labor saw it at the AFL-CIO convention in San Francisco. “We think it will go to three or four ballots. Things will be confused and then the convention will almost inevitably turn to Humphrey,” said a Meany aide. . . . Other AFL-CIO leaders say Labor will support any Democratic candidate (except Wallace or McGovern) next year because Labor “needs the Supreme Court and Ford will turn it into a 1920s court if we give him until 1980.” . . . A Christian Science Monitor team, sounding out Democratic preferences in the Midwest, finds that only George Wallace is well known there; Jackson comes next among the candidates, and Birch Bayh is a poor third. . . . Wallace is now expected to announce the second week of November; his first major address will be in busing-torn Boston.
■ New York Times reports one presidential aide as saying that “if Reagan wins both [New Hampshire and Florida] primaries or comes very close then he’s viable into the convention. If we beat him in both, then it’s over for him.” . . . F. Clifton White is quoted as saying that Ford could lose both earlier primaries (N.H. and Mass.) and still stay in the race because of the “power and substance of the Presidency itself.” . . . YAF, incidentally, has now given its official backing to Reagan, according to newly elected chairman Jeffrey Kane. . . . And there are reports that Ambassador (to London) Elliot Richardson, a victim of the Saturday Night Massacre, may take a leave of absence next year to come home and campaign for Gerald Ford. . . . Barry Goldwater will be commenting on the Democratic convention in NYC next July for ABC, and George McGovern will do the same for the Republicans in Kansas City. (The idea originally was to have the 1972 candidates perform, but, as the delicately worded story goes, “Mr. Nixon, the Republican nominee in 1972 . . . was assumed to be unavailable and never got an approach.”)
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