Free, Vital

Free, Vital Capitol Issues GEORGE F. WILL Perhaps an economic crisis is beginning. If so, Republicans running for office in 1976 may look back on 1974 as a relatively good year. For now, some Republicans are already soothing themselves in. anticipation of the unhappiness sure to come on November 5. They are saying that a wholesale slaughter of Republicans this year might not be .an unmixed curse because the electoral pendulum has a way of swinging back two years after a debacle. For example, in 1964 a lot of Republican candidates drowned in the anti-Goldwater tide, but in 1966 the electorate made amends by serving up a good Republican year. But such talk is just political whistling by the graveyard. There are some freshly dug graves in that yard waiting for occupants, and it is instructive to look at two candidates for burial there. Peter Dominick, the senior senator from Colorado, is seeking a third term. With his silver hair and his manner of a well born and gently reared patrician, he looks like a senator. But he looks like a tired senator. He had a heart attack a few years ago, and recently was hospitalized for treatment of an ailing back. Before Nixon resigned, Dominick was resigned—if that is the right word-—to the necessity of doing little or no campaigning this fall. He had found that when he talked to the folks back home in colorful Colorado, all they wanted to do was pepper him with colorful questions and remarks about Watergate. So Dominick decided —rather more eagerly than he let on, I think—that he should stay off the stump to preserve his standing as an uncommitted “juror” in the forthcoming Senate impeachment trial. By late July Dominick seemed strangely content about the forthcoming trial’s forcing him to spare himself the rigors of a campaign. Unfortunately for Dominick, his opponent, Gary Hart, does not lack energy. Hart was national campaign manager for George McGovern in 1971-72 and it would be fun to dismiss him as the architect of the McGovern sweep of Massachusetts and the District of Columbia. But Hart has Dominick on the defensive. As chairman of the Republican Senate Campaign Committee a few years ago, Dominick, not surprisingly, dealt—as everyone once dealt —with the generous milk lobby; and Hart, even before he won the Democratic nomination in a rugged three-way primary, was hammering away at the alleged impropriety. Dominick has repeatedly and convincingly denied wrongdoing, but the important point is that he has had to waste much time and energy denying things. Dominick is an honest man, but you do not inspire campaign Volunteers by asserting, however truthfully, that you are not a crook. Dominick has fewer volunteers than he would need in a normal year, against a normal opponent, and this is not a normal year for Republicans; and Hart has an abnormal skill at marshaling and deploying volunteers: he was the real architect of the McGovern volunteer movement that blew the other 1972 Democratic presidential candidates out of the primaries. Even before he won Colorado’s September primary, Hart was using a poster featuring a big picture of Nixon and Dominick, grinning, with their hands clasped together, aloft. Unfair? Sure-—sort of. But Dominick is an easy victim of guilt by association because he never seriously tried to dissociate himself from Nixon. Oh, last winter he gave a speech in Denver saying that Nixon should be forthcoming, etc., and he felt very proud and brave for having said that. But that was the extent of his public display of independence. Public independence is not a Republican forte. Because he had doubts about Spiro Agnew’s capabilities, Dominick actually got-himself admitted to the Oval Office before the 1972 Republican Convention. Once inside, he urged Nixon to drop Agnew from the ticket. Nixon jumped straight up out of his chair; Dominick, his duty done, went straight back to Capitol Hill. And he never uttered a public syllable about his doubts concerning Agnew’s. fitness. Next door to Colorado, Kansas’ senior senator, Robert Dole, is behind in his fight for a second term. He is losing to Congressman William Roy, who got the Democratic nomination when a Kansas scandal tarnished a state Democrat who, untarnished, would have been an even tougher opponent than Roy has become; Dole entered the Senate when Nixon entered the White House and his fierce support for Nixon’s policies caused Nixon to name him Republican National Chairman in 1971, a post he held during the 1972 election; Having prospered as a Nixon man, he suffered when it became clear that it was no longer a good thing to be a Nixon man. But he suffered in silence. Oh, in private he was witty, acerbic, independent; candid about Nixon and his men. But the thing about private remarks is that they do not seep out to the electorate. So, one member of the Kansas electorate, speaking for many, now says: “Dole is honest, I guess, but he’s a Nixon man and people don’t believe him any more.” One of Roy’s campaign lines is that a, vote against Dole “is the closest thing to voting against Nixon that any of us will have the opportunity to do.” This is sleazy stuff and Dole, who thinks this is unfair, has a point—up to a point. Roy is being tricky with Dole’s record regarding Nixon, but Dole’s response to Watergate—public silence, private candor— was a bib tricky. Republicans in Colorado and Kansas and elsewhere are dispirited and they need a reason to support their Party’s candidates. In Vermont, in his first political speech since becoming President, Gerald Ford took a stab at giving them a reason. He urged Vermonters to vote Republican to save the two-party system: “We need two strong parties-—free, vital; and broad enough to take under their wings a wide spectrum of opinion——to serve as the twin pillars of democracy.” In other words, Mr. Ford says people should vote Republican because if one of the major parties is decimated, only one part will be left undecimated. And free, vital, etc. 1222 NATIONAL REVIEWE