For the Record

The great re-alignment debate continues: Is it or ain’t it in the cards? Democratic pollster Peter Hart, looking over polls by both parties, says: “The data show that the days of Democratic dominance are over.” . . . That’s how Kevin Phillips reads the situation: What is going on, he says, is “de-alignment . . . the destruction of the old New Deal Democratic presidential coalition.” . . . Agreed, says David Broder, but how are the Democrats going to beat the Republicans’ proposition that, “reduced to basics, is: Get rid of government, get it off our backs,” so long as their response remains: “Expand government at every opportunity, especially at the federal level”? . . . Norman Podhoretz believes Republican resurgence pre-dated Reagan. It started in 1972, he says, “when the McGovern Left took over the Democratic Party.” Phillips dates it to 1968, when the South largely deserted the Democrats and split between Republicans and the third-party candidate, George Wallace. . . . How went Operation Open Door, the major GOP drive to get 100,000 Democrats to switch parties in four states (Louisiana, North Carolina, Florida, Pennsylvania)? So-so. Republican National Chairman Frank Fahrenkopf Jr. says 54,000 Democrats have re-registered as Republicans in those states, and claims victory; the Dems predictably are playing it as huge GOP defeat. . . . Former Jimmy Carter chief of staff Hamilton Jordan, hard at work on a book on Democratic Party, says it is “out of step with the mood of the country.”

Bully for Sens. William Cohen (R., Me.) and Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D., N.Y.). On recent trip to Peking, Cohen pointedly told authorities the U.S. was committed to Taiwan, its security, its way of life, its freedom of choice in the way it is governed. And Moynihan asked his hosts how come Red China voted with the U.S. only 14 per cent of the time in the UN, with the Soviet Union 85 per cent of the time. . . . And bully for Sen. Patrick Leahy (D., Vt.), who calls for legislation limiting the number of Soviet diplomats in the U.S. to the number of American diplomats at the U.S. Embassy in Moscow. . . . Reed Irvine, not content with bedeviling the media (Accuracy in Media), is setting up parallel operation, headed by former Foreign Service Officer Malcolm Lawrence, to monitor Marxist instruction on the nation’s campuses (Accuracy in Academia). … In the communications field, former Reagan Director of Communications David Gergen will be managing editor of Morton Zuckerman’s newly acquired U.S. News & World Report. . . . Norman Lear (People for the American Way, Archie Bunker) wants to buy the conservative Detroit News. … In New York, the Tribune, started as News World by Rev. Moon’s Unification Church in 1976, has suspended publication (they say until January), but that won’t affect its sister paper in Washington, the Washington Times, says Times’s editor-in-chief, Arnaud de Borchgrave.

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The great re-alignment debate continues: Is it or ain’t it in the cards? Democratic pollster Peter Hart, looking over polls by both parties, says: “The data show that the days of Democratic dominance are over.” . . . That’s how Kevin Phillips reads the situation: What is going on, he says, is “de-alignment . . . the destruction of the old New Deal Democratic presidential coalition.” . . . Agreed, says David Broder, but how are the Democrats going to beat the Republicans’ proposition that, “reduced to basics, is: Get rid of government, get it off our backs,” so long as their response remains: “Expand government at every opportunity, especially at the federal level”? . . . Norman Podhoretz believes Republican resurgence pre-dated Reagan. It started in 1972, he says, “when the McGovern Left took over the Democratic Party.” Phillips dates it to 1968, when the South largely deserted the Democrats and split between Republicans and the third-party candidate, George Wallace. . . . How went Operation Open Door, the major GOP drive to get 100,000 Democrats to switch parties in four states (Louisiana, North Carolina, Florida, Pennsylvania)? So-so. Republican National Chairman Frank Fahrenkopf Jr. says 54,000 Democrats have re-registered as Republicans in those states, and claims victory; the Dems predictably are playing it as huge GOP defeat. . . . Former Jimmy Carter chief of staff Hamilton Jordan, hard at work on a book on Democratic Party, says it is “out of step with the mood of the country.”

Bully for Sens. William Cohen (R., Me.) and Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D., N.Y.). On recent trip to Peking, Cohen pointedly told authorities the U.S. was committed to Taiwan, its security, its way of life, its freedom of choice in the way it is governed. And Moynihan asked his hosts how come Red China voted with the U.S. only 14 per cent of the time in the UN, with the Soviet Union 85 per cent of the time. . . . And bully for Sen. Patrick Leahy (D., Vt.), who calls for legislation limiting the number of Soviet diplomats in the U.S. to the number of American diplomats at the U.S. Embassy in Moscow. . . . Reed Irvine, not content with bedeviling the media (Accuracy in Media), is setting up parallel operation, headed by former Foreign Service Officer Malcolm Lawrence, to monitor Marxist instruction on the nation’s campuses (Accuracy in Academia). … In the communications field, former Reagan Director of Communications David Gergen will be managing editor of Morton Zuckerman’s newly acquired U.S. News & World Report. . . . Norman Lear (People for the American Way, Archie Bunker) wants to buy the conservative Detroit News. … In New York, the Tribune, started as News World by Rev. Moon’s Unification Church in 1976, has suspended publication (they say until January), but that won’t affect its sister paper in Washington, the Washington Times, says Times’s editor-in-chief, Arnaud de Borchgrave.