- TIME
Among the nation’s political races, some, by reason of the stakes involved, or the personalities engaged, are particularly significant. Four of these critical contests are revisited by TIME on election eve, following an assessment earlier in the campaign (Oct. 21).
New York
JAVITS v. CLARK The politics of antipolitics has reached a kind of perfection in the New York senatorial race. Democratic Candidate Ramsey Clark, 46, is doing everything a candidate is not supposed to do. Whenever possible he does not avoid a stand on a controversial issue—he takes it. Instead of giving a long-winded, inconclusive answer to a provocative question he offers a resolute “Yup” or “Nope.” In fashion-conscious Manhattan, he would make anybody’s list of worst-dressed candidates of the year. Often he wears a jacket that is either worn or torn and rarely matches his denim trousers, a threadbare tie that he bought for $1 in 1967 and Hush Puppies. His campaign style is in keeping with his dress. He is not surrounded by pollsters and media consultants. From all conventional appearances, Clark is scarcely running for office.
Yet he must be doing something right, for he is giving Republican Incumbent Jacob K. Javits, 70, the toughest contest of his 18 years in the Senate.
Javits admits he is running “scared” and he might add “bewildered.” Always taking a moderate-to-liberal position, Javits has knit together a far-flung constituency of largely Jewish voters in New York City and upstate conservatives who have found him safe on economic issues. As the ranking Republican on the Senate Labor and Public Welfare Committee, he has played a key role in shepherding some of the major legislation of recent years through Congress.
With consistent skill and forcefulness, but with a knack for compromising at the right moment, he has led the fight for bills for aid to education, consumer protection, liberal trade policies, pension reform and restriction of the President’s warmaking powers. Legislative aides have voted him the second most effective Senator (after Democrat Henry M. Jackson) and the most intelligent. But in the aftermath of Watergate, his virtues have the appearance of vices to some outraged citizens. A cautious, scrupulous politician, he rarely speaks out on an issue until he has absorbed all the facts. He was not a perfervid critic of Nixon during Watergate, and on occasion defended the beleaguered President. For this reason, he is sometimes portrayed as a political trimmer without sufficient principle at a time when ethical purity seems to be valued above everything else.
Into this void has stepped, Hush Puppies and all, Ramsey Clark. Ever since he resigned as U.S. Attorney General in the Johnson Administration, Clark has sought out one liberal cause after another. He has championed Eskimos and Indians, the Berrigan brothers and the Attica rebels, New York Detective Frank Serpico and vanishing wildlife. There is a joke on the liberal co*cktail circuit that if Clark were told that the “nauga” was an endangered species, he would demand a ban on the sale of Naugahyde furniture. He seemed to be too much of a causemonger for even cause-prone New Yorkers, and his candidacy was laughed off. Then he handily won the Democratic primary, and the laughing stopped.
Even though he put a $100 ceiling on campaign contributions, Clark has raised an impressive $358,320, as compared with Javits’ $680,000. So much money is unexpectedly coming in—from small contributors and conceivably from some big ones who have spread their funds among friends—that Clark has enlisted an additional ten volunteers just to count it and sort it out. He had originally planned no spot television commercials because he did not think it was “possible to discuss something in 30 seconds.” But last week he changed his mind and started making tapes for the windup of the campaign.
Feeling the pressure, Javits sharpened his attack last week by charging that Clark had been “exploited” by the Communists when he made his celebrated trip to Hanoi in 1972. At a press conference, Javits read a letter from a former P.O.W. stating that a tape made of Clark’s remarks in Hanoi had been a “harmful blow to our morale.” Clark, wrote the P.O.W., had encouraged prisoners in their “cooperation with the enemy in generating antiwar statements.” Clark’s position was especially “devastating” to those who had been put in solitary confinement and were trying to maintain their allegiance to their country. In reply, Clark accused Javits of an “orgy of McCarthyism.”
Javits faces not only the threat of Clark on his left but a Conservative Party candidate, Barbara Keating, 36, on his right. If he loses enough votes at both ends of the political spectrum, he could be in serious trouble even though he continues to lead Clark by a few percentage points.
Kansas DOLE v. ROY Kansas is one state where the G.O.P. incumbent may be saved by a Watergate backlash. At least he is doing his best to help it along. In mid-October, Senator Robert J. Dole, 5 1 , was hard to recognize in his TV spots.
His face was either covered with crayon scrawlings or splattered with mud. It was his rather startling way of telling voters that he was being unfairly tarred with Watergate by supporters of his opponent, Congressman William R. Roy, 48. Many viewers apparently agreed with the message, and Dole caught up with Roy in the polls. The spots, Roy grudgingly concedes, have “to a degree turned Dole into a Watergate martyr or hero.”
Whether Dole can completely escape the taint of Watergate and Washington is the crucial question. For there is no doubt that the transgressions of Nixon & Co. are hurting his chances in a state which, if substantially Republican, is also highly moral in its outlook.
So, muting his usual wisecracking, Dole dashed through 26 counties in the first two weeks of October, assuring voters that his heart belongs to Kansas and not to Washington. He has also spent more money than any other senatorial candidate in state history—$708,392 since the first of the year as compared with Roy’s $461,739. A plainspoken, genially combative obstetrician to the political left of Dole, Roy has tried to make a campaign issue of his opponent’s campaign spending. Dole retorts that Roy has received $100,000 from organized labor in a state where a right-to-work law is supported by an overwhelming majority of the voters.
California BROWN v. FLOURNOY In another year, facing an opponent with a less familiar name, Houston I. (“Hugh”) Flournoy, 45, might have been a different candidate in a different kind of race.
But in 1974, he has trouble arousing excitement in the electorate. “There hasn’t been a passionate issue in this campaign,” he declares. Nor does he display much passion himself except in infrequent face-to-face encounters with Edmund G. (“Jerry”) Brown Jr., 36, in which he emerges as a match for the front runner. “Sometimes I wish I had an electric prod,” says a Flournoy staffer. “Hugh is so good. But he comes on like Sominex.”
His campaign style is leisurely, relaxed, almost diffident. “I don’t have anything against passion,” explains the former political science professor. “I just happen to be more committed to reason as a basis on which campaigns ought to be fought.” Last week he invaded politically hostile territory: a medical center in Watts. Dutifully following the guided tour, he was wary of seizing many hands. Asked why he did not take the opportunity to press more flesh, he shrugged: “The patients were there for medical care, not political therapy.”
Avoiding far-right positions on crime or welfare, he conceives of himself as a moderate Republican in the tradition of former Governor Earl Warren; he calls for a state land-use plan and a full-time state air-pollution control board. But the G.O.P. base in California has considerably contracted under the impact of Watergate. Flournoy has had to devote much of the campaign to separating his own candidacy from the national party, while Brown continues to link the two. In one of his television spots, Flournoy tells viewers: “My name is Houston Flournoy. Houston Flournoy.
I repeat my name because Jerry Brown seems to be running against Ronald Reagan and Richard Nixon.”
Brown, meanwhile, is coasting to what he expects to be an easy victory in November. Still well ahead in the polls, he schedules almost no appearances before noon. Last week he was once again ignoring Flournoy as he attacked more inviting targets. With puritan outrage, he assailed as a modern-day Taj Mahal the new $1.3 million Governor’s mansion that is being built at the same time that Reagan vetoed a $500 million housing bond issue. Flournoy supported the housing program, but his moderate views on the issues—not very far removed from Brown’s—are all but lost in the general revulsion against Republicanism.
Tennessee
ALEXANDER v. BLANTON If Republican Lamar Alexander, 34, is worried about trailing Democrat Leonard Ray Blanton, 44, in the Tennessee gubernatorial race, he is the last one to show concern. Seasoned political observers are scratching their heads over his studied coolness in the face of possible defeat. But they figured that he must know what he is doing. He managed the successful campaigns of both Senator Howard Baker and Governor Winfield Dunn. Two weeks before Alexander won the primary for Governor, he was considered to be running a poor third. His forte is catching up.
A last-minute Republican rally appears to be in the making. The big G.O.P. guns have begun to fire for the first time in the campaign. Baker, the most popular politician in Tennessee, is stumping Republican territory in eastern Tennessee and is taping television spots. Senator William E. Brock III is campaigning in Chattanooga and Governor Dunn is helping out in Memphis. Just about every voter in the state can expect to be buttonholed by a G.O.P. campaign worker, either in person or on the phone, before Election Day.
With no burning issues in the campaign, Blanton, a former Congressman, has kept linking Alexander with Watergate on the grounds that his opponent spent a year working for Bryce Harlow in the Nixon White House. Alexander, on the other hand, projects a youthful Mr. Clean image in contrast to Blanton’s old-pol background. While Alexander has disclosed the name of every contributor to the $435,000 he has collected since the primary, Blanton has revealed nothing beyond the fact that he spent $235,185 in the primary.
A recent convert to liberalism, Blanton voted against most civil rights mea sures in his rather lackluster career in the House. But he is now engaged in fashioning a coalition of liberals, blue-collar workers and blacks that he hopes will assure him victory on Nov. 5. Like Baker, Dunn and Brock before him, Alexander must peel off some of the members of this coalition if he is going to win in a state where Democrats traditionally outnumber Republicans. If he loses, it would be considered an ominous sign for Republicans throughout the South — an area where they once entertained such high hopes.
