The Score at Half Time

The battle of the 1960 Democratic presidential nomination, said the pundits at year's beginning, would be won on the playing fields of the 86th Congress. And what green fields they were. The Democrats had swamped the Republicans in the November elections (House 283-153; Senate 64-34); the Republicans were stuck with their refusal to spend their way out of the recession; their once-popular President was held to be an ailing lame duck. Four 1960-minded Democratic Senators --Texas' Lyndon Johnson, Missouri's Stuart Symington, Minnesota's Hubert Humphrey, Massachusetts' John Fitzgerald Kennedy--appeared on every score card. But by the time the 86th Congress got ready to adjourn this week for its half-time break, the four Democratic hopefuls had learned the dangers of underrating the other team. The four:

Texas' Johnson, the adroit, trend-sensing Senate Majority Leader, started the session by delivering his own "State of the Union" message to fellow Democrats, pushed a liberal-spending, twelve-point program (e.g., "bold" housing program, depressed areas bill) that included several items clearly beyond his legislative role and inside the executive area ("breathe life into the newly created space agency," "a consistent policy for Latin America"). He got off to a fast start on a quicker-than-the-eye maneuver to limit slightly the Senate's filibuster Rule 22, hoppered his own civil rights bill as a necessary prerequisite for any ambitious Texan seeking to prove that he is a Westerner, not a Southerner.

But in midseason, Johnson, whose chief political appeal was a habit of success, suddenly lost his rabbit's foot. His own Preparedness Subcommittee failed to fulfill its purpose of discovering dangerous flaws in Administration defense policy. His dramatic proposal for a Congress-authorized commission to study unemployment--a tinhorn political promise thrown the A.F.L.-C.I.O.'s conference on unemployment in Washington last April --gathered dust in a House pigeonhole as the economy boomed to new heights. His civil rights bill got nowhere.

So Quarterback Johnson, backed by his old coach, House Speaker Sam Rayburn, decided to play Dwight Eisenhower's game. Angering the liberals, Johnson refused to hurl their spending bills full-sized against inevitable vetoes, thus make an irresponsible "record" for next year's campaigns. He sought instead to shrink the proposals just enough to get under the veto, but failed in this tactic when Ike refused to compromise on the budget line. Johnson was blamed by labor for swinging key Texas Congressmen to a tough version of the labor reform bill. So by half time, Johnson had picked up a serious new handicap: many a labor leader and many a Northern Democrat have vowed to see that he gets no place on the 1960 ticket.

Missouri's Symington, Harry Truman's onetime (1947-50) Air Force Secretary, who set up shop as chief critic of Administration defense policy, failed to score a direct hit in many bombing runs on and off the Senate floor. Feeling the balance-the-budget heat, he gradually backed down from his charge that the Defense Department was dangerously starved by the Budget Bureau, shifted toward a new line in favor of re jiggered priorities (more ICBMs) within present spending. Turning his attention to the farm program, he failed to score with cloudy hints of Commodity Credit scandals, or help write a new party farm program. Half-time score: Symington is still the favorite of most Democratic pros (notably Missouri's own Harry Truman), is the only candidate with no "insuperable handicap," but cannot yet boast a single important legislative achievement to support his presidential pretensions.

Minnesota's Humphrey, leading contender for the title of old-style New Dealer, loosed a blizzard of proposals for new alphabet agencies into the Senate hopper. Sample: a CCC-style Youth Conservation Corps. But in an era of budget-balancing conservatism, he looked like a Democratic dinosaur. Busy touring the country on his half-announced candidacy, Humphrey did not find time to carry out the one important legislative assignment that he got from Johnson: writing a completely new Democratic farm program and fighting it through Congress. Half-time prospects: dim and fading.

Massachusetts' Kennedy gambled his presidential hopes on being able to push through a labor reform bill to satisfy public outrage over Teamster scandals--without bringing down an A.F.L.-C.I.O. veto of his nomination at the convention. His bold plan put him into the center of the year's toughest scrap, bloodied him up a bit. His troubles started when the Senate toughened his original Kennedy Bill, got grim when the President pushed the far tougher Landrum-Griffin bill through the House. As chairman of the Senate-House conference to resolve the differences between the two measures, he fought a union-side rearguard action against adoption of all Landrum-Griffin's tougher provisions, won enough concessions to avoid an all-out attack by angered labor leaders. Last week the powerful building trades (which, thanks to Kennedy's plugging, got special privileges in the new law) gave him a rising ovation at their annual convention in San Francisco. Half-time score: as the hopeful who risked the most in the session's hottest issue, Kennedy is the only one of the Big Four who did not lose heavily. He could balance off whatever union disfavor he incurred against the respect he earned for a man-sized fight against union racketeers. He convinced everyone that his footwork is good, leaving the question of whether he can fight to overcome his biggest political handicap.

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