How COPE Will Cope

"Politics," wrote Union Leader Sidney Hillman in the heyday of Big Labor's entente with Franklin Roosevelt, "is the science of who gets what, when and why." Under Lyndon Johnson, who clears nothing with George Meany, labor has found Hillman's three Ws aggravatingly hard to get. Yet, despite its president's recent hints that the A.F.L.-C.I.O. may jilt the Democratic Party, the federation's energetic Committee on Political Education (COPE) has already made clear that its 1966 electoral strategy will be, as usual, to support the Democrats.

Three-Pronged Effort. COPE's first major commitment was made this month in California. Of 113 candidates whom it endorsed for state and nation al office, all but seven were Democrats. Nationwide, labor is expected to hew pretty close to its line in the last election: of 276 COPE-backed candidates elected to Congress, only 17 were Republicans. Labor's political experts are paying particular attention to the reelection of 51 Democratic freshmen, most of them from swing districts that were won in the L.B.J. landslide. To preserve some aura of bipartisanship, COPE is expected to bestow its benediction on three old Republican Senate friends: New Jersey's Clifford Case, Maine's Margaret Chase Smith and Kentucky's John Sherman Cooper.

COPE support for a candidate is decided in each case by its autonomous state committees which this year seem to be endorsing before the primaries. They have already endorsed California's Governor Pat Brown and Houston Oil man Donald Woods, a liberal who is challenging Texas' conservative Governor John Connally. COPE's choice is in some cases apt to be dictated by old loyalties rather than performance or promise. A case in point is Michigan, where COPE almost certainly will throw its weight behind former Governor G. Mennen Williams in his contest with Detroit's dynamic (and liberal) Mayor Jerry Cavanagh for the Senate nomination. It may also try to influence primaries in Virginia, Tennessee, Louisiana, Florida, Alabama, and any other Southern state in which nonracist candidates may surface. In all, COPE will probably spend about $1,000,000 in 1966 on its three-pronged effort to register voters, promote the "right" candidates, and get out the vote.

Computerized Campaigns. One innovation this year is to bring selected candidates together with local union leaders in 13 regional conferences. In some areas, COPE is experimenting with computerized canvassing. By collating the names of all union members with voter rolls, it can give election district workers "walking lists" of unregistered but potentially pro-labor voters. COPE has also mounted a massive, direct mail offensive involving twoscore different pieces of literature that will flood the electorate's mailboxes right up to election day. For all of Meany's rumblings, neither the Democrats nor the Republicans doubt which party will benefit from COPE's campaigning.

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