Wallace in the West

As the capital of Alabama, Montgomery is a governmental ghost town. Since Governor Lurleen Wallace underwent a cancer operation in July, she has spent less than two weeks attending to her putative duties at the statehouse. Meanwhile, George Wallace, who wears the pants if not the titular authority in Alabama's first family, has spent 47 days out of state campaigning for President. At least ten top-ranking state officials, still drawing their regular salaries, are off helping Alabama's First Gentleman drum up votes.

"Aw, come on, California," wailed an editorial in the Montgomery Advertiser-Journal. "Let our people go. Are there not 66,059 patriots among you who will step forward to save the republic--before Alabama collapses through chronic absenteeism?"

The 66,059 "patriots" represent the number of signatories that George Wallace needs to place his name on next spring's primary ballot as a third-party candidate for President. Last week, behind the body-blocking of a dozen armed Alabama cops, all of them still on the state payroll, Wallace campaigned from San Francisco to San Diego trying to win support for his American Independent Party. Accompanied by a country-music troupe and cheered by older, working-class whites, many of them emigrants from Dixie, Wallace served up his set harangue against "perfessers, liberals, social engineers and all those people who want to tell the rest of us how to live." Knowing his audiences, which were tuned up by straw-hatted California belles, he turned in effective, skillfully orchestrated performances. His trouble in California, however, is that many of the conservatives who applaud his views would probably wind up by voting for Governor Ronald Reagan in the presidential primary.

Wallace aspires to beat the Republican presidential candidate and the Democrat as well, thinking that a three-way stand-off in the Electoral College, with no candidate managing to win the required 270 votes, might throw the decision to the House of Representatives. After almost seven weeks of baby kissing and arm wringing in 14 states, however, Lonesome George has little cause for serious hope. Of the 66,059 signatures he must gather in California, for example, he has rounded up 25,000 at most, and he must file his petition by Jan. 1.

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