Tails You Lose

Only seven days after this week's Indiana primary, Robert Kennedy and Eugene McCarthy will meet on the fertile Republican turf of Nebraska for their second direct confrontation of the campaign.

Fortunately for the Democrats--especially Bobby--G.O.P. voters in the Cornhusker State cannot readily cross over party lines to register negative votes against either. While Richard Nixon is confident of garnering well over 60% of the Republican vote despite write-ins for Nelson Rockefeller, both Kennedy and McCarthy can concentrate exclusively upon courting the state's 276,000 registered Democrats, many of them conveniently clustered around the urban centers of Omaha and Lincoln, only 58 miles apart.

McCarthy will require all of his urbane powers of persuasion. Of late, the Minnesotan's campaign forays have seemed forced marches. In both Indiana and Nebraska, his volunteer student armies have dwindled. McCarthy has sometimes appeared supercilious, as last week in Indiana, when he declared the Hoosier primary to be "critical" to the outcome of the Democratic race. Later, in an unwonted exercise of heads-I-win-tails-you-lose casuistry, he explained testily that he meant it would be crucial only if he won against Kennedy and Hoosier Favorite Son Roger Branigin. Otherwise, he averred, Indiana would not matter much.

Laundry List. In Nebraska, McCarthy's campaign machine is somewhat ramshackle. He is widely unknown among Nebraskans, and until this week had made only four appearances in the state. Bobby, by contrast, is almost too familiar in the Republican bastion that gave Nixon his largest margin against John Kennedy in 1960. Headed by Ted Sorensen's brother Philip, former Nebraska Lieutenant Governor, Kennedy's team last week was busily imitating McCarthy tactics by dispatching scores of student volunteers to canvass at least 200,000 Democratic households. In Indiana, Bobby's admirers had become dangerously demonstrative. Jostled by crowds in Mishawaka, he banged his upper lip on a car, chipping a front tooth.

Ironically, Kennedy could win a plurality in Nebraska's popular voting, yet lose a substantial portion of the state's 28 convention delegates to McCarthy. Because Nebraska filings closed before Bobby announced, no Kennedy-committed candidates are listed on the ballot to select the 22 at-large delegates. The at-large ballot is a bewildering laundry list of 75 names--21 identified as uncommitted, 30 as committed to Lyndon Johnson, and 24 as committed to McCarthy. If the Minnesotan's partisans carefully vote only for his delegates while the rest of the ballots are scattered among the 51 uncommitted and Johnson delegates, McCarthy could come away richer in convention strength, if not in popular votes.

Student Cheer. Whatever the outcome, at least one politician, Lyndon Johnson, was keeping his options open, hinting at his Washington press conference that he might not campaign for the party this year if the ticket does not suit him. "I would not want to go into that matter at this time," he told a reporter. "I'll be glad to visit with you about it after the convention and we see what the situation is."

Meantime McCarthy could cheer himself with the results of "Choice 68," a computerized presidential-preference poll of U.S. college students. Sponsored by Time Inc. and Sperry Rand's Univac Division, the poll was the largest nationwide pre-election sampling ever taken, with more than 1,000,000 students voting on 1,450 of the nation's campuses. Last week, after computers tabulated results, McCarthy won, with 285,988 votes, followed by Kennedy with 213,832 and Nixon with 197,167. Rockefeller, who was not an active candidate at the time of the voting late last month, collected 115,937, while Hubert Humphrey won 18,535 write-ins. More than 44% of the students who voted will be eligible to go to the polls in November.

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