Tarot Cards, Hoosier Style

Eugene McCarthy: Next August, I'll probably still be the front runner, as I am now.

Hubert Humphrey: We're about where we were.

Robert Kennedy: I'm very, very pleased.

Like competing gypsies, each of the rivals for the Democratic presidential nomination shuffled the tarot cards of Indiana's primary-election results last week to suit his own purpose, and each found consolation in his readings.

The vote spread itself was hardly overwhelming. In the record turnout of 764,000 Democrats. Kennedy got 42% of the vote; Governor Roger Branigin, who adopted a favorite-son stance as Humphrey's not-so-secret ally, received 31%; McCarthy polled 27%. While Kennedy failed both to roll up a ma jority and to demolish McCarthy, the timing of his first-place finish and his surprisingly broad base of support gave the New Yorker's campaign a solid, if less than meteoric, boost.

The Eleventh Campaigner. Kennedy carried nine of the state's eleven Congressional districts, while Branigin took the other two.* Bobby also captured eleven of the state's twelve largest cities and towns. He won 90% of the Negro vote, yet held his own in many of the white, working-class precincts that gave George Wallace a heavy vote in the 1964 Democratic primary. He turned on the electorate in low-income neighborhoods, where voting is not habitual, to produce solid crowds at the polls. And he succeeded in the face of several handicaps. Indiana is a basically conservative state. The Democratic organization, labor-union leadership and the state's two largest newspapers did their best to torpedo Kennedy.

Starting late--just four weeks before the election--Bobby parlayed his longstanding assets. He imported some of the nation's most talented political organizers, led by Lawrence O'Brien and Ted Kennedy. He mobilized three generations of kin--Mother Rose, Sisters Eunice, Jean and Pat, Children David, Michael and Courtney. Ethel, who is expecting their eleventh campaigner in January, did her smiling bit. Meticulous planning and arrangements, plus Kennedy's own crowd-catching personality, consistently made for large audiences, while McCarthy and Branigin frequently dissipated their efforts on small groups.

Lawman. Well aware that he sometimes comes over as a hyperthyroid hippie, Kennedy trimmed both his tresses and his rhetoric to please the Hoosiers. He made vaguely conservative sounds about big, distant government. He never stopped saying that the U.S. must cure the causes of racial unrest, but he stressed the need for peace in the streets. "Violence won't get you better housing or better jobs or better education for your children," he told Negroes. He reminded white listeners: "I was the chief law-enforcement officer of the U.S. for 3 1/2 years. This nation must have law and order."

And then there was money. McCarthy staffers occasionally went without their paychecks and sometimes had to exist on $5 a day for expenses. Branigin complained: "You can't beat $2,000,000." Though Kennedy insisted that he had actually spent between $550,000 and $600,000, Rose Kennedy, in an interview with Women's Wear Daily, was cash-candid: "It's our own money, and we're free to spend it any way we please. It's part of this campaign business. If you have money, you spend it to win."

Survival Power. The victory was worth every dollar to Kennedy. It was his first real test as a candidate this year, and a loss might well have crippled him. The win would have been sweeter, of course, had it been against his prime opponent, Hubert Humphrey, but Humphrey's name will be on no presidential primary ballots this year. On the same day that Kennedy carried Indiana, however, a Kennedy slate of delegates defeated pro-Humphrey candidates with surprising ease in the District of Columbia primary--a contest that Humphrey, with better organizational work, might have won. Kennedy will get all of the District's 23 votes.

It was a particularly opportune time for Kennedy to begin looking like a ballot-box strong man. Humphrey's campaign has been steadily picking up momentum. A Congressional Quarterly survey of Democratic Senators and Representatives showed Humphrey favored as the party's "strongest" candidate by a margin of 4 to 1 over Kennedy, 11 to 1 over McCarthy. On the eve of last week's voting, Humphrey bested Kennedy in Louis Harris poll pairings against both Richard Nixon and Nelson Rockefeller.

The significance of Indiana, from Kennedy's viewpoint, was not that it demonstrated overwhelming strength or that it promised victory at the Chicago convention; it did neither. Rather, it demonstrated his survival power in hostile territory. Uncommitted party leaders in such large states as Illinois and Michigan, regardless of their personal feelings toward Kennedy, must respect a candidate who fights hard and pulls well in urban areas. Those who might have been tempted to come out soon for Humphrey now have an excuse to wait and see. Indiana also gave Kennedy a nudge in the right direction for this week's Nebraska primary. The New Yorker is now in a position to trot ahead to Oregon, California and South Dakota. At week's end Kennedy seemed in a good position to score again.

Omaha Omen. McCarthy tried mightily to make his 27% in Indiana sound like a majority; some early projections had credited him with less. "We've tested the enemy now, and we know his techniques," he declared. "We know his weaknesses." But it was McCarthy's weaknesses--of organization, among Negro voters and as a general campaigner--that were laid bare. Many professionals have been saying that the McCarthy bloom would not survive the summer, and for McCarthy summer may come cruel and early.

After Indiana, McCarthy went to Nebraska for two days of dispirited campaigning before small crowds. Three persons met him at the airport in Lincoln, and two of them were Kennedy advance men. To some, it seemed as if McCarthy had already given up on Nebraska. But he toughened his approach to the extent of needling Kennedy repeatedly, accusing him of such failings as not knowing from which side to milk a cow (from the animal's right) and voting against meat-import restrictions. But he got little response from the cattlemen.

Humphrey suffered no direct damage in Indiana and was only nicked in Washington, but he stands to lose considerably if Kennedy runs a string of primary victories that crush McCarthy's candidacy soon. Humphrey's standing above the primaries while Kennedy and McCarthy slug it out is sound strategy only so long as McCarthy keeps slugging. If McCarthy cannot slow Kennedy's pace, Humphrey will have to fight more vigorously to pick up delegates in the nonprimary states and to maintain a creditable standing in public-opinion polls. The Vice President began testing a rhetorical weapon last week--the phrase "New Democracy"--that may become his equivalent of "New Deal" or "New Frontier."

In Atlantic City, Humphrey and Kennedy paid courtesy calls on the United Auto Workers' convention on successive days. Humphrey talked in folksy terms about his own political status and the Viet Nam negotiations. Kennedy demanded a foreign policy of "no more Viet Nams," jabbed at Humphrey's "politics of joy" slogan by saying that, considering poverty and other problems, the U.S. "is not a joyous and happy country." Humphrey seemed to get a slightly warmer reception than Kennedy, but the U.A.W. is officially remaining neutral. At week's end in Omaha, Humphrey and Kennedy again shared an audience--Democratic notables at a Jefferson-Jackson dinner--and again McCarthy was elsewhere. It seemed to be an omen of the way the preconvention campaign would develop in the next three months.

*Thus Kennedy will probably get 55 of Indiana's 63 convention votes on the first ballot; this must still be made official by the state party organization. On subsequent ballots, if any, delegates will be legally uncommitted--and probably pro-Humphrey.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.