The Sleeper v. the Stumbler

Vice-presidential candidates generally get excellent training to serve as No. 2 men. They spend much of their campaigns in the boondocks, are subject to unnerving changes of schedule, and go largely unnoticed. This year, however, the veep candidates are attracting more attention than usual, one because he is proving a more promising prospect than most people suspected, the other because of his monumental boo-boos.

Jogginq Institutions. The sleeper is Maine's Senator Edmund Muskie.* In the western Pennsylvania city of Washington last week, Muskie gave an impressive display of coolness. For three minutes, he stood silently at the microphone in front of the county courthouse as some 40 students from Washington and Jefferson College yelled: "Stop the war! Stop the war!" When one screamed "Say something!" Muskie allowed: "Well, that's not a bad idea. If you will give me the chance, I will try." A student replied: "You have a chance! We don't!"

Muskie paused only briefly. Then inspiration struck. "I'll tell you what," he said. "I'll make you a bargain." He invited Rick Brody, 21, a sandaled, longhaired senior wearing a peace medallion, to speak for ten minutes.

Brody was rambling and emotional.

"Everybody calls us dirty and unwashed," he said. "We are the true Americans. We want America to stand for what the Constitution stands for, which is everyone equal under the law." He advised the crowd: "Sit out this election." As if anticipating what Muskie would say, he declared: "You are going to hear a lot of stuff, a lot of platitudes, about apple pie and motherhood. That's fine. But does it bring any sort of qualitative change? No!" Yet later, as Muskie praised American youth for "jogging our institutions," Brody nodded up at him and said to a bystander: "If they would do this more often, there wouldn't be all the really radical protests."

In Detroit later in the week, Muskie followed up by urging tolerance of the disaffected pro-McCarthy young before a United Auto Workers conference.

"They've met what they considered defeat," said Muskie, "and they're on the threshold of disillusionment. The worst thing we can do is throw cold water on their expectations."

Apologize Now. The stumbler in the campaign is the G.O.P. vice-presidential candidate, Maryland's Governor Spiro Agnew. He has committed so many errors, in fact, that a picket greeted him in Washington last week with a placard reading: APOLOGIZE NOW, SPIRO. IT WILL SAVE TIME LATER.

Agnew began the campaign by calling Hubert Humphrey "squishy soft" on Communism, a charge he hastily retracted. Two weeks ago, he denounced a charge of "collusion" with George Wallace, only to discover that the charge had been made against the Democrats by Dick Nixon. In Casper, Wyo., Agnew put a Stetson on backward and talked about wheat prices to sheep and cattle ranchers. On KULR-TV in Billings, Mont., he hinted that the Republicans had a solution to the war, forcing Nixon into a weary "what-Mr.-Agnew-meant-to-say" denial.

Some of Agnew's major miscues have been unintentional ethnic slurs. He jovially referred to a Japanese-American reporter accompanying him as a "fat Jap." In Chicago, where the Congressmen have names like Pucinski, Kluczynski and Rostenkowski, he answered a question about the dearth of Negroes in his audiences by saying: "Very frankly, when I am moving in a crowd I don't look and say, 'Well, there's a Negro, there's an Italian, and there's a Greek and there's a Polack.' " Before newsmen late last week, Agnew sought --with some success--to make light of the whole thing by referring to himself as "Greek, er, Grecian."

Earlier, while traveling in Hawaii, he complained that Americans are now "up so tight that we can't communicate with each other, and our sense of humor is beginning to disappear." Muskie could not let that one pass. "Mr. Agnew tells us that we lack a national sense of humor," Muskie remarked dryly. "I think he is doing his best to restore it."

* A Mervin Field poll released last week showed that California voters believe that Muskie does more for the Democratic ticket than Spiro Agnew does for the Republican. All told, 11% of the state's Republicans think that Agnew weakens their ticket, while 17% consider him an asset. Only 6% of the Democrats think Muskie hurts the ticket, while 25% consider him an asset.

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