Democrats: Divided and Dispirited

LEADERLESS, divided and deeply in L debt, the Democratic Party last week lost one of its last links to any semblance of organization. Its national chairman, Oklahoma Senator Fred Harris, announced that hs was resigning effective March 5 and the party is now seeking a successor. Although many Democrats insisted that Harris accept some of the blame for his party's doldrums, a Washington headquarters official put the resignation in what seemed to be the right perspective. "Fred was not forced out," he said. "He was fed up."

Harris was largely a victim of circumstances. His selection as co-chairman of Citizens for Humphrey-Muskie indicated how fast he had risen after just three years in the Senate. Harris, 39, is a bright (Phi Beta Kappa, University of Oklahoma), lively politician who manages to remain popular in a conservative state despite his liberal views on social issues and his criticism of the Administration's Viet Nam War policy. But as party chairman, he carried two huge handicaps: 1) rebuilding a shattered party is a full-time job that stretches a hard-working Senator too far; and 2) since he has difficulty disguising his own ambitions, all his moves as party chairman have led rivals for the 1972 presidential nomination to eye his efforts as self-serving. Harris possesses no effective leverage to pull all of the factions together.

Nothing could have illustrated Harris' predicament better than the futile party fund-raising affair held last week in Miami Beach. He first announced that it would be a 16-city closed-circuit television spectacular that might net the party $2,000,000 in its drive to overcome a deficit of more than $8,000,000 remaining from the 1968 primary and presidential campaigns. But Harris had failed to consult city and state Democrats in advance. Many refused to cooperate, claiming that they did not want to siphon off money they needed for their elections next November. Why ask donors to contribute to a lost cause when tough new races loom ahead?

Baby Powder. In the event last week, the fund-raiser attracted about 1,500 Democratic donors, who paid from $100 to $5,000 each. But much of the money was retained by the Florida State Committee, and the National Committee picked up only about $300,000--hardly enough to keep it operating for more than a few months. Worried about giving any single Democrat an advantage, Harris devised a dinner agenda without formal speeches. That also avoided dramatizing the fact that no one in the party is the accepted leader or an effective drawing card. Nor was there anything encouraging for 1972 to be drawn from certain popularity indicators; as Hubert Humphrey, Edmund Muskie and Edward Kennedy were introduced, it was Humphrey, the defeated candidate, who drew the warmest applause. Former President Lyndon Johnson was honorary chairman of the dinner but did not even attend, and his name was mentioned only once. That was when the put-down comic Don Rickles called Johnson "a great man--I've used his baby powder."

Democrats seem to be looking wistfully backward rather than hopefully forward. The Miami Beach dinner honored Former President Harry Truman. Another dinner was held in New York to pay tribute to Adlai Stevenson, who would have been 70 years old last week.

Harris had done little to check this party tendency to prefer reverie to reality. When President Nixon gave his televised State of the Union speech, the National Committee offered only Joe Califano, former assistant to President Johnson, to the networks for rebuttal. Complained one top Democrat: "Now Joe's a bright boy, but outside of Washington, who ever heard of him?"

Repetitive Tone. But Harris can hardly be blamed for all the party's many problems. That is especially true of its major headache: the agile manner in which President Nixon has seized the initiative on the Democrats' most promising issues. On what is now the nation's foremost issue, inflation, he has taken strong action by trying to throttle down the economy (whether it will work without provoking a damaging recession, of course, remains to be seen), and he has managed to place much of the blame on the Democrats' past policies. By putting himself in the front ranks of the anti-pollution crusade, he has convinced much of the public that the Republicans are no less eager to clean up the environment than the opposition party is --even though the Democrats argue that they cared first. His Vietnamization policy seems so unassailable at the moment that the renewed war hearings of Democratic Senator William Fulbright's Foreign Relations Committee last week took on a carping, repetitive tone.

While Fulbright asked valid questions about whether the South Vietnamese will be able to hold off the Communists and what Nixon will do if they cannot, other Democratic doves hurled overstated broadsides. Iowa Senator Harold Hughes called Vietnamization "a semantic hoax," adding, acidly, that it is "simply an extension of the Johnson for eign policy." South Dakota Senator George McGovern termed it "an effort to tranquilize the conscience of the American people while our Government wages a cruel and needless war by proxy." He even charged peevishly that the Administration was using the Pentagon to attack his patriotism.

The Democrats may be able to do better in remounting a campaign against the anti-ballistic-missile program, which Nixon now wants to expand. Senate Majority Leader Mike Mansfield opened fire last week by charging that it will cost "well beyond $50 billion" and asking: "Where the hell is it going to end?" Former Ambassador to Moscow George F. Kennan warned that ABM expansion could imperil progress in arms-limitation talks with the Soviet Union and touch off an arms race at "enormous expense and danger."

Shriver Moving. Such is the vacuum of Democratic leadership that speculation persists that New York's Republican Mayor John Lindsay may turn Democrat (see box, page 13). At lower levels, there is also a dearth of attractive Democratic candidates in some key states. Sargent Shriver, long rumored ready to resign his ambassadorship in Paris to run for Governor of Maryland, is now considering moving to New York to seek the Senate seat once held by his brother-in-law Robert Kennedy, and currently occupied by Republican Charles Goodell.

As the Democratic Party loses its voice at top levels, polls show that it is also getting weaker at its base. A new Louis Harris poll indicates that the Democrats are not a majority party; it reports that 48% of the nation's voters now regard themselves as Democrats, 33% as Republicans and 19% as independents. Figures from George Gallup put the Democrats even lower, at 42%, compared with the Republicans' 28% and the independents' 30%.

Those figures do, of course, also indicate a hard core of support on which the Democrats can still base a strong challenge to President Nixon by 1972. And despite the party's current disorganization, it is not in a state of total despair. Ted Kennedy contends that Nixon is especially vulnerable on inflation, claiming that "the price of steel rose more in one year under Nixon than in eight previous years--without a single word of protest from the President." Minnesota Senator Eugene McCarthy scoffs at Nixon's heralded victory on the HEW appropriations-bill veto. "What's so great about sustaining a veto --a majority of Congressmen voted against him. His support is a mile wide but only two inches deep." Humphrey, always optimistic, argues that the President's current advantage is only temporary, since it is based on "a Southern strategy--a Nixon-formed coalition of frightened Americans--that has no long-range future." Yet in all those various charges, there is a defensive, almost desperate tone.

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