Missiles from the Michelle Ann

The Republican Party last week armed a Boeing 727 with the G.O.P.'s fastest-firing political weapon--Spiro Agnew--and launched it westward to strike at Democratic candidates in this fall's elections. The mission was the first of a series that will take the Vice President to most of the 35 states in which Senate seats are at stake.

The President himself provided explicit flight plans before Michelle Ann II (named for Agnew's granddaughter) took off. A 2 1/2-hour White House meeting at which Nixon delivered a 90-minute monologue, was attended by Presidential Counsellor Bryce Harlow, Speechwriters William Safire and Patrick Buchanan and Political Advisers Harry Dent and Murray Chotiner. TIME Correspondent Simmons Fentress reports the President's admonitions:

"Bryce, see that Spiro takes the candidates to the airport fences. Don't let him waste his own time there, but see that he takes the candidates over. Safire, I know you'll be wanting to come up with new speeches all the time. Forget it. See what goes and then stick with it. Forget the national press."

Turning to Dent and Chotiner, Nixon instructed them to tell each local candidate to avoid name calling and to seek maximum TV exposure. "We have the Republican vote, but that isn't enough. To win, we must get the Democratic workingman. If we get him, then we can win all the races."

To the Rail. Nixon argued that such Democrats are "decent people," concerned about promiscuity, crime, pornography, drugs, riots, desecration of the flag. Many are Catholics. He recalled entertaining 90 labor leaders and their wives at the White House on Labor Day. "If someone had called a Mass," he said, "80% of them would have gone to the rail." The way to reach people like these, he added, is to take a hard line on social issues and to paint the Democratic Party as "the party of permissiveness." The Democrats are "way out on the left," he observed. "Keep them there." The main problem facing the Republicans is the state of the economy, and he urged that Agnew meet it by pinning a "big spender" label on the Democrats.

Agnew heeded his boss well. Even before his jet was airborne, Agnew began assailing anti-Administration demonstrators. "The primary issue is whether public policy in the U.S. is to be made by elected officials or by people in the streets," he declared at National Airport. At Springfield, ILL., he criticized the "caterwauling critics in the Senate" who oppose the President's Viet Nam policy. They are part of a "misguided movement--an ultraliberalism that translates into a whimpering isolationism in foreign policy, a mulish obstructionism in domestic policy, and a pusillanimous pussyfooting on the critical issue of law and order." Later he said: "How do you fathom the thinking of those who work themselves into a lather over an alleged shortage of nutriments in Wheaties, but who cannot get exercised at all over a flood of hard-core pornography."

He also created a new derogatory label: "radical-liberal" (he sometimes shortened it to "radic-lib"). The term seems to include nearly all opposition on the Administration's left, particularly in Congress and on the campuses. The Vice President used the expression with relish at his first stop in Springfield, delighting his Republican audience. As he jetted on to Casper, Wyo., and San Diego, Agnew embroidered on the theme. He hit at "a disruptive radical and militant minority--the pampered prodigies of the radical-liberals in the U.S. Senate."

The annals of political invective are full of hybrid epithets. "Comsymps," musty term though it is, can still be heard occasionally from the distant right. The far left revels in items like "establishment-fascists" and "bourgeois-racists."

Election-season license is broad enough to tolerate much hyperbole, but it is disturbing to find the Vice President engaging in an essentially misleading confusion of political categories. Without question, some liberals have supported or at least been tolerant of some radical causes. But in rational political debate, words must be used precisely. Radicals, in today's lexicon, include bomb throwers and those committed to destroying American institutions. Liberals, often criticized by Agnew as being too soft, cannot by any stretch of definition be lumped in with violent extremists. Yet the Vice President does the trick with a flick of the hyphen.

A repeated and far more convincing Agnew point was that today's liberals have lost both their fire and their function and thus are no longer relevant to the workingman. He paid his respects to labor's past heroes. "The liberalism of the old elite was a venturesome and fighting philosophy--the vanguard political dogma of a Franklin Roosevelt, a Harry Truman, a John Kennedy. But you know and I know that the old fire-horses are long gone."

In defending Republican Senator Ralph Smith of Illinois against the challenge of Democrat Adlai Stevenson III, Agnew paid a rare Republican tribute to a Democratic machine politician. He noted that Stevenson had called the Chicago police "storm troopers in blue" for their part in the 1968 Democratic Convention riots. "The grave injustice done by that convention was not done to the demonstrators in the streets," Agnew said. "It was done to the good name of the great city of Chicago and its mayor, Richard J. Daley."

The Administration's campaign kick-off was a carefully coordinated case of Agnew hitting the low road and Nixon saying some of the same things, but on a higher plane of rhetoric. Thus Agnew accused the Democratic Congress of "featherbedding" and "monumental goldbricking" in holding up Administration bills. He charged that it was controlled by "big spenders" and "bitter men" who have "forfeited their mandate" to represent the workingman. Nixon issued a 20-page "call for cooperation" from the Congress, gently chiding the Hill for its failure to act on his programs. The watchword of his Administration, he insisted, was still "reform." "In a mood of nostalgia and partisanship," he said, "Congress has too much devoted its energies to tinkering with programs of the past while ignoring the realities of the present. What is at stake is the good repute of American Government at a time when the charge that our system cannot work is hurled with fury and anger by men whose greatest fear is that it will."

Democratic leaders in the Congress tried to dismiss the Nixon message as a routine post-Labor Day political attack. House Democratic Whip Hale Boggs said that Nixon was only trying to "divert public attention from the failures of his own Administration."

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