Round 1 to the Regulars

After the horror of the 1968 Chicago Convention, Democratic regulars and reformers were of a single mind: it must never happen again. Vowing to reform itself, the party appointed a 28-member commission to come up with ways of giving "all Democratic voters a full, meaningful and timely opportunity to participate" in choosing convention delegates. The commission issued an array of "guidelines," which were adopted by the Democratic National Committee. Any state party organizations ignoring the reforms, the National Committee warned, did so at peril of losing their seats at the 1972 Convention.

But would they? That would depend partly on the temporary chairman of the convention Credentials Committee, who, for the first time, would select examiners to go into the states to probe reform challenges. The examiners' recommendations on whom to seat would then be accepted or rejected by the full committee. But by picking the judges, the temporary credentials chairman will be able to influence the outcome of disputes. As a result, when the National Committee convened in Washington last week to select the temporary credentials chairman for 1972, there was more than casual interest in the election. When it was over, several liberal presidential contenders had possibly been set back, and the tenuous bond that held regulars and reformers together had become sorely strained.

Lopsided Vote. The focus of the struggle was a deceptively soft-spoken black woman, Mrs. Patricia Roberts Harris, a former dean of the Howard University School of Law and Lyndon Johnson's ambassador to Luxembourg. Chosen by the regulars for her race and her sex, Mrs. Harris was matched against Iowa Senator Harold Hughes, nominator of Eugene McCarthy, onetime presidential contender in his own right and a tough, no-nonsense reformer. The outcome of the National Committee's voting was lopsided: 72 for Mrs. Harris, 31 for Hughes.

The New Politicians, predictably, lined up behind Hughes, while Party Chairman Lawrence O'Brien, organized labor, conservatives and, ironically, Southerners, stood foursquare for Mrs. Harris. Hubert Humphrey, whose longtime confidant Max Kampelman is one of Mrs. Harris' law partners, hedged his bets by telling an audience before the balloting: "Whatever decision you make, I'm going to like." Edmund Muskie finally made up his mind to authorize his operatives to support Hughes --only a scant day before the voting, so that his influence was lost.

The reformers offset Mrs. Harris' two most obvious advantages by enlisting black Brooklyn Congresswoman Shirley Chisholm to nominate Hughes. Labor countered with what Hughes decried as "savage tactics." Some state committeemen were warned that unless they voted for Mrs. Harris, they could forget about A.F.L.-C.I.O. money for next year's congressional campaigns. The most powerful persuader, though, was Old Pro O'Brien. Rumors floated about that O'Brien would resign if Mrs. Harris was not elected. He personally swung at least ten votes only hours before the election.

Whether the party's pledges of reform remained believable after the balloting was another question. Mrs. Harris declared firmly that Democrats would "wreck" the party if reform went unheeded. Some of the embittered losers were predicting, perhaps too gloomily, that a liberal fourth party in 1972 was now inevitable. Many Democrats had an ominous inkling that what they had said could never happen again was already beginning to happen.

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