Eyeball to Eyeball, Congress Blinked

RICHARD NIXON was feeling his oats last week. He was getting 53% approval in the Louis Harris poll, highest in a year. Talking to 1,600 teenagers at the 50th National 4-H Congress in Chicago, and later to the White House Conference on Aging in Washington, he sounded like the man who had pledged to "bring us together" on the morrow of his 1968 election victory. The youngsters applauded his denunciation of "the insidious bigotry called age-ism," which leaves the young to "plod along in apprenticeship or chafe in alienation" and abandons the old to "draw Social Security, preferably well out of sight." The oldsters cheered his call for "a new national attitude toward aging," which "can end the 'throwaway psychology' " (see following story).

Nixon was happily making points for 1972 with two important constituencies. Where he really scored, however, was in a crucial confrontation with the Democratic-controlled Congress over financing the 1972 campaign. Eyeball to eyeball, the Democrats did more than blink. They turned away, humiliated.

It had shaped up as a classic political battle. The Democrats, still $9.3 million in debt from 1968, came up with a plan to allow each taxpayer to check off $1 of his taxes for a fund that would give each party's presidential candidate a maximum of just over $20 million to spend for the presidency next year. The Senate passed the plan, along almost strictly party lines, and tacked it on to the tax-reduction bill that is the legislative keystone of the President's plan to revive the U.S. economy. Before the House-Senate conference on the tax bill began, House Ways and Means Chairman Wilbur Mills let it be known that the campaign check-off was fine with him. It looked as if the President would have to accept the financing amendment he did not want along with his tax bill--or veto both. He threatened repeatedly to do just that, putting his design for economic recovery in hazard so as to deny the Democrats their campaign money.

Wheels Within Wheels. Whether or not Nixon was bluffing, Mills caved in. "We just didn't have enough votes to carry it," Mills insisted, although nose counts by House Democratic leaders and by AFL-CIO lobbyists indicated that the votes may well have been there if the Democrats had wanted to fight for them. Mills, a cautious man, did not want to take the risk; his critics suggest that he lost his nerve. Party leaders were shocked and angry.

Mills tried to save face for the Democrats by leaving the check-off in--but making it effective only after 1972 and subject to a subsequent congressional appropriation. Though there were valid substantive arguments against the scheme, the hard fact was that the Democrats wanted campaign cash for 1972, and they lost out. Nixon prevailed, too, on the tax changes he wanted for Phase II and after (see THE ECONOMY).

There were other grapplings last week in the continual struggle for advantage between Democratic Congress and Republican President. Among them: >After delaying for nearly a year, Chairman Mills came up with his own version of the revenue-sharing program that Nixon once proposed and later was forced to defer because of Mills' opposition, and because the federal deficit has already reached a record high. The Mills plan would pass along roughly the same amounts of money; under it, for five years state governments would get $1.8 billion annually from federal revenues, and local governments $3.5 billion. But Mills rejected the Administration's no-strings approach: he would restrict use of the money to high-priority programs, among them public health, transportation and environment. Why did Mills produce a revenue-sharing plan now? Partly, it seems, to please Democrats in state and local government and thus enhance his possible presidential candidacy next year, or at least his kingmaking clout in Miami.

>After an elaborate round of wheels-within-wheels politicking, Purdue University Dean Earl Butz, Nixon's nominee to replace Clifford Hardin as Secretary of Agriculture, won Senate confirmation, 51-44. At first it looked as though Butz might be beaten. Butz was vulnerable because he seemed more sympathetic to big agribusiness than to the smaller farmers. Still, enough Democrats went along to confirm him--including, oddly, such Midwestern liberals as Indiana's Birch Bayh and Michigan's Philip Hart. Why? Maybe the Democrats only wanted to make their point and then leave Nixon stuck in 1972 with an Agriculture Secretary unpopular with a farm constituency that could be crucial to the election. But the real rub with the farmers is low corn prices; the Agriculture Secretary has wide latitude to tinker with support prices, and the Republican plan is simply to have Butz raise the floor under corn. The day after he was confirmed, Butz announced that the Government would start buying corn this month in an effort to bring prices up.

> The Senate passed a bill to start up a far-reaching $2 billion-a-year federal program for children that would include day-care and medical services. It would be free to poor families; the cost to other families would depend upon income. The bill is one of the few important pieces of social legislation produced by the 92nd Congress. A House vote is planned this week. The White House has left open the possibility of a veto because of the eventual cost of the program, but the President risks the wrath of the mothers of the land.

Winter Resort. At week's end, looking pale from what he called "one of those 24-hour things" but surely pleased with himself, Nixon took off from Washington on short notice, L.B.J.-style. He arrived in Key Biscayne to work on the gloomy fiscal 1973 budget, which he will send to the Congress before he leaves for Peking in late February.

The first round of the President's pre-Peking summit meetings with Western leaders begins this week, when Canada's Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau comes to the White House. Press Secretary Ronald Ziegler announced that the President and Mrs. Nixon will spend Feb. 21-28 in China, visiting Peking, the capital; Shanghai, China's largest city; and Hangchow, the picturesque winter retreat of Chairman Mao Tse-tung. Henry Kissinger, the President's foreign policy adviser, noted that there will doubtless be discussion of other nations between Nixon and the Chinese, but as for the war in Viet Nam, "we do not expect to settle it in Peking."

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