Ford: Giving 'Em Heck on the Hustings

The Lincoln-Washington birthday recess is a congressional institution, but last week Congressmen back home for the ten-day holiday got an earful, and their ears were burning. What in the world were they doing at home, their constituents wanted to know, when the economy needed their full attention? "There is a real irritation around here that Congress recessed," reports New York Republican Peter Peyser. "People have been coming up to me and saying, 'Why aren't you down there doing something about all this?' " An aggrieved constituent told Virginia Republican Caldwell Butler: "Any policy is better than none." Reports Ohio Republican Samuel Devine: "People tell me, 'Let's stop this bickering between the White House and Congress and get something done!' " The American public did not appear to be panicking; people were sober and subdued but still largely positive as they appraised their own and their country's future. "The mood isn't gloom and doom," says Norman Mineta, a freshman Democrat from Southern California. "The question always asked is how much and how long it is going to take to turn this around."

Good Will. Responding to the public mood, President Ford was doing his best to do something. He went on the road to try to sell his program along with his presidency. Quite deliberately, he invoked the memory of Harry Truman and let his audience draw the comparison between the two Presidents. He was not flaying Congress in the "give 'em hell" style of Truman in 1948; but befitting a more conservative and restrained politician, he was at least giving 'em heck on the hustings. Even if his listeners did not agree with or did not quite grasp his complex economic and energy proposals, they were beginning to warm to him.

He will need all the sympathy and good will he can bank as the bad news accumulates over the coming months. Last week it was announced that industrial production had fallen a dismaying 3.6% in January, the sharpest monthly drop since the Depression year of 1937. George Meany, the redoubtable president of the AFL-CIO, declared, "We're past the recession stage; we're going into a depression." He predicted that unemployment would hit 10% by summer, and that was not far from the estimates of some economists (see ECONOMY & BUSINESS). Teamsters President Frank Fitzsimmons, who supported the G.O.P. in 1972, gave a speech in which he said he was tired of Administration "rhetoric." Ford's critics doubt that his proposed $16 billion tax cut is big enough to stimulate a real recovery and condemn his energy program as adding arbitrary and unnecessary burdens on the already reeling economy. Yet Ford was willing to compromise even as he fought for his program and carefully avoided a fixed position from which he could not retreat.

His first stop was Houston, oil country where both executives and wildcatters resent urbanites who want to trim their energy profits. The President did not give them grounds for much complaint. In a speech to some 600 business leaders, he defended his energy program as a way of encouraging more oil and gas development. He waved a copy of his 167-page energy proposal in the air; then he brandished the four-page bill passed by the House to postpone his tariff increase on imported oil. "A program and a plan is needed," he declared, "not a step backward."

Afterward he met with five of the Southwestern Governors--all Democrats. Arkansas Governor David Pryor said bluntly, "First, I would basically support the moratorium on the imposition of the oil tax; and two, I would personally like to thank President Ford for coming." But if the Governors were skeptical of Ford's program, they liked the President better than they thought they would, and so did some other politicians he met along his route. A county Republican leader in Texas conceded that he had had grave reservations about Ford's leadership before they met; after their chat, he was fired up to organize for the President's election.

Grasp of Facts. In Topeka Ford was greeted by some 10,000 people at the state capitol. He shouted into the microphone with delight, "This crowd is unbelievable!" He announced that he was releasing $2 billion in highway funds out of a total of $11.1 billion that had been impounded. The money, he said, would create some 140,000 jobs, help conserve fuel by building better and safer highways and contribute to mass transit. The hard-pressed states, however, would have to provide at least 10% in matching grants, and it can be argued that highway building is not the most useful form of public works for the times. Again, he met with the Governors of the region. Dan Walker, Democratic Governor of Illinois, told the President: "Rarely have I seen a Chief Executive with such a grasp of facts and statistics."

Then Ford moved east to address the Society of Security Analysts in New York City. "While unemployment is the enemy of the 8.2% of American workers temporarily out of work," he said, "inflation is the universal enemy of 100% of our people." He took another jab at his antagonists on Capitol Hill: "Until the Congress does something more, it will be part of the energy problem, not part of the solution."

Ford gave his final speech of the week at a $175-a-plate dinner in Manhattan in honor of Vice President Nelson Rockefeller. The President chided Congress for opposing his foreign policy as well as his economic program. He drew on another historical figure, Michigan Senator Arthur Vandenberg, to emphasize the need for a bipartisan foreign policy. A onetime Republican isolationist, Vandenberg persuaded members of his own party to support Truman's interventionist policy. "I do not expect 535 reincarnations of Senator Vandenberg," said Ford. "But I challenge the Senate and the House to give me the same consideration that Vandenberg sought and got for President Truman." More articulate than in the early days of his presidency, Ford drew no guffaws when he failed several times to pronounce integrated correctly. His audience laughed with him, not at him, when he finally gave up with the remark, "I told my wife Betty I knew this speech backward, and I'm proving it."

While the President was promoting his program, the remaining chamber in session on Capitol Hill was trying to catch up. The Senate Finance Committee finally put together a quorum and approved, by a vote of 12 to 2, the House bill postponing the oil import fees for 90 days. Though the measure will be easily passed in the Senate, the question is whether or not it will get the two-thirds vote to override a veto.

Senate Democrats also readied an energy program they will offer as an alternative to Ford's. It takes a more cautious approach. While the President seeks an immediate cut in oil imports to safeguard the nation in case of another Arab embargo, the Democrats are content with a more gradual reduction in foreign oil over the long run. They oppose Ford's scheme to reduce consumption by raising the price of oil because it would be a drag on an already sagging economy. Says a Senate staffer who specializes in energy: "There is no need for a sudden drastic cut in petroleum imports that would add to unemployment and choke off economic recovery."

Dream Ticket. Still another approach was on view in Washington's Mayflower hotel last week. Some 500 conservatives gathered to express their discontent with Ford's budget deficit, as well as other aspects of his policy that seemed to separate him from the true faith. "I personally believe that in 1976 we need a new political party," said M. Stanton Evans, chairman of the American Conservative Union. "The essential thrust of this Administration is not a conservative thrust." He was cheered by an audience wearing buttons proclaiming, REAGAN--THE SPIRIT OF '76 or THE DREAM TICKET: REAGAN AND BUCKLEY.

Next month New York Senator James Buckley will sponsor a more exclusive meeting of top-ranking conservatives to plan for 1976. Considering a move toward a third party to be a "disaster," Buckley wants to form a bloc to bring pressure on the G.O.P. national convention and put over a candidate like Reagan if Ford grows too liberal in the meantime. The conservatives fear, above all, that Ford will decide against running and give his blessing to Vice President Rockefeller, who is still the prime target of conservative wrath, despite his moves rightward in his last term as New York Governor.

In many ways, the President could not be in a worse position: squeezed in a vise between recession and inflation. If he cannot extricate himself, if the economy fails to respond to his programs, he will have no chance to win election in his own right in 1976. But from another, political viewpoint, he is not in such a bad position. It is, in fact, a traditionally enviable one: under attack from both the left and the right, he can pre-empt the vast middle. So armed, he could present himself to the electorate in 1976 as the reasonable candidate between the extremes if--and it is a big if--the economy sufficiently improves.

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