A Vote for Jimmy--Maybe

After nine months of speeches and more than $30 million spent, 35 primaries and 21 caucuses, the Democratic presidential nomination could, in the end, turn on the telephone -- the long-distance leverage being exerted by Kennedy and Carter supporters on individual delegates. Take, for example, the experience of Kym Ammons, 18, a May graduate of East High School in industrial Waterloo, Iowa. She is a loyal Carter delegate, but is, nonetheless, leaning in favor of voting for an open convention. As a result, she now finds her self a part of the great electronic roundup.

Ammons was a school track star and president of the student senate when she went to a local caucus meeting in January. Says Ammons: "I was just sitting there watching when a neighbor asked if I wanted to be an alternate delegate to the district convention in Waterloo. I delegate said, to 'I the guess so.' " There she substituted for an absent delegate and was elected to the state convention. By then she was politicking in earnest, passing out KYM buttons and placards, and was chosen as one of Iowa's 50 delegates to the national convention. As she explains: "appeal to a lot of special-interest groups -- women, blacks and young people."

These days, as Carter and Kennedy campaign aides vie for her attention, she is having understandable difficulty in keeping track of the people who are trying to keep track of her. She has been phoned by local, regional and national Kennedy workers, who all urge her to help defeat the proposed rule that would require her to vote for Carter on the first ballot. To Ammons, the calls have become an overlapping blur. Says she: "They talk about ten minutes at a time, saying the same things, and I just don't hear them any more." But the calls have had some effect. She explains: "At first I was going to vote for Carter no matter what. I still feel that way, but not as strongly."

Carter callers strike Ammons as more concerned about her needs than her leanings. One of them, a man whose name she has never quite caught, phones regularly from New York to "ask how I'm doing, to see if I'm having financial problems." She is indeed. To raise the $1,200 she expects the convention trip to cost, she has put on a barbecue and an ice-cream social. She has sold $3-a-plate family-cooked chicken dinners and collected $100 from former teachers and classmates at East High School. Radio and television interviews brought in more money, but she is still $300 short of her goal.

Ammons is not sure how she will end up voting on the question of an open convention. Says she: "At first, I was going to vote for a closed convention, but now I'm undecided." Of her experience of being wooed by both camps, she says, "It feels good."

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