How Will the Kremlin "Vote"?

By Hugh Sidey

The Presidency

All over Washington last week the foreign embassies were studying the election polls with the same intensity as Chicago's Mayor Jane Byrne. Those faceless analysts in the lower reaches of diplomacy manned the phones looking for clues about the next U.S. President. One Communist newsman hurried to the office of an American counterpart and traded electoral theories on Reagan and Carter for an hour, left a little vodka in appreciation, then undoubtedly dashed back to his embassy to file a report behind the Iron Curtain.

What is making this city nervous in these waning days of the campaign is that the "votes" that may tip this election could come from Leonid Brezhnev, the Ayatullah Khomeini, Menachem Begin or assorted other parties far beyond any U.S. precincts.

The pollsters almost to a man believe that the Carter-Reagan race is now so even and so fluttery that one good puff of wind from the Persian Gulf or Moscow could turn the tiny tide one way or another. These "external sources of conflict," to use the language of the experts, can dramatically bring "coherence" to a confused domestic political picture by scaring people to one side or the other. Burns Roper calls this year's race closer than the eyelash contest of Kennedy-Nixon in 1960, and his research of the data from 50 years shows that every international scare benefited the incumbent President. Yet the dynamics of this election are so bizarre that none of the experts will rule out the possibility of such an incident's turning against Carter.

If the hostages are released, Richard Scammon believes, the stunning television spectacle of men and women kissing U.S. soil after a year of captivity would virtually assure the President's victory. Still, a thin hint that Khomeini was seeking leverage or the White House orchestrating such a drama could send Carter packing. What if there were Iranian mines in the Strait of Hormuz and Carter dispatched a huge allied armada to clear them out? The experts quibble--maybe yes for Carter-on-the-bridge, maybe no.

Ed Muskie sipped orange juice the other morning on the seventh-floor balcony of the State Department and doubted that other nations deliberately try to influence our elections. What happens, he judges, is that events always quicken around a U.S. election, and foreign powers hurry to protect their own interests in a time of political change. The fallout echoes through our nation, and it can influence a vital segment of the electorate.

Jimmy Carter cannot shape the world as much as Ronald Reagan believes, but Carter can hurry, nudge, urge, threaten in a thousand ways that can bring change. Thus the pressure was desperate to complete in a few days the deal for selling 6 million to 9 million metric tons of grain to China. The arrival of the Iranian mission at the U.N. sent a delicious shudder through Foggy Bottom. Castro's release of imprisoned Americans was viewed as an effort to soothe troubled waters for whoever wins the Oval Office--but Castro wants Carter. The word leaked out that Armand Hammer, the U.S. industrialist and buddy of Brezhnev's, came straight from Moscow last week with a secret letter of peaceful portents from the Soviet President for his American counterpart. Begin's slight shift on the Palestinians seemed designed to burnish his U.S. image before the big ballot. All of these events at the very least focused more national concern on the issue of leadership.

Rarely in the past, except in time of war, has foreign policy been the decisive American political issue. But the opinion data now show the social issues waning and worldly well-being ranking up close to pocketbook economics.

One lesson of these days is that the loss of the great margin of American power and prestige makes our open system of government easier to influence from the outside and at the same time makes it more imperative than ever that we get a skilled person as President. The national perception that we may not have offered up our best talent in this election rests heavily on America's mind.

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