The Senate: Two Incumbents Falter

Two Democratic Senators are in trouble back home partly because of their support for expensive federal programs, even though one of them is a Capitol institution who is a master at steering federal largesse to his constituents. Meanwhile, a small revolution may be about to occur in the House: a record number of women are running, and they may double their representation in Congress.

Washington's Monument

Seniority and control over federal expenditures: both are powerful assets that Washington Democrat Warren Magnuson touts in his campaign for a seventh term in the Senate. Ironically, they may also be his greatest liabilities.

Magnuson, 75, chairs the powerful Appropriations Committee, which heavily influences how the Government will spend its half-trillion dollars a year. He is also the ranking Democrat on the Budget and Commerce committees. In effect, he only needs to nod to have federal money steered toward his constituents. Boasts he: "Washington gets more federal money per capita [$1,850] than any state in the union." Everywhere there are signs of "Maggie's" vast power: $951 million of relief for the victims of Mount St. Helens' eruptions, $5.7 billion in hydroelectric projects on the Columbia River, including the $1.5 billion Grand Coulee Dam complex. Federal grants and contracts to Washington have exceeded $80 billion during his past 13 years as Senator.

But federal fiscal restraint has become attractive even to voters in Washington. As a result, Magnuson's pork-barrel record is no longer the asset that it was in past campaigns. Says his moderate Republican opponent, State Attorney General Slade Gorton: "I'm not saying Maggie hasn't done good for this state. He has. I'm saying he has now become part of the problem of ravaging inflation, and that I'm part of the solution."

Gorton, who looks a little like Henry Fonda, has argued more cases before the U.S. Supreme Court than any other state attorney general (14) and initiated antitrust suits against some of the state's major industries and banks. He has a campaign war chest of $400,000 with the help of timber and small-business interests, but he is still being outspent more than 2 to 1 by Magnuson.

Nevertheless, Gorton, 52, is running almost even in the polls with Magnuson, partly because of an issue that he tends to run around rather than confront directly: the incumbent's age. The Republican organized a 62-mile relay run from Seattle to the state capital of Olympia to file his election papers, running nine of the miles himself. The contrast with the portly Magnuson, who now walks with a shuffle and has a hearing problem, was obvious. Seated in his state office, surrounded by pictures and mementos of the eight Presidents with whom he has served, Magnuson says, "I may walk a little slow. But the meeting doesn't start until I get there, and it doesn't stop until I bang the gavel."

Iowa's Fullback

Pugnacious. The word fits liberal Democrat John Culver as well as his football helmet did when he was a fullback at Harvard. Now, after ten years as a Congressman and six as a Senator from Iowa, the beefy Culver, 48, is running for re-election with all of the ferocity that he once showed on the gridiron. His opponent this time is not simply mild-mannered Republican Charles Grassley, 47, a conservative Congressman and corn farmer, but the entire New Right--the antiabortion, anti-liberal and conservative-evangelical Christian groups that have put Culver on their nationwide hit list.

Feet apart, fists chopping the air, Culver roars that he received a zero-percent rating from Christian Voice, a fundamentalist lobbying group. With fire and brimstone in his voice, he adds sarcastically: "If you were for SALT II, you couldn't be a good Christian. If you were for normalization of relations with China, you couldn't be a good Christian. My opponent [who got a 100% rating] voted against foreign aid. What would Jesus Christ have said to that when 1 billion people in the world are going to bed hungry every night?"

His opponent, the boyish, personable Congressman, neither looks nor acts like the venomous creation of the New Right that Culver depicts. To Culver's charge that Grassley accepted campaign funds from out-of-state oil and chemical companies and right-wing groups like the National Conservative Political Action Committee, Grassley notes that the incumbent has received money from out-of-state labor unions and New York City liberals. Says Grassley: "Who's a tool of what organization? He talks about N.C.P.A.C., but what about ADA [the liberal Americans for Democratic Action]?"

While Culver is at his bombastic best before large groups, Grassley is in his element in one-on-one encounters with voters, on street corners, at coffees, in backyards. He is trying to focus his campaign on the economy. Says he: "I am diametrically opposed to John Culver, the biggest spender in the Senate. He has never voted against a single spending bill to come out of the Senate. These policies have brought the U.S. economy to its knees." By contrast, Grassley has regularly opposed foreign aid and voted no on many spending bills, including the 1979 bill to raise Congressmen's annual salaries by $3,000 to $60,662.

Both candidates are equally matched in budgets (more than $1.4 million apiece) and, according to polls, in support among voters. Thus no one in either camp disputes Culver's analysis: "We're in the fourth quarter, and we're even."

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