How Reagan Plans to Win

...The efforts of both volunteer networks will be buttressed by a multi-million-dollar burst of the extremely effective TV commercials that the Republican Congressional Campaign Committee began running late last year...

...In his two weeks of August campaigning he appeared in Chicago, Boston, Dallas and Columbus, Ohio...

...in order to make the evening news in the Eastern and Central time zones...

...He also trailed President Grover Cleveland in the popular vote...

...Far more typical then-And clearly, in Reagan's opinion, now-was the attitude summed up in the usual climax to his Vietnam pitch: "Let us tell those who fought in that war that we will never again ask young men to fight and possibly die in a war our government is afraid to let them win...

...He and his wife also have moved from California to a rented estate in Northern Virginia, so that his weekly forays will no longer require him to get up at 4:30 or 5 a.m...

...It all sounds too pat, though...

...He is certainly not writing off the Deep South-nothing ventured, nothing gained...

...Republicans are marching under Reagan's banner from coast to coast...

...At the same time, his words appear designed to get his views out to like-minded Frost Belt Democrats and independents, many of whom were previously preoccupied by the more dramatic two-way battle between Carter and Senator Edward M. Kennedy...

...Mrs...

...Washington-USA HOW REAGAN PLANS TO WIN BY ANDREW MOLLISON Washington The euphoria that bubbled up in Ronald Reagan's headquarters right after the Republicans emerged from their harmonious National Convention in Detroit last July has moderated to a gentle optimism...

...His treasurer's one firm boast, however, is that the party is two months ahead of schedule in paying off the 12-year-old debt from the Robert Kennedy and Hubert Humphrey campaigns...

...To many reporters who have been traveling with him since the primaries began, everything Reagan says in these early days of the autumn race seems carefully crafted to reassure the 500,000-1 million volunteers he expects to use in the Sun Belt that he has not changed...

...Using video cassettes, it has trained 435 volunteers as its congressional district chairmen, and will employ cable television to train and motivate tens of thousands of workers attending living-room meetings later this month for volunteer recruitment and voter registration, identification and turnout...

...Such "slips," it is complained, could alienate the very constituencies Reagan must seduce away from the Democrats this fall...

...Rewriting history to make the antiwar sentiment seem dominant is to diminish the sacrifice and frustration of those who opposed the war...

...Kinder's forces, run by the Reagan-Bush Committee, include veteran workers recruited mainly from lists compiled by the Citizens for the Republic, the group that held Reagan's 1976 organization intact...

...But the AFL-CIO's semi-soft endorsement of Carter could mean that Labor, traditional supplier of most of those volunteers, will not match the Republicans body-for-body...

...Reagan enters the fall stretch at the head of disciplined, well-supplied GOP brigades, operating under a settled chain of command...

...They are using Republican National Committee and Reagan-Bush mailing lists for direct mail and personal "major gifts" solicitations of their own...

...They also have the technology Hanna never enjoyed to help train the foot soldiers who are central to the carefully drawn GOP battle plan for breaking the Democratic grip on the White House, the Senate and (in heady daydreams) possibly even the House of Representatives...

...Republic of China" in advocating "official" nongovernmental relations with Taiwan, "a noble cause" in describing the Vietnam War, and occasionally "military superiority" instead of "margin of safety"-what Reagan wants the the United States to have over the Soviet Union...

...But he counts on volunteers to carry his water in most of the South and West...

...Plans for special appeals to important constituencies-such as black voters-were crossed out of the budget just before Labor Day...

...But he won in the Electoral College because he held his Western base and led in six of the seven largest Northern constituencies...

...Nor is it clear that the Democrats-preoccupied with the John Anderson threat and the formation of ad hoc "independent" pro-Reagan groups-realize the implications of their opponent's hope to field 1 million grassroots workers, or one for every 160 voting-age adults...

...In 1976, under new campaign laws partly inspired by the indifference of Nixon's political mercenaries to the fate of other Republican candidates, President Gerald Ford had the opposite problem-too little money and too little time...

...Reagan is currently concentrating on the same territory-California and the Northern industrial states-plus Texas and Florida, which are more important today than they were in General Harrison's time...

...This appeared in the prepared text of a major address and was inserted there, aides who requested anonymity assured reporters, by Reagan himself over the objections of his staff...

...In 1980 the Republicans are ready...

...The Republicans have a man, a plan and a party...

...He persists in using shopworn phrases...

...But those who are close to the GOP candidate say they anticipated his slide in the polls following President Carter's success in portraying himself before the August Democratic Convention in New York as a centrist opposed to extreme liberal views...

...By repeating his views in two shipyards and before two veterans conventions, Reagan left the news media no alternative but to once again report in depth the positions he outlined last spring...

...House, the day after his 1980 acceptance speech, referred to casually as "the so-called Roosevelt coalition...

...involvement in Vietnam...

...The challenger, in other words, is attempting to revive the older Western-Northern alliance that in 1888 made Benjamin Harrison the last Republican Presidential candidate to defeat an incumbent Democrat...

...Reagan, as he has said time and time again-And there is no reason not to believe him-does not intend to broaden his support by watering down his ideas...

...More plausibly, they base their rosy claims of impending victory on their elaborate national coordination of the drives of Republican candidates ideologically united at all levels, on their superior money-raising potential, and on the near certainty that for the first time since Dwight D. Eisenhower's Citizens' Campaign of 1952 they will have more volunteer workers than the Democrats...

...Even more than his words, Reagan's itinerary makes clear that his strategy is to strip away the Northern portion of what the Southerner in the White Andrew Mollison, a frequent New Leader contributor, is chief political writer for the Cox Newspapers...

...One of Reagan's first "slips" was his reference to the Vietnam War as "a noble cause [in which] a small country newly free from colonial rule sought our help in establishing self-rule and the means of self-defense against a totalitarian neighbor bent on conquest...

...The only loose cannon on the deck of Reagan's ship, some staffers grumble, appears to be the candidate...

...Democrats usually make up for their lack of money with a plethora of volunteers...

...Lewis' outfit, known around Republican headquarters on Capitol Hill as the "Commitment 80" program, will assist all GOP candidates...

...The wonder is that the Republicans can keep their optimism under control...

...After officially kicking off his fall campaign with Labor Day speeches in Jersey City and in Detroit, two ethnic and blue-collar totems once conceded by Republicans to Democrats, Reagan scheduled appearances up to mid-September included Jacksonville, Philadelphia, Indianapolis, Chicago, Milwaukee, Cleveland, San Antonio, and Houston...

...In a campaign plan hurriedly slapped together in late August, Ford's managers put so much of his money into mass media that almost nothing was left for buttons, bumper stickers and leaflets...

...Before the campaign is over, every American will be familiar with their theme, "Vote Republican, for a Change...

...But why should they have objected...

...A recent "theme week" stressed defense...

...Richard Nixon had so much money in 1968 and 1972 that he simply hired professionals to run phone banks and carry out the other dreary details of old-time politics...

...Harrison lost the South, along with Connecticut, New Jersey, Delaware, Maryland, Kentucky, and Missouri...

...They face a ragged, un-dersupplied Democratic militia whose congressional and state party colonels accept only grudgingly, if at all, the orders of their commander-in-chief...

...The bulk of the money for this operation is being raised by state parties-most of them free from, or only loosely restricted by, spending and contribution limits...

...Different Democrats are running with, without or against Carter...

...The Democrats have Jimmy Carter and the record he and the Democratic-controlled Congress have compiled...

...Democratic National Chairman John White makes brave sounds about raising $ 1S million in supplemental fall campaign cash...

...In 1972 you didn't need an elaborate volunteer structure, because you could spend as much money as you could raise, and in 1976 we didn't have enough time to get it together after the nomination fight," says Drew Lewis, deputy chairman of the Republican National Committee and deputy political director of the Reagan-Bush Committee...

...He believes they are popular and merely need to be communicated this fall to people who have not yet heard the message...

...Even at the height of the Vietnam War, it was only a determined minority-never a majority of Americans-who became disenchanted with the Cold War rationale for the U.S...

...Perhaps they did...

...Lewis and Lorelei Kinder, political coordinator of the Reagan-Bush committee, head two complementary national networks of volunteers organized as well as any legions the legendary Mark Hanna ever fielded...