EDITORIAL:

...The Democrats can dally longer and nurture the hope that if the situation gets totally bleak Senator Edward Kennedy will fish their fat from the fire by accepting the presidential nomination, something he would apparently prefer to defer to 1980...

...Gerald Ford has made official what had become ludicrously unofficial: he will be a candidate for election to the office he holds by sheer accident...

...Yet the Democratic party stumbles blithely along without decisive leadership and, more's the pity, without substantive program of its own...

...There is much to be admired about Senator Humphrey, and he is a valuable person to have back in the Senate...

...Editorials TOWARDS 1976 In the summer of '75, the lineup takes partial shape for the presidential race of '76...

...Seldom in the history of the country has the political challenge been more clearly defined-or been greater- for an opposition party...

...When one reads, for instance, that the presidential stock of Hubert Humphrey is rising in the party, one wonders where Democratic eyes are trained...

...If, between now and convention-time, Ford falls on his face as figuratively as he sometimes does literally, Reagan will presumably formalize his entry into the race...

...If there are not other reservoirs, not just the party but the country is in a bad way...

...One thing is certain: If the Democrats stick with their politics of reaction and wheel out old political war-horses, they can kiss the '76 presidential election goodbye.oodbye...

...Perhaps there is time for a party as struggling and uninspired as the Democrat party presently is to recover itself and make a real contest of the upcoming presidential election...

...But one is not reassured by the manner in which the Democrats are proceeding...

...This means that Ford will be the standard-bearer...

...But there is a kind of William-Jennings Bryan quality to the talk that projects him as the party's nominee...

...But no new pattern has been set...

...The evidence of its inertia and current ineptitude is not only in its inability this late in the competition to raise up a truly impressive single presidential candidate, much less a promising slate of aspirants, but also in its ongoing inability to produce programs of remedy for critical public issues, such as the energy problem-despite what seemed an open invitation from the White House many months ago to come up with answers that were beyond the administration...

...The warnings are in his every utterance and in almost everything he does, most notably his 36 vetoes...

...There may be precedent, but there is no sacred rule that a presidential nominee must come from the Senate or a governor's office...

...The party, in a word, needs new faces fully as much as it needs new ideas...

...Almost simultaneously, former Governor Ronald Reagan of California has given his go-ahead to a committee "to explore and possibly organize" his candidacy for the presidency...

...The poor and the deprived of American society do not fare well in the Ford philosophical framework, but the investment community does and so does corporate America, for such is the Ford orientation and the disposition of his administration...

...Among other measures, Ford has vetoed a farm bill, an attempt to provide public-service jobs, a housing provision, curbs on strip mining and, most recently, a health-care appropriation that, as one Congressman noted, amounted to no more than the cost of one Trident submarine...

...The Republican party will thus offer its members a choice between a McKinley conservative and a California reactionary, with the likelihood that McKinleyism will be blessed at the Republican National Convention...

...What's to be done...

...Fortunately, the latter veto was overridden by the Congress and there will be money after all for new programs on rape prevention, migrant worker health centers, the treatment of hemophilia and the education of nurses...

...Four additional years of Gerald Ford is nothing to regard sanguinely...

...The future promises more Ford vetoes of progressive, humanitarian legislation, with many of them being sustained-and more politics of privilege...

...Or, they can undertake a crash program of ideas and launch a talent search that extended beyond the usual precincts -particularly political ones...