WASHINGTON REPORT: Ford Against Ford: Ford Loses

...You can take your choice of any of those degrees on the concern-through-panic scale...

...What gives it class in this year's context is that it is Ford's old stuff, not Reagan's particularly...

...The shape of Reagan's victories, of his achievement of the fleeting state of front-runner, from which it is so much easier to drop back to equal, head-to-head competition than it is to attain that equality from far behind, the shape of that achievement is derived from Japanese wrestling, in which, unlike our own, the object of the contender is to use the opponent's strength against him...

...Panama is an exotic, as they say in horticultural catalogues, but the defense "issue" of course has been around in pretty much the same shape as that enunciated by Reagan for die last thirty years...

...When Reagan was still confronting the dread problem of welfare mothers getting free food for their children, Ford was already grown middle-aged working for the Pentagon and for the general foreign-policy attitude represented by the invade-Panama-now-school...

...In that time there hasn't been a Chairman of the Joint Chiefs-that incredible title that sounds like a corporation of tomahawks but is actually more involved in wampum-who hasn't raised the same alarm, cried, The Russians are coming, The Russians are coming...

...It takes the breath away...

...The rhythm so far-that basic aesthetic component totally lacking elsewhere-has included a climax in the clean sweep in Texas and in the serious unsettling of the President in his home state of Michigan and certainly looks forward to a grand climacteric in Reagan's "home" state of California...

...The answer is yes, although that makes no difference in the results...

...He is temporarily taking over the "Washington Report" column for Sisyphus, who is ill...

...The case with Kissinger is hardly less satisfying from an aesthetic point of view...

...Various sets of figures have been used to prove that the Russians have overtaken us in arms superiority, that, in fact, they have achieved superiority themselves, that they are about to do so any moment now, and that they have attained the possibility of so doing and that possibility will increase steadily so long as one cent of this nation's budget is spent for anything other than arms...

...Sic transit and so long, Henry...

...What makes the difference is winning in such a way as to create a certain satisfying shape to the victory, one, for example, of exquisite simplicity, or one of elaborate complexity in which each element falls into place at precisely the right moment...

...The more precise of the two issues has been the Panama Canal, which Reagan holds to be as much an American land as Texas and which he has accused Ford of wishing to give away to Panama, now in the hands of a military dictator...

...While all right-thinking (in either sense) citizens would like to believe that the large-scale repudiation of Ford by voters of his own party has been at least partly based on a deep-seated desire finally to be done with Watergate-Ford being not only the maintainer and enhancer of such Nixonians as have not gone to jail, but also himself, after all, the last gift of Richard Nixon to his country-the political analysis with the highest credentials has been unanimous in rejecting any such assumption...

...A novelist, a playwright, a movie-maker, would hesitate to risk such a turn because of the credibility problem, yet there it is, happening daily before our eyes...

...and got the key to the Treasury for a month or so...

...He has done this simply by winning a number of them from President Ford, one or two of them quite handsomely...

...The Reagan Panamanian position is remarkable chiefly as being the first time in memory an American right-winger has come out against a foreign military dictator, most of whom are traditionally regarded by our right as the bastions and best friends of what is rather mysteriously called "the free world...

...On the contrary, it seems quite clear that Reagan has toppled Ford with two issues and, to be sure, a resonance from those two issues that sounds through half a dozen others and itself constitutes if not a foreign policy exactly at least an attitude toward foreigners and foreign affairs...

...FRANK GETLEIK...

...He is one of the great slaughterers of all history, a bomber on a scale far surpassing the efforts of his fellow sanguinary scholars, Dean Rusk and Walt Whitman Rostow, and all of the swarms of people he has bombed have been Communists, or Communist-sympathizers, or Communist dupes, by definition...

...The more general issue, hence the harder to refute, has been the current state of the American military establishment in relation to that of the Soviet Union...

...For this, he is to be turned out as soft on the Commies...

...Not that the campaigners have been drenched in class, far from it...

...The gestalt class of class, however, has been lamentably absent until recently...

...Ford is being beat over the head with Ford, automatically an aesthetic development of a certain elegance...

...Ronald Reagan, of all people, the last man in the world one would suspect of trafficking in class of any kind, least of all gestalt class, has brought that precious quality into the primaries...

...That's class...

...As for poor, "decent" Jerry Ford, child of the television age who was all along labeled self-destruct, in his vanishing he reminds us that those who take the missile gap will fall into it...

...Mere winning, however, isn't enough, 01 Jimmy Carter would be the classiest thing since Elsie de Wolfe...

...McCarthy is the only candidate with any valid claim to credentials in philosophical activity-(if you think Governor Brown's Jesuitical past necessarily involves such activity, you think Kant and Hegel exist in the history of thought as "adversaries")-and, appropriately, McCarthy is actually exemplifying in his campaign one of the basic philosophical problems, the one about the tree falling in the forest: Does a political campaigner have class if no one is aware of his campaign...

...When the front runner is running frontally on the basis of his plea to the voters to trust him and on his belief in love, the bemused private elector cannot but think he is back with John P. Wintergreen only without the laughs...

...The meaning is the same in all cases: Ford has been dangerously lax in giving the military all it deems essential, as a result the defenses of the country are in pitiable shape, and we may expect the Russians at the Ambrose Light or the Golden Gate some time in the next few years, perhaps months, depending on the enthusiasm of the speaker and the response of the crowd...

...It's old stuff...

...With Cardinal Wolsey, that premature Metternichian, Kissinger can well say, Had I but serv'd sweet Peace with half the zeal I serv'd red War, it would not in mine age have left me naked to mine enemies...

...Old stuff, to be sure...

...The Russians are always coming, and if anyone suggests Penta-gonians should not go duck-hunting with their hardware merchants, still worse that naval commanders are responsible for their aircraft carriers decapitating lesser vessels, such suggestions are clearly made to give aid and comfort to the enemy, even now steaming toward Montauk at a good clip, only to be repulsed by cash and lots of it...

...He is being pilloried as soft on Communism, not hard line enough and so on...

...In Reagan's case, this technique has been the easier, since Ford has voluntarily and consistently brought his own strength-or what he sees as his strength-to bear against himself, operating in ideology and political action much as that keen observer, Chevy Chase, portrays the president as acting in the world of physical objects and obstacles...

...On the count of personal, elocutionary style, only Eugene McCarthy has regularly demonstrated first-class class and on that count, he doesn't count, we are reminded whenever we ask...

...So far there has been almost no class in the presidential primaries, speaking not of the campaign style of the various candidates, but rather of the form, the aesthetics of the shapes revealed in the structures of planning, contests and outcomes...

...It is Ford, not Reagan, who has whooped it up for higher ever higher Defense Department budgets, Ford, not Reagan, who has cautioned that one dollar pared from the subsidy of the Joint Chiefs' lunchroom would bring the godless Communists up the Potomac, Ford, in short, not Reagan, who over the years has actually accomplished a great deal, not just talked about it, in turning the country over to the Pentagon to do with as it will...

...Good Heavens, there is not an anti-Communist in the country who has actually worked the line to such effect as Henry...