The primary points

...Kemp—and Reagan—say they want tax cuts not just for corporations, but for working people, too...

...Whether Kennedy could have avoided this by dealing with Chappaquiddick forthrightly early in the campaign is a question that will plague him and his advisors long after 1980...

...Tolerance, plus market economics, plus perhaps a sense of the need for some limited social provision for the poor...

...And this is not an ideological decision...

...His stand on rationing has at least partially assuaged this constituency...

...And that alliance is likely to survive the Kennedy campaign...

...In many ways, the most suitable ideology for the professional middle class is a mixture of social liberalism and economic conservatism—an ideology that in the nineteenth century was called simply liberalism...

...Even in New Hampshire, where Kennedy's economic issues began to work for him, Carter's margin was over 10 points...

...What has not caught on at all is Brown's effort to tie the need to sacrifice for the environment with the need to sacrifice to rebuild the American economy...

...But Reagan also profited from the tax-cutting ideology of Congressman Jack Kemp, a Republican conservative who seems determined not to write off the poor and the working class as part of a new conservative majority...

...Kennedy's record of losses rivaled that of the 1962 New York Mets until the home folks in Massachusetts rescued their senior senator...

...Why...

...But he won't be able to repeat it often enough to win the Republican nomination—unless masses of Republican Convention delegates undergo a miraculous ideological conversion...

...And all the more so since he embraced wage price controls, gas rationing, and social justice as major campaign themes...

...Primarily, I think, because the Democratic primaries so far have been a referendum not on Carter but on Kennedy...

...Kennedy's campaign, in short, is one that appeared to have learned the lessons of the New Politics' failure, as preached from the right by Ben Wattenberg and from the left by Michael Harrington...

...And his success in drawing liberal middle-class students and professionals may owe something to this, and to the politics of sacrifipe that he preaches...

...These were Democrats, and Kennedy's is a decidedly Democratic campaign...

...Bush is struggling...

...Not since Wendell Willkie have the kids from Exeter and Andover had so much to cheer about...

...Commonweal: 168 inside the Republican party...

...But there was something different about this campaign and these campaign workers, gathered on the Saturday morning before the New Hampshire primary to cheer a white-haired Republican Congressman from Illinois...

...Americans overwhelmingly disapprove of his handling of the economy—and his apparent decision to counter inflation by allowing more unemployment is not likely to help him...

...On these issues, too, he is far out of line with a substantial body of Republican opinion— though perhaps not as much so as on defense questions...

...To be sure, the AMA and militant conservatives continue to loathe Kennedy...

...The mansion was farther down South Main Street than most of the other candidates' headquarters, but it also had a lot more room, and charm, and so it could accommodate the couple of hundred students from Exeter and Andover and colleges around New England who imagined that this is what it was like to knock on doors for McCarthy in 1968...

...And Gerald Ford of course wavered for a week and then decided not to enter the race...

...And it wasn't that they weren't part of a "constituency of conscience" — God knows what else besides moral thrills, a touch of history, and some good fellowship there was to be had out of the Anderson campaign...

...JR., is a reporter for the New York Times...

...Gerald Ford may be right and Reagan could turn out to be the Barry Goldwater of 1980...

...In a sense, he might be thought of as The Highest Stage of Hopeless Liberalism...

...Their clothes were less expensive—and not designer jeans, either...

...They don't much like Jerry Brown, either, about whom more in a moment...

...Their accents were thick with the English dialects of Dorchester or Lawrence or Fall River...

...Commonweal: 170...

...On the Democratic side, the only bar to a Carter renomination would seem to be the entry of a new Democratic candidate into the race...

...Anderson has bred excitement so far because his successes, however transitory, mark the return to the American political scene of the ideology that had gone the way of Wendell Willkie, Liberal Republicanism...

...IT was a chilly afternoon in Concord and the old mansion that John Anderson's campaign had managed to commandeer for the New Hampshire Primary was filled with preppies...

...It is also an ideology France's Giscard d'Estaing talks a lot about...

...If John Anderson is the candidate of the liberal preppies, George Bush is the candidate of the conservative preppies...

...Americans seem to have reached a collective decision that for very personal reasons, they cannot accept Edward Kennedy as president...

...These volunteers were scruffier...

...And enough economic bad news could cause a major shift away from President Carter...

...And he won the Massachusetts primary, the New York Times /CBS New Poll found, primarily because he drew the support of thousands of liberal Independents who picked up Republican ballots on primary day...

...Most members of these groups would otherwise go with Kennedy, who is drawing some support on both issues...

...And George McGovern actually won the Democratic nomination...

...The appearance of this ideology inside the G.O.P...

...Still, there was a difference, perhaps best summarized by the fact that this was a Republican campaign...

...Gerald Ford is itching to make the economic issue the centerpiece of his campaign...

...He even gave Kennedy a backhanded compliment for hitting the economic issues harder than the Republicans...

...Gary Orren, Kennedy's polling coordinator, said after the New Hampshire primary that while the senator got clobbered in the French Canadian wards of Manchester, he did extremely well in the French working class mill town of Berlin...

...And he has done best among the poorest and most economically distressed...

...could draw in many confused middle-class liberals who never have been comfortable, with trade unionism or memories of Roosevelt...

...At least Gene McCarthy succeeded in getting Lyndon Johnson to resign...

...Some will no doubt argue that Kennedy's defeat will help bring down this alliance...

...On the Republican side, Connally and Baker are out...

...The polls show that Kennedy cannot even win strong majorities among those who disapprove of President Carter...

...Adding to the hopelessness of Anderson's quest is the fact that there just are not enough primaries he can win...

...The economy is the time-bomb ticking inside the president's popularity ratings...

...It has talked about the race issue, but generally in the context of economic growth or in attacks on the Carter administration's record toward cities...

...And Kennedy's unfocused media strategy, well-analyzed recently by Sidney Blumenthal in the New Republic, certainly contributed to this crystallization of public mistrust...

...And yet the campaign is a disaster...

...That, I think, is a mistake...

...But Kennedy's campaign, like John Anderson's, is not a total loss, though for almost exactly opposite reasons...

...At the Conservative Political Action Conference this year, a board game called "Chap-Acquitted" was a hot item...

...There is a tendency on the Left, and among Republican moderates like Gerald Ford, to write off Ronald Reagan's chances in November...

...On the contrary, he is embracing a policy which includes low-cost gasoline, a position which enraged many a middleclass liberal who saw Kennedy ducking the energy issue...

...Interviewed on CBS the night of his much-needed primary victory in Massachusetts, Kennedy barely answered the questions he was asked and instead gave several short speeches in which he used the words "economy" and "economic" at least a dozen times...

...In New Hampshire, Reagan clobbered Bush among the Republican working- and lower-classes, in part because of the attacks of the Manchester Union Leader on Bush and because of Bush's ties to the Trilateral Commission, a group Reagan's supporters made out to be the modern equivalent of the illuminati...

...The point is that John Connally was at least partially correct when he said, in announcing his withdrawal from the Republican race: "I think the popularity of President Carter today is a fantasy...

...He is not making any fight to speak of in the South...

...What is remarkable about the Kennedy effort so far is that on a thematic level, it has avoided almost all the mistakes that plagued New Politics liberals in earlier elections...

...Because, said Orren, Berlin was one of the most economically hard-hit areas in an otherwise prosperous New Hampshire...

...But they didn't look much like the Oxfordcloth kids who populated John Anderson's mansion in Concord...

...But in the liberal fascination with Anderson, something important is being lost: that on many crucial economic questions, like government regulation and tax cuts for corporations, Anderson is very much a Republican...

...But the voters have yet to make the connections Brown makes, and he continues to founder...

...WHICH LEAVES us with the small matter of who will get nominated and elected this year...

...And yet, at this stage of the 1980 campaign, John Anderson has emerged as 1980's liberal hero...

...The Kennedy forces will no doubt keep arguing that Iran and Afghanistan made all the difference, and there is no doubt that the actions by the student militants and the Russians bolstered Carter when he badly needed help...

...Kennedy's successes, such as they have been, were built on economic issues...

...In some states like Wisconsin, which permit Democrats to vote in Republican primaries, Anderson may be able to repeat this feat...

...And whatever happens to Anderson, the recreation of liberal Republicanism has to be seen as a beneficial event, because it may help to rid American politics of a great deal of posturing and cant...

...Jerry Brown, in the meantime, has done exactly the opposite of what a global thinker would like to accomplish: He has put together one-issue groups in a tiny coalition...

...To Brown, the attempt to link these concerns with a balanced federal budget and attacks on multinational corporations is intellectually exciting and coherent...

...It has resolutely stayed away from social liberalism...

...A Kennedy victory, therefore, now seems almost inconceivable...

...This confusion makes a mess of the party system, and renders middle-class liberals the laughing stock of neoconservatives, trade unionists and leftists alike...

...One of the most interesting turns of events on the Republican side is Reagan's success in assembling a conservative populist coalition, the sort Daniel Bell and Seymour Martin Lipset warned against in the fifties, and that conservative William Rusher dreamed of in the seventies...

...If Kennedy could somehow manage to win both Illinois and New York, his candidacy would once again take off...

...It could, but I doubt even the most loyal Kennedy operative believes this will really happen...

...Instead, Kennedy's campaign is hitting hard and constantly on economic themes designed to unite the Democratic party's base and take advantage of the low marks the public gives the Carter administration's handling of the economy...

...The Kennedy strategy appears to be to stick around until the big, final day of primaries comes, when California, Ohio, and New Jersey pick delegates, and hope the president has faltered by then...

...The point is that Kennedy has begun the task of resurrecting a left position inside the Democratic party built around economic issues, and has galvanized union and liberal support around these issues...

...His agenda is not Roosevelt's—or Kennedy's...

...Kennedy is not preaching sacrifice to the working class, something that often appeals to the conscience of the middle class...

...But if Americans are unhappy with Carter, they are even more uncomfortable with Kennedy...

...On foreign policy issues, he is a dove, far out of step with the mass of hawkish opinion E.J...

...What Brown is succeeding at is drawing the intense anti-nuke types to his camp, and winning a lot of anti-draft folks, too...

...John Anderson, who has run the most costefficient campaign in either party, will be- able to stay right until the end...

...But John Anderson has no apparent way of winning the Republican nomination...

...It is an ideology that finds a tweedy, comfortable home in the center factions of many European conservative parties, especially the British Tories...

...Which meant that those gathered felt no profound sense of attachment to trade unions, Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal, sweaty jobs, immigrant grandparents or the other cultural baggage carried, or eventually picked up, by those who choose to immerse themselves in Democratic politics...

...In failure, John Anderson may help restore a whole class's political identity...

...In and out of the doors they came, young volunteers who had come up from Boston...

...This sort of prediction is, of course, extremely hazardous...

...But it's at least possible that given an angry electorate, a weak economy and rising unemployment, the Kemp ideology, given resonance by Reagan's abilities as a campaigner and an orator, could grant America's conservatives the victory they've been waiting two decades to win...

...But Kennedy has been losing the election so far among liberal and working-class people who agree with him on many issues, but have decided not to trust him...

...28 March 1980: 169 But Carter is winning despite himself...

...It wasn't just their class background—that was similar to the pedigree of the McCarthy legions a decade and two years ago...

...It could also help clarify the muddle that is now the Democratic party—a party whose ranks are swollen with middle-class liberals and moderates, many of whom make it to Congress and then vote like Republicans on traditional union and economic issues...

...But it's more likely that only a Kennedy candidacy could have brought it together...

...IN FRONT of Edward M. Kennedy's New Hampshire state headquarters in Manchester, the busses were parked and rumbling...

...On social issues, he supports environmentalists on many matters, favors the Equal Rights Amendment, and has maintained his commitment to the civil rights movement, a commitment born out of Anderson's revulsion at the assassination of Martin Luther King and his reassessment of the duty of a Christian politician faced with the poverty of millions of black people...