THE DEMOCRATS : FEUDS & FACTIONS

...The last of the pragmatic hopes for restoring the old party, Robert Strauss, has looked around and seen that the new activists are too numerous, too hard-working, too important to the party's fortunes to be downgraded...

...Reformers threatened to take the party to court if the DNC overruled the work of the Commission, which was mandated by the 1972 convention...

...A few years ago, we celebrated the emergence of the "new" Nixon...

...Before the 1972 convention, the AFL–CIO was reportedly cool to these guidelines, particularly those on affirmative action...

...and one Jackson...

...Most became active in the McCarthy, Kennedy, or McGovern campaigns and remained active on the state or local level...

...The politically active unions, except the Steelworkers, went outside COPE to set up Labor for McGovern units...

...A compromise there gave Strauss his way on the size of the Compliance Review Commission and on proportional representation starting when a candidate got 15 percent rather than 10 percent of the vote...

...Long-time Wallace nemesis and national party loyalist Robert Vance (who backed Southern moderate Terry Sanford for the '72 nomination) easily beat back the effort to gain a Wallace majority and a Wallace chairman for the state party...

...The Vietnam war, as a domestic political issue, is over...

...Some states had primaries...

...Veterans of the McCarthy, Kennedy, and McGovern campaigns had formed the New Democratic Coalition dedicated to the politics of peace and new priorities...

...Later, when COPE and CDM called for more labor representation on party bodies, JACK CLARK they defined most of the McGovern backers in the labor movement as "New Politics people...

...For that to happen, discussion is, of course, a prerequisite, and for discussion to occur, Barkan and his friends will have to end their pointless boycott of party task forces and their war of silence against Strauss...

...The upcoming party charter conference will be another sore point...

...ANNE ARMSTRONG, then White House counselor, speaking about the Democrats, July 16, 1974...

...Proreformers in the labor caucus were delighted and hopeful...

...To sort all this out, we must backtrack to the 1964 Atlantic City convention, where the Mississippi Freedom Democratic party challenged the all-white Mississippi delegation...

...Barkan himself told Midwest governors that Strauss was his worst political mistake...

...That might have been true earlier, but since 1972 so many McGovern people have achieved party office, you cannot regard them as ideologically regular...

...These new activists are the people motivated by the civil rights or antiwar movements, the student upsurge, the women's movement, or by the upheavals of the 1960s and early '70s...

...Their real animus is directed against the "kooks and crazies" (COPE Director Al Barkan's phrase) who proposed the guidelines and favored McGovern...

...Barkan himself put it succinctly, "We didn't need all these women and youth to nominate Roosevelt, Truman, and Kennedy...

...He didn't win it by going to Birmingham and praising Wallace's courage, or by offering Wallace the vice-presidency...

...There was a brief flurry of publicity, some speculation that the mid-term conference would be absolutely dominated by Wallace's followers, some solemn headshaking by the young graybeards around the Coalition for a Democratic Majority ("see was `participatory democracy' has wrought...

...People in the party ranging from Mikulski and McGovern to Mayor Daley to George Wallace liked the whole package, and the effort to unravel it failed...

...Some state chairmen didn't like the "in all party affairs" phrase, and CDM-COPE agreed...

...The drafting, Barkan argued, should be done by the entire Commission...

...After failing to get support from major elected officials, Strauss took his case to the DNC Executive Committee...

...One reformer has cockily predicted that the New York NDC delegation will outnumber the national Wallace delegation...

...occasionally a few state chairmen will join them on this or that vote but not enough to carry the vote...

...On Wallace, much has been said and most of it is silly...

...The reformers recognize that and show an openness toward new issues and alignments...

...Enough of this "New Left nonsense" about participation, let's get on with building an institutionally based, institutionally representative Democratic party...

...Ex officio delegates might be broadly representative, but, given the Muskie experience, there was little reason to believe that elected officials represented their constituents' views on presidential preference...

...As a vocal supporter of Israel, he gained attention when war broke out in the Middle East...

...Between '68 and '72, McGovern staked out his chief issue, Vietnam, and his base constituency, the antiwar Democrats...

...The strongest resistance came on affirmative action...

...Statements from black mayors who rely on his largesse to keep their cities running are cited as indications of his new, liberal attitudes on race...

...Their solution was to drop the language entirely, or to broaden it to call for affirmative action for all Democrats...

...One of the CDM's patron saints, Albert Shanker, has gone so far as to propose the rejuvenation of the old Democratic party urban machines...

...There is, though, very little indication that COPE or CDM will object to very much in the present guidelines...

...Then came the fireworks...

...A month later, the drafting committee presented its report, and the full Commission unanimously adopted new guidelines on October 27, 1973...

...But the "regulars" in these states were the people who had run the local McGovern campaign and gone on to party office...

...In 1968, as a continuation of the work begun in 1964 and in response to the upheavals and insurgencies of the Kennedy and McCarthy candidacies, the antiwar platform resolution, and the charges that the convention was run undemocratically, the convention went further...

...Strauss, unwilling to take the reformers on, didn't move on that proposal, and it died...

...COPE supporters voted for the guidelines while reserving an option to vote against them when the issue came before the DNC...

...If only we're nice to him, the Democratic reasoning seems to run, then maybe he'll deliver us his votes...

...If the right-wing candidate John Schmitz did not demonstrate that in 1972, George Wallace himself offered us proof in 1974...

...Alan Baron, the director of the Democratic planning group and perhaps the closest student of the party's internal wrangling, divides the Wallace constituency into three parts...

...Some of the states chose delegates two years before the convention...

...If Wallaceite efforts to take the country by storm have failed to create enthusiasm far from home, Wallace's personal efforts to capture the Alabama party has been a disaster from his point of view...

...So Jackson began his campaign early, identifying his issues as a too-easy detente and an insufficient military readiness, and shaping his base constituency around those concerns and his support for Soviet dissidents and for Israel...

...The always pragmatic Robert Strauss has carefully worked to keep him in the Democratic fold between elections, and Jackson has offered him the vice-presidency...

...After the Stevenson defeat in 1956, Democratic National Chairman Paul Butler put together a series of task forces on specific issues and the Democratic Advisory Council...

...And the May 1973 CDM report on delegate selection goes into more detail...

...The internal party skirmishes are interesting and instructive, but what they're really about is party leadership, leadership that is not determined by commission decisions and is rarely established by DNC votes...

...Charging that the labor movement had been excluded, insulted, and ignored in Miami, Meany decreed neutrality...

...He is also been taking a lot of speaking engagements, and his sudden rightward shift on national health insurance smacks of ambition...

...The reformers opposed both recommendations...

...responsive to the will of the voters—the delegates' presidential preferences had to reflect the presidential preferences of the voters, preferably in the same proportion...

...California party leaders, afraid that such a move would diminish the importance of their state's primary, prevailed on the commission to let them keep the "winner-take-all" primary...

...Barkan pushed Strauss to double the size of the Delegate Selection Commission by appointing "more representative" members...

...All that is aimed at the famous "Wallace constituency," 13 percent of the electorate in 1968...

...He lost on that one, too, but only after a long, bitter fight ending in a legal ruling that the Commission's work was reviewable by the full DNC...

...The affirmative-action language was changed...

...Wallace himself still has tremendous personal appeal...

...The reformers want to make the mid-term conference a party institution to deal with policy and issues...

...The new approach was that affirmative action in delegate selection was fine, but THE DEMOCRATS: FEUDS & FACTIONS 521 not in "all party affairs...

...The reformers were ready to compromise up to a point...

...Not much effort would have been needed to do so...

...Interestingly, quite a few trade unionists sided with reformers on guidelines...

...To avoid repeats of the 1972 convention fights, the "winnertakeall" primaries were abolished, and proportional representation down to the precinct level was established...

...That should have been the end of the controversy...

...Now the Democrats could go on to issues surrounding the new party charter and the charter conference, party positions on public policy issues, etc...

...In very few states did the presidential preference of the voters have anything to do with the delegates' preferences...

...after all, Al Barkan is helping to finance George McGovern's reelection campaign...

...Women in the NDC, in Americans for Democratic Action, and in the women's caucus of the Democratic National Committee decried attempts to backpedal on affirmative action...

...But there is no "Wallace constituency" without Wallace...

...Or they were liberal office-holders...

...When Strauss offered Meany lieutenant Lane Kirkland, Meany speechwriter Tom Kahn, and Meany ally Bayard Rustin positions on the Democratic task force on domestic policy, all three refused...

...AFL–CIOers contend that such conferences could be embarrassing, if the Democrats hold the White House...

...Of those selected, one committee member had favored George Wallace for president in 1972...

...Except for some of them who didn't —like Bill DuChessi, one of Barkan's more outspoken defenders, who cochaired New York Labor for McGovern, and Mike Johnston of the Pennsylvania AFL–CIO, a Barkan choice for the Democratic National Committee, who risked his job by actively backing McGovern...

...Wallace personally lobbied members of the state committee after the primary election (in which a Wallace slate had run for state committee...

...After the '72 election, CDM charged a different kind of exclusion against representatives of the majority of—to use Scammon and Wattenberg's phrase—unyoung and unblack Democrats...

...After the election, Barkan delivered enough votes to elect Robert Strauss Democratic national chairman...

...There lies the goal for CDM, Barkan, and COPE...

...No matter what Wallace does in '76 to win "his" voters, to challenge the Republicans, the Democrats will need to develop some Democratic stands or at least approaches on foreign policy, energy, inflation, and unemployment...

...But, in a closed labor caucus, a surprise came...

...All these reforms, of course, affected the demographic (though not the political) composition of the '72 convention...

...but what Kemble—and Barkan—want is not...

...Those things affect it, of course, but leadership in the Democratic party is determined by elections, by the selection of a presidential nominee, ultimately by the election of a Democratic administration...

...The New Democratic Coalition is asking its candidates for the interim conference to focus not only on issues of war and peace, but also on the economy, the energy crisis, inflation, and unemployment...

...In more recent months, CDM and COPE spokesmen have denounced Strauss for selling them out on the delegate selection guidelines...

...three McGovern...

...The jockeying for the 1976 Democratic presidential nomination has already begun, while the fights that divided the party in 1968 and again in 1972 still smoulder...

...Still, the vote was unanimous, and the substance of the new guidelines offered a hopeful compromise...

...If he does, that will probably hurt the Republicans more than the Democrats...

...The story of Democratic divisiveness from the '72 convention through the November election is all too well known...

...Instead, Al Barkan boasted at regional COPE meetings that the labor movement had a lot of women, a lot of minority-group members, a lot of young people, and that COPE would go out, get people involved in all the liberal campaigns, THE DEMOCRATS: FEUDS & FACTIONS and create a large labor delegation at the '72 convention...

...Jackson has been fortunate that these and other issues have been breaking in his favor...

...No other politician has gained as much from the interest in the plight of Solzhenitsyn, Sakharov, and other dissidents and minorities in the Soviet Union...

...The commission found a lack of any system in delegate selection...

...Before the vote, Strauss had pushed for some major changes, mostly in areas dealing with the proportional representation rules and the scope, authority, and membership of the Compliance Review Commission...

...The Democratic Black Caucus also rose to defend this provision...

...Mikulski insisted that the reforms were a series of compromises, and to unravel one might unravel the whole package...

...THE DEMOCRATS: FEUDS & FACTIONS 525...

...The reformers wanted to do away with the "winnertake-all" primaries in which 51 percent of the vote carried 100 percent of the state delegation...

...Outside the official party structure, a diverse discussion group, calling itself the Democratic Forum, has been sponsoring discussions on some difficult issues...

...still others had state conventions to select delegates to the national convention...

...The drafting committee that emerged demonstrated a willingness on the reformers' part to compromise...

...The controversial thinking of the Advisory Council sometimes irritated the Lyndon Johnson-Sam Rayburn congressional leadership, but it also developed some of the progress Kennedy campaigned on in 1960 and some of the ideas his Administration implemented— such as Medicare, civil rights legislation, the new economics of Walter Heller, the disarmament theories of Paul Nitze...

...All of this has earned him a sometimes grudging respect among the very "New Politics" constituency his own supporters seek to drive away...

...Included in this "New Politics" faction are such noted "upper-class crazies" as Leonard Woodcock, the officers of the Communications Workers, the Machinists, the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, the Graphic Arts International Union, and Barbara Mikulski, the Baltimore city councillor whose political base is in that city's blue-collar ethnic neighborhoods and who headed the Com mission on Delegate Selection...

...After a summer of taking testimony from party activists in cities across the country, the Mikulski Commission met in September of 1973 to draft revised guidelines on delegate selection...

...To develop a party consensus on these issues will require the Democrats to come up with some answers...

...CDM wanted to avoid the possibility of affirmative-action language being used to impose quotas in the future...

...Barkan's staffers announced that the affirmativeaction language was alright, most of the reform proposals were alright, and compromise was possible...

...Restore the good old days, with the good "old-boy" network and with convention delegates we can deal with...

...The Labor for McGovern activists had worked with the reformers in 1972, and many of them openly resented Meany's indifference to the outcome of the election...

...In the wake of that challenge—and the compromise settlement—the 1964 convention adopted a resolution barring discrimination in delegate selection...

...timely—delegates had to be chosen the same year they would serve...

...Then, communication stopped...

...And the fight was on...

...Instead, affirmative action was demanded to "encourage participation in all party affairs" for these previously underrepresented groups...

...The DNC accepted that, but the affirmative-action language caused a new uproar...

...Ironically, a compromise on this very point, which regulars wanted and reformers didn't, insured the nomination for McGovern...

...The authors praised the work of the McGovern-Fraser Commission and agreed that many of the reforms were needed...

...If he doesn't, it will be very difficult for him to "deliver" his votes to any Democratic ticket, including a ticket he's on as vice-president...

...But the rancor of the delegate selection fight lingered after the fight was settled...

...Not only should there be ex officio delegates and delegates chosen by the state committees, but the rest JACK CLARK of the delegate slots should go to established leaders—party officials, party fund-raisers, labor and community leaders...

...But there was no preconvention effort to scuttle any of the reform guidelines...

...the new delegate selection rules were reasonably noncontroversial, and the body charged with enforcing the rules, the Compliance Review Commission, was carefully balanced politically and demographically...

...Strauss, behaving more cautiously, has set up a similar Advisory Council, though this one is limited to elected officials...

...Once again, it is fascinating to watch the hardliners' imitation of the "New Politics" strategy...

...Of course, issues other than delegate selection enter into the fray between the Democrats and COPE...

...The hard-line anti-McGovernites were, from all appearances, set to duplicate the strategy, as they had perceived it, of the "New Politics" forces after the 1968 election...

...One of Barkan's friends and allies complained, "Mikulski was the one that counted, and we got screwed...

...The old machines are hanging on with difficulty in the cities they still run, and, as ever, the local offices are far more important to them than the national ticket...

...State parties were required to draw up and fund affirmativeaction plans, subject to review by the national party...

...There, also, lies the failure of CDM and COPE...

...Senator Jackson, who at times has shown open contempt for the reformers, is taken seriously by a great number of them...

...Those votes went to Humphrey because Humphrey himself and George Meany and Walter Reuther led a campaign to take Wallace's record onto the shop floor and to expose him as the demagogue he still is...

...others had closed caucuses of party leaders...

...But even with the new rules, which will make a first ballot nomination difficult, a lot of party activists guess that Kennedy can have the nomination if he wants it...

...A commission to study delegate-selection rules was mandated...

...Just what "ideologically regular" means in a nonideological party is unclear...

...in 1972, they voted for Nixon...

...New Politics" activists, concerned with limited job opportunities for women, blacks, youth, and the hardest-hatted Meany partisan can, or should, be able to agree on a full-employment program...

...More recently, he and Advisory Council Chairman Arthur Krim have moved to set up task forces for discussion on foreign and domestic policy...

...Some states forced delegates to vote against their own preferences for the presidential nomination...

...The "insurgents," in many instances, were Wallace enthusiasts or Barkan operatives...

...five Muskie...

...The national party leaders of the Kennedy-Johnson years, the John Baileys and Larry O'Briens, have learned to deal with the new issue-oriented Democrats and are hardly eager to lead a battle against them...

...Barkan wouldn't talk to Strauss, and he blocked the Democratic Chairman's efforts to reach Meany...

...With those compromises, a reform-moderate alliance had the votes on most issues...

...True, most of them voted for Nixon in 1972, but Hubert Humphrey won their support in 1968...

...While a number of unions contributed money and volunteers to the June Democratic telethon, COPE was conspicuous by its absence...

...Henry Jackson's prime supporters in and around the AFL–CIO's Committee on Political Education and the Coalition for a Democratic Majority are smoldering the hardest about such things as the retention of most of the McGovern-Fraser guidelines for delegate selection...

...the most explosive issues had been finessed...

...Kevin Phillips has speculated that, given such resources, Wallace will choose the third party route...

...There is a very sizable group of Dixiecrats in transition—old-line Southern Democrats who are having increasing difficulty identifying with the national Democratic party...

...Another reform complaint against the Barkan hard-liners is that their candidate, Jackson, has been "soft" on George Wallace—even though Wallace's aides on national Democratic party bodies have voted with the reformers rather than with the regulars...

...five Humphrey...

...Delegations no longer had to reflect women, youth, and minorities "in proportion to their presence in the population...

...Just as the McGovern campaign was launched with no real hope of success in 1968, so was Henry Jackson's bid for the nomination in 1972...

...The Barkan people are hoping that no matter how many setbacks they suffer in the internal wrangling, their tendency will emerge victorious in the party with the election of Scoop Jackson as president...

...These "New Politics" elitists are also alleged to be the direct descendants of the most destructive New Left tendencies of the '60s and to pursue as their chief political goal the destruction of the labor movement's po litical clout...

...520 In May 1973, CDM issued a detailed report on the delegate selection procedures used in the '72 primaries...

...The "kooks and crazies" (the term Barkan constantly uses to describe almost everyone who supported McGovern) are reputed to be a small corps of university- and media-based elitists representing no one in the Democratic electorate...

...In the 1968-72 party bodies, reformers presented charges that women, blacks, and racial minorities had been excluded from party decision-making bodies...

...Reform club presidents and building trades workers alike are beset by double-digit inflation...

...When Jackson's name comes up, one sometimes hears something to the effect, "Well, he's not my first choice, but I could certainly support him if he got the nomination...

...On the whole, unlike most CDM statements until then, the report was balanced, reasonable, almost conciliatory...

...Just as NDC activists became involved in the internal workings of the Democratic party, in commissions, on the Democratic National Committee, so CDM operatives moved into that kind of activity...

...But the sense that the "regulars" were re-assuming control became so pervasive that CDM Director Penn Kemble told the Washington Post: Because a person is a party official, he is not necessarily regular on the ideological issues...

...The "kooks and crazies" or, as they prefer to call themselves, reformers, aren't fond of Barkan and his hard-line friends either...

...Their first move was to dump McGovern's Democratic National Chairwoman Jean Westwood and replace her with Robert Strauss, a conservative Texan...

...It is necessary to note that many of these Wallace voters will cast a "protest" vote for JACK CLARK Wallace, as in the Michigan primary, but will not support him in the general election...

...Another source of friction is what Barkan sees as excessive independence of DNC staff...

...Since January 1, he has raised $750,000, mostly from small contributions...

...Or they were McCarthy volunteers who were now on the state committee...

...The other two candidates for the '76 nomination who have received any attention at all are Senator Kennedy and Governor THE DEMOCRATS: FEUDS & FACTIONS 523 George Wallace...

...But we shouldn't be overly pessimistic...

...On some issues, they disagreed with the Commission, and on two guidelines in particular they recommended change: the affirmative-action language and the proportion of delegates chosen by the state committee and/or automatically seated ex officio...

...Early in the year, Wallace announced that he would mobilize in every state to elect delegates to the mid-term conference...

...This is illustrated by the results of the delegate selection for the mid-term conference...

...CDM declared itself dedicated to traditional (i.e., cold-war) liberalism and political alignments...

...Barkan and friends followed the "neutrality" line in 1972...

...The new rules allowed state committees (provided that the committees met certain requisites) to choose 25 percent of a state's delegation—just the percentage CDM had demanded...

...Certainly to govern after a '76 victory, the Democrats will need some advance thinking on those problems...

...If that sounds confusing, hold on...

...They're fighting to restore a leadership that no longer wants to lead the national Democratic party...

...Compromises had been made all around...

...Now, in mid-summer, with al 524 most one-half of the delegates chosen, the Wallace upsurge is nowhere to be found...

...Such discussion is not only needed for elections, it is needed to heal some of the wounds of the last six years...

...Steelworkers President I. W. Abel had a vote on the McGovern Commission, though he never attended meetings...

...On the issues now before the Democrats— except for defense and foreign policy—there is real hope for reestablishing a party consensus capable of holding through the 1976 election...

...Now the Jackson partisans, with some help from COPE and Democrats for Nixon and propelled ideologically by some Social Democrats, formed the Coalition for a Democratic Majority in 1972...

...If the reformers sometimes define the conflict in misleading terms, Barkan and his allies do so habitually...

...There is the hard right-wing constituency—the Birchers, Minutemen, and other assorted extremists who voted for Wallace and Schmitz...

...When it was over, Vance had retained the chairmanship by a 66-51 vote...

...Arguing for ex officio delegates or delegates chosen by the state committee, the CDM report reasoned that public officials, elected in high turnout elections, were more representative of Democratic voters than delegates chosen in low-turnout primaries...

...New Jersey Governor Richard Hughes headed the Special Equal Rights Committee to enforce the guidelines...

...Finally, in February 1974, the Democratic National Committee, after a week of behindthe-scenes maneuvering, adopted the new rules in slightly modified form...

...now we suffer through the merchandising of a "new" George Wallace...

...Then Barkan shifted to fighting against a drafting committee that was to be appointed by Mikulski from the Commission membership...

...In state after state, the local and national press reported a "turn to the Right" by the Democrats as the "regulars" defeated insurgent slates...

...But in 1974 and probably again in 1976, COPE will allocate money and personnel to reelect some of those "kooks and crazies" to Congress...

...They have been willing to compromise on such internal issues as delegate-selection guidelines...

...He mobilized to get his people elected in the Massachusetts delegate selection for the interim conference, and that kind of activity in state politics is unprecedented for a Kennedy...

...Ironically, this is happening when Jackson's most ardent partisans (with some assists from the Senator's staff) are sealing themselves off from any dialogue with the rest of the party...

...His predictions were accurate, for the labor delegation to the Miami convention was the largest ever...

...Finally, there are the northern bluecollar and lower-middle-class voters who back Wallace on such "social" issues as busing...

...So Barkan and his shrinking circle of allies battle alone on internal structural party issues...

...THE MCGOVERN Commission surveyed all this and came up with recommendations emphasizing that the delegate selection pro cess had to be: • open—no more caucuses, no more straight appointment of delegates...

...The Jackson partisans have been vociferous in their dislike of those guidelines and have opened battle to get rid of them immediately after the 1972 election...

...Then came the energy crisis, a topic on which Jackson was well prepared...

...522 All the issues that divide the CDM-COPE hard-liners from the rest of the DNC, indeed from the rest of the party, have to do with the entrance of new types of activists into the party...

...These issue-orientated Democrats became, in many localities, the new regulars...

...If he had voted against the affirmative-action language, it would have been defeated...

...After the convention, Party Chairman Fred Harris, in consultation with Hubert Humphrey, appointed the commission and named George McGovern its chairman...

...Americans for Democratic Action devoted its most recent convention to the problems of achieving equality throughout the society, and the speakers' roster included Jerry Wurf, Geno Barone of the National Center on Urban Ethnic Affairs, and Richard Scammon, coauthor of The Real Majority...

...Barkan sought, unsuccessfully, to prevent the appointments of UAW VicePresident Olga Madar, Communications Workers President Joe Beirne, and Machinists President Floyd Smith to the Executive Committee of the Democratic National Committee...

...National party figures parade through Alabama praising his courage...

...Former hawks, trade union leaders Joe Beirne and Floyd Smith, are close allies of the reformers on the national party bodies...

...All of that seems remote right now, and perhaps counselor Armstrong is correct that only the big BandAid of Watergate, which now has been ripped off, could hold the Democrats together...

...One NDC activist summed up the irony: "It turned out that George Meany is more ideological and more concerned with the `style' issues than any of us ever were...

...A variant of the respectful theme praises Jackson's diligent and competent work on issues...

...But most controversial, at least in retrospect, were the "affirmative-action" provisions, which outlawed quotas and then called on the states to send delegations reflecting "in proportion to their presence in the population" women, youth, and racial minorities...

...These were the same COPE meetings in which Barkan assured his activists that labor would mobilize to elect even George McGovern over Richard Nixon...

...Mickey Griffin, an aide to the Governor, was assigned to the job...

...Of Senator Kennedy's intentions much has been guessed and little is known...