California Surprise
GOODMAN, SANDY
NATIONAL REPORTS Los Angeles If you look at the record. Max Rafferty is a winner. He has never lost an election. He startled the entire nation last spring with his strong primary victory over...
...The respected Muchmore state poll, taken in early September, showed Cranston with a whopping 19-point lead over his Republican rival...
...On Vietnam Cranston is distinctly dovish...
...Besides publicly calling Rafferty a liar...
...Cranston is doing everything he can to make them feel at home, while struggling to hold together his own divided party...
...They first accused Rafferty of "Nine Big Lies," and later lengthened the list to 11...
...Figures obtained from the State Department's Agency for International Development show Rafferty's statements are true—as far as they go...
...Communist Czechoslovakia got 193 million of your dollars...
...On law and order—the issue he believes is even more important than Vietnam—he has called for the shooting of looters if such action is necessary to apprehend them...
...The one most often mentioned was Rafferty's accusation that Kuchel voted to use U.S...
...and a symbol—a funny-looking two-headed cartoon creature that is half blue elephant and half orange donkey...
...No one, it turns out, except Max Rafferty...
...Having enunciated this "big lie," Rafferty promptly goes on to "nail it firmly to the wall of history with the nails of truth," by pointing out that all four American wars in this century began under Democratic Presidents...
...The rest was for flood relief in the 1950s, and credits for surplus American property left there at the end of World War II...
...Cranston's solution is similar...
...He has even dreamed up a name for his renegade Republican supporters—Gopacrats...
...California Surprise By Sandy Goodman understatement...
...Kuchel handled Rafferty's attacks by ignoring them...
...Rafferty's biggest problem in this campaign stems directly from the kind of campaign he waged against Kuchel...
...But this initial impression of Rafferty fades when one examines what he is saying...
...He favors stopping the bombing of the North immediately in order to help the Paris peace talks, demonstrate U.S...
...Rafferty answers that he has held his own views for many years and that he did not borrow them from anyone else...
...As for Hungary, surplus property credits during the 1946-48 period accounted for 15.9 millions, and unrra contributions during that time for 2.4 millions more...
...Yet there are a number of indications that the loser may beat the winner in November...
...In "Let's Stop Kidding Ourselves," he declares: "We're kidding ourselves when we try to buy international peace by giving money away to our international enemies...
...good faith, and test Communist sincerity...
...Although Rafferty can be humorous, his normal political posture is that of a hard-hitting, no-nonsense advocate of old-fashioned conservatism...
...Rafferty knocks aside opposing arguments with words like "baloney" and "poppycock...
...Communist Albania got 20 million...
...And he adds that "you cannot have law and order without justice...
...That is an Sandy Goodman is a writer with the National Broadcasting Company...
...But what Rafferty does not say is that all the money given to Russia was donated by the U.S...
...Cranston's strategy is to take the offensive, although he has repeatedly turned down Rafferty's challenges to debate...
...He startled the entire nation last spring with his strong primary victory over California's three-term incumbent Thomas Kuchel—the second-ranking Republican in the U.S...
...Asked if he regretted having made it, he replied that he did not, because Kuchel had not complained...
...The candidate himself seems un-worried...
...In his "Republican Party" speech, for example, he labels as "Lie Number One" the notion that "The Republican party is the war party...
...He has brought minority group members into the state school administration...
...Cranston and his Gopacrats have charged that Rafferty used "smear tactics" against Kuchel...
...Some of Rafferty's active supporters are clearly worried...
...As Assembly Speaker Jesse Unruh, a man who ought to know, once remarked: "In California politics, I've learned never to be surprised at anything...
...And the great, broad expanse of forehead under his thinning white hair gives him an intellectual look that makes him seem even more convincing...
...Cranston has charged that his opponent's views on Vietnam and law and order are similar to those of George Wallace...
...Communist Hungary got 31 million...
...Rafferty is no racist...
...Khrushchev's "we will bury you" statement, was not made until the 1950s...
...The truth is that while the United States has granted $9.4 billion in aid to France since the end of World War II, very little of that assistance went to governments headed by de Gaulle...
...While I used to place polls in the same category as science fiction, and enjoyed them accordingly," Rafferty quips, "I now place them in the same category as Grimm's fairy tales...
...And you know how helpful de Gaulle has been in getting rid of our gold supply for us...
...According to the findings of a Democratic poll, nearly half of those who voted for Kuchel in the primary now favor Cranston...
...The remaining 13.2 millions were spent in the period from 1953-57, for Danube flood relief and assistance to "our enemies," the refugees of the Hungarian Revolution...
...Rafferty's other distortions are more serious...
...Among the examples that Rafferty cites are these: "We've given $186 million to Communist Russia, at a time when it was trying to bury us, and didn't mind saying so...
...but he did not explain his statement, either...
...Senate hierarchy...
...On the stump, Rafferty creates an impression of self-assurance and forthrightness...
...But in this astounding political year, when the nation's Number One loser appears likely to become its Number One winner, the signs of a Cranston victory might just prove correct...
...In Orange County, the state's traditional stronghold of Right-wing sentiment, a young lawyer working for Rafferty was pessimistic: "I'm for Max," he told me, "but I don't think he's going to win...
...Rafferty charges that Cranston's stand brings him "perilously close" to endorsing "a policy of national treason...
...His sentences are well-focused and carefully directed...
...But who called the Republicans the war party...
...De Gaulle was only in power for six months during that entire period—the last half of 1945...
...If you look at the record, Alan Cranston is a loser...
...That, of course, is quite true...
...He never fluffs or gropes for words...
...His tactics in the primary alienated thousands of liberal and moderate Republicans, many of whom have waltzed into the waiting arms of the Democrats...
...between 1946-48 as postwar relief through the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (unrra...
...When he ran for reelection as State Superintendent of Public Instruction in 1966 on a nonpartisan ticket, he outpulled the combined vote of Ronald Reagan and Edmund Brown in their respective gubernatorial primaries...
...One liberal who observed Cranston's lackluster campaign style and reflected on his record as a vote-getter summed up the reaction of many people: "He would probably make a very good Senator...
...A lot of people who would normally vote for Humphrey are going for Nixon this year...
...The aid given to Albania was in the same category, as was 183 of the 193 millions that went to Czechoslovakia...
...Recently, when a reporter confronted him with the fact that no such vote was ever taken, Rafferty did not deny it...
...Ideologically, Cranston is a rather orthodox liberal...
...Rafferty's prescription for ending the war is to turn matters over to the military and follow their advice on how to conclude it "as quickly and inexpensively as possible...
...funds to build a steel mill in Red China...
...After two terms as California's State Controller, he was defeated in his 1966 re-election bid...
...He has lost his past two elections...
...The titles of two of his five set speeches, "Let's Stop Kidding Ourselves" and "The Republican Party: Target of the Big Lie," also give the impression that here at last is a man who is going to cut through the fog of uncertainty, half-truth and downright lies that pervades politics today...
...Who is spreading Lie Number One...
...They'll salve their consciences by voting for Cranston...
...But Nixon is as far right as they are willing to go...
...Cranston is a bland, lackluster candidate...
...The first sentence of his own campaign biography somewhat self-consciously describes his political style as "without flamboyance...
...If negotiations fail, Cranston favors phasing out American troops and replacing them with South Vietnamese...
...Rafferty's long-range solution to racial unrest is more jobs for unemployed Negroes in business and industry, encouraged by Federal tax incentives...
...Rafferty points out that the Muchmore poll showed him six points behind Kuchel just a week before his 70,000-vote victory in the primary...
...He is a flamboyant personality, a dynamic speaker, and the darling of California's Republican right wing at a time when a strong conservative tide is running in the state...
...In that same speech, Rafferty goes on to say: "De Gaulle's France received a whopping nine billion from us...
...But he is for neighborhood schools, and against bussing and compulsory open housing laws...
...When he talks about trouble in the streets, however, he emphasizes "peace and security" more than "law and order...
...Almost all of the aid was given between July 1, 1945 and June 30, 1957...
...Despite a lengthy political career in California, he was upset in the state's 1964 Democratic senatorial primary by Pierre Salinger, a Virginia resident who had quit his job as President Johnson's press secretary to enter the contest only the day before the deadline for filing...
...A survey by San Diego real estate man Charles Kerch, an amateur pollster, indicated that Rafferty trailed Cranston by 300,000 votes at a time when Richard Nixon led Hubert Humphrey by half a million...
...The trouble is, you have to get elected first...
Vol. 51 • October 1968 • No. 20
