How to Make Votes Count

...Irish-Americans, nearly 80 per cent of whom voted for Lyndon Johnson in 1964, have since voiced their increased assimilation by supporting the likes of Mario Procac-cino...

...There is a lesson here for those eager reformers bent on the destruction of the organizational superstructures that Chicago's Mayor Richard Daley, New York's Joseph Crangle, and their much maligned and rapidly disappearing comrades built...

...Perhaps, but the point clearly requires some qualification in the present highly volatile political atmosphere...

...The Election Game offers some ideas for defeating Nixon this November that make a queer sort of sense, but in the context of the ongoing campaign they have the status of political museum pieces...

...Thus, where Napolitan urges a "negative" strategy centering on criticism of Nixon's record, McGovern seems intent on stressing his own programs and speaking as the leader of a movement rather than as the Democratic standard bearer...

...Napolitan expresses a fondness for his clients, but cannot always understand them...

...Many forget that Dwight Eisenhower commanded strong backing from Catholics and blacks in his second campaign...

...less noted, however, is the opposition expressed by Jews and Chicanos, traditionally the more liberal of the ethnics, to even a mainstream candidate like Tom Bradley, whose 1969 bid to unseat Los Angeles Mayor Sam Yorty was frustrated by a campaign of demagoguery and radical baiting...

...law and order, and other aspects of the social issue have figured prominently in an election...

...We learn, for example, that registration among Northern blacks and Chicanos, two Democratic bulwarks, has actually declined in the past decade...

...Since the candidates he happens to like are usually liberals like Humphrey, Shapp and Mike Gravel, this will comfort some people...

...The antipathy displayed by Italians and Slavs to black mayoral candidacies in Newark, Cleveland and Gary is already well documented...

...Probably the candidate is not resisting so much as asserting that it is he who is running for office, and not some phantom creation of makeup men, television producers, advance men, press aides, speech writers, and other specialists who earn their livings in the burgeoning enterprise of political image-making...

...The problem with The Ethnic Factor is that such perceptions are too often left unstated, forcing the reader to extract his own conclusions from the welter of charts, graphs and polls...

...This movement toward the Republicans was reversed by John F. Kennedy's religious and ethnic appeal, and by the economic fears Barry Goldwater stirred...

...One involved a newspaper supplement, ostensibly nonpartisan, that was in reality a clever propaganda outlet backed by supporters of Mike Gravel...

...6.95...

...Nelson Rockefeller, it will be remembered, nominated Richard Nixon for his second term, and Ronald Reagan added his blessings as temporary convention chairman...

...An even more marked conservatism has been registered by Italians, particularly when racial polarization...

...Nelson Rockefeller, James Buckley, and the late Thomas Dodd...

...And as we are constantly informed by such divergent sources as Kevin Phillips and the editors of the New Democrat, 1972 may inaugurate an actual, if temporary, period of political realignment where the majority of ethnics are concerned...

...Despite their reputed anti-Semitism, Poles and other Slavic voters have supported such Jewish candidates as Milton Shapp, Abraham Ribicoff and, yes, even Arthur Goldberg...

...The careful media preparation, the use of computers, all the advanced techniques of electronic campaigning that he so eloquently advocates, are already in the Republican arsenal...

...Discussing their failure to properly utilize camera crews, he laments, "Candidates are a strange breed...

...Many of the techniques one might applaud when appealingly presented by Na-politan, however, differ only slightly in degree from tactics deplored as slick and manipulative when portrayed in The Selling of the President...

...Moreover, he is no exponent of media campaigning, having succeeded in the primaries though the old politics of tight organization and vigorous precinct work...

...In some ways the most valuable of the demographic studies spawned by the chaotic 1968 election and the consequent rise of the "social issue," it contains a statistical wealth that adds up to some disturbing possibilities for the Democrats' Presidential aspirations...

...Not that Napolitan's approach is going entirely unheeded...

...It's no coincidence that party organization and machine politics entered their death stage with the advent of electronic campaigning," he asserts, adding: "I for one think this is good, not bad...

...Indeed, if his bitterly divided Democratic friends do not appear inclined to follow Napolitan's advice, the Republicans seem way ahead of him...

...Ironically, it is where healthy old-line machines continue to trot out the faithful in awe-inspiring numbers that white ethnics steadfastly adhere to the party of their ancestors, no matter how liberal the candidate may be...

...Napolitan, who has worked in three Presidential contests, assures us that there is nothing sinister or Machiavellian about his trade, and that he only works for "Democrats I like...

...They show that the Slavs, popularly considered the most conservative and bigoted of our ethnic blocs, are second only to the Jews in being the most persistently liberal of the various European immigrant groups...

...The data collected in this book also pose some penetrating questions about the future of black urban politics and obliquely suggest that the hostility generated by the Negro's self-assertiveness may be a semipermanent fixture of the big-city landscape...

...Still, there have been periods of erosion...

...Nonetheless, Kramer and Levy perform a much needed service in exploding a number of unwarranted myths about the prides and prejudices of the American electorate...

...So well put together was the magazine that Senator Ernest Gruen-ing purchased preelection advertising in it, thus helping to finance the insurgent who was soon to unseat him...

...A second Napolitan ploy was a television commercial that, even with the disclaimer, could have easily been mistaken by the inattentive viewer for a regular news broadcast...

...All of the ethnic and racial groups examined by Michael S. Kramer, a political researcher, and Mark Levy, associate national affairs editor at Newsweek, have on the whole remained "good Democrats...

...For Joseph Napolitan, ethnic appeals are relatively unimportant and the organizational politics they symbolize are passe—both having become victims of the rise of the media in campaigning...

...The Election Game By Joseph Napolitan Doubleday...

...292 pp...

...In 1968, Hubert Humphrey again suffered from the erosion of support among the white, ethnic Democratic core...

...Reviewed by Arch Puddington Research Director, A. Philip Randolph Educational Fund The political analysts for whom 1972 has proved an embarrassing series of miscalculations and uncertainties would do well to spend an evening poring over The Ethnic Factor before November's denouement...

...Sometimes they resist the obvious...

...Similarly, while insisting that his profession is honorable and honest, Napolitan cannot resist celebrating some of his more deceptive—and spectacular—coups...

...The Election Game, in fact, is a 292-page panegyric to the profession of political consulting and the use of media...

...For their part, the authors seem self-consciously committed to proving that the majority of white ethnics have not and in the foreseeable future will not stray from the Democratic fold...

...Nor has the GOP ignored Napolitan's call for the intelligent and specialized use of unsuccessful Presidential aspirants to unify a party in support of the candidate...