The Democrats' New Command
COTTIN, JONATHAN
TRYING TO PUT IT ALL TOGETHER The Democrats' New Command BY JONATHAN COTTIN Washington By any conventional measure, the chairman of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) has the least enviable...
...The choice for the job, C. Peter Mc-Culough, president and chief executive officer of Xerox, has meanwhile kept the door open to disenchanted party moderates...
...His admirers think the stocky Texan has the cunning and forcefulness to pull it off...
...Although the reformers continue Jonathan Cottin covers U. S. political affairs for National Journal...
...But its main task is to force California to abandon its winner-take-all primary the cause of so much bitterness last summer in Miami...
...Strauss has done nothing in his new job to deserve a moss-back reputation...
...He leaves no doubt that a refusal or a lesser amount would be interpreted as a personal insult, and usually extracts a promise that "the five" will be mailed by dark...
...When the name of the new Democratic treasurer was announced January 8 it was not Dees, but by then Strauss had presumably cemented his relations with the man from Alabama who might be able to fill the 1976 campaign chest with as much as $20 million...
...Strauss has been known to pick up $5,000 in less than two minutes on long distance...
...When he was DNC treasurer, laboring in the shadow of former Chairman Lawrence O'Brien, Strauss would spend his supper hours in a hotel dining room, a phone on the table, calling people and asking for money...
...So does the manner in which he went about selecting a new treasurer...
...and then ask about his wife...
...Thus far, Strauss has shown his willingness to compromise with the McGovern faction by ratifying exChairman Jean Westwood"s choices to lead the two party reform commissions created by the 1972 convention...
...Indeed, about the only thing of value the chairmanship confers is a sleek black limousine with the District of Columbia license number 32the year of Franklin D. Roosevelt's triumph...
...Well in advance of Miami, before he could possibly know the identity of the nominee, he created a 'Telethon Trust" to administer the proceeds from the preconvention Democratic fund-raising telethon...
...The first panel, assigned to draw up a new charter for the party's 1974 miniconvention, is headed by former North Carolina Governor Terry Sanford...
...Strauss will naturally continue to raise money for the party, too, simply because he can do it so well...
...Shifting effortlessly from sounding stern to pouring on the charm, he will call a prospect an "s.o.b...
...Now he is moving to eliminate the remainder, although since the bulk of it is owed to regulated industries chiefly the airline she is forbidden by law from settling for anything less than the full amount billed...
...For example, one day near the end of the 1972 campaign, while raising money for Democratic House and Senate candidates, Strauss had barely welcomed a visitor before he began one of his instructional talks...
...The Sanford Commission will undoubtedly consider such sensitive questions as denying Democratic affiliation to candidates who disown the platform, and refusing DNC campaign funds to incumbents who have opposed party policy...
...His party is fractured by ideological divisions...
...He usually started about 8 P.M., Washington time, because it was late afternoon on the West Coast and a good time to catch wealthy California Democrats who helped keep the party operational in the months before the 1972 convention...
...So dominant is his driving energy that he sometimes has difficulty stifling the urge to lecture others on the importance of hard work, one of the few beliefs he shares with the present occupant of the White House...
...The goal is to make the party's representatives in Congress truly national Democrats...
...Consequently, Donald Petrie, the interim party treasurer after Strauss left in July, was able to operate virtually free of harassment...
...The "Woodstock Commission," as Strauss has called it, must devise a new method of bringing minorities into the party's conventions without employing the odious quota system that undermined the real accomplishments of the other 1972 reforms...
...I paid for the reforms," he protested...
...Yet Robert Schwartz Strauss, the roundish lawyer-millionaire from Dallas, is not the sort to shrink from such adversity...
...Mc-Culough served as co-chairman with Strauss in last year's successful broad-based drive to raise funds for Democratic House and Senate candidates, and has been active in previous noncontroversial Congressional fund-raising efforts...
...Strauss' approach to the red-ink problem reveals a good deal about his method of operation...
...Anticipating that the Presidential campaign would be run by the national committee, as was normally the case, he designed the trust as a vehicle to pay off the 1968 creditors...
...The second panel, continuing the work of the old McGovern Commission, is under the leadership of Leonard Woodcock, president of the United Auto Workers and one of the men McGovern seriously considered for his running mate...
...One of the men under active consideration, he let it be known, was Morris Dees, the Alabama lawyer and direct-mail genius who raised more than $25 million for McGovem from small contributors by developing a mailing list reputed to be the largest of its kind in the history of U.S...
...Noting that it was the lunch hour, he told his guest there was a qualitative difference between himself and the thousands of Washingtonians who were at table that very moment: "Those s.o.b.s are sitting out there, starting their second martinis, and we're up here, sober and working...
...Strauss believes he will have convinced even the most skeptical that he is neither an ideological neanderthal nor a Democrat for Nixon...
...A Rhodes Scholar whose research on Democratic behavior formed the basis for Mc-Govern's successful strategy in the nonprimary states, Stearns is giving Sanford a quick course on what is wrong with the party...
...five thousand we can count on tomorrow...
...His accomplishment went unmentioned in the reformers' battle to keep him from the chairmanship until Strauss brought it up, sounding hurt that they could accuse him of being the archetypal Old Guardsman...
...And Richard Nixon is doing all he can to bring the one out of three Democrats who voted for him last November permanently into the Republican fold...
...On the contrary, he has been reaching out to all factions, meeting with everyone from Shirley Chishoim to George Wallace...
...The telephone is his instrument," says an awed associate...
...He fought bitterly for the privilege of serving as the Democrats' national chairman, and he is confident of his ability to solve the party's problems...
...The ultimate challenge facing Strauss himself in the months ahead, of course, is uniting all the factions in the party and preventing a fringe candidate, unacceptable to the majority, from running off with the Democratic Presidential nomination again in 1976...
...Paying 50 cents on the dollar, he reduced the debt from $9.3 million to its current level of $5.3 million...
...In this manner, Strauss raised the funds that made it possible for the McGovern Commission to complete its work and for the party to implement its reforms...
...to worry about his long friendship with John Connally of Democrats for Nixon...
...TRYING TO PUT IT ALL TOGETHER The Democrats' New Command BY JONATHAN COTTIN Washington By any conventional measure, the chairman of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) has the least enviable job in this city...
...He often tells a short, sometimes bawdy story before making his pitch: "My friend, I gotta have five...
...politics...
...That should already be clear from his record...
...As his staff director, Sanford has picked Richard G. Stearns, who ran the delegate operation for McGovern at the Miami convention...
...Meanwhile, as administrator of the Telethon Trust's $2.1 million in liquid assets, Strauss passed the word that if creditors wanted money, they must leave the party alone and come to him...
...Saddled with the $5.3 million debt remaining from Hubert H. Humphrey's 1968 campaign, the committee appears to have little prospect of raising much money in the near future...
...By the time he completes this first phase of party rebuilding, his crosscountry come-together crusade will have put him in touch with Connally in Texas, Richard Daley in Chicago, Dale Bumpers in Little Rock, John V. Lindsay and Allard Lowenstein in New York, as well as George McGovern...
...It was Strauss who labored loyally to save the party from its creditors during the 1972 campaign...
Vol. 56 • January 1973 • No. 2
