Autumn's Political Winds

...In light of all this, it could prove unfortunate for Republicans-and in the larger sense for the quality of the national political debate-that President Reagan cannot bring himself to speak t he language of leading women, blacks, unionists, environmentalists, or His-panics...

...Still, Reagan has all the resources and media access of a President...

...Another Republican who has been attracting attention of late is Ben Fernandez...

...Deregulation Reagan could sacrifice...

...In health, safety and social areas, many executives prefer quotas and goals to amorphous standards that make it harder to demonstrate compliance or assure that competitors are performing in comparable fashion...

...That-or a surprise no-go decision by Reagan-could lead to a GOP rerun of the Democratic follies of 1968...

...Or Reagan could be blessed with an opposing ticket as dull and cautious as the one Republicans put up against Harry Truman in 1948...

...might then play Bobby Kennedy...

...And because women outnumber men slightly among each party's voters, a decision by less than 20 per cent of the Republican women in key states to spank Reagan by voting for Fernandez could stretch out the GOP selection process to embarrassing lengths...

...Thus, despite the steepest membership decline since the 1920s, when unions lost 2 million of their 4 million members under a series of Republican Presidents, organized labor can conduct powerful efforts for its designated candidate, Walter Mondale...

...Pre-fering power to purity, the now delegates also ruled that if Ronald Reagan is the Republican candidate next fall, their board cannot endorse a third-party candidate...

...Walter Mondale sought support from Maine Democrats early this month as the only "real Democrat," one who consistently supported arms control and opposed Reaganomics...

...He subsequently campaigned hard for Reagan in that general election, failed to get a post in the Administration, expressed disenchantment with its economic policies, and has announced he will once more challenge the President...

...The quixotic Mexican-American millionaire lost to Reagan and almost everybody else in the 1980 Republican primaries and caucuses...

...On the labor scene, the biennial report to this month's AFL-CIO convention by its Executive Council revealed the degree to which both labor's motivation and its resources for beating Reagan had increased since the former actors' union president entered the White House...

...His potential battlegrounds in either Lebanon or Central America, though, lack the element of national pride and survival that the World Wars evoked...

...Several Republicans(Howard Baker, Robert Dole, Jack Kemp...

...Thanks to Watt, environmental groups have built up huge surpluses that, like treasury funds of the AFL-CIO, can be used to communicate anti-Reagan sentiments to members and their families without regard to limits on campaign spending set by Federal election laws...

...The 50 state and 737 local AFL-CIO central bodies are legally bound, and the affiliated unions are morally bound, to follow the convention's political lead...

...If Reagan withdrew, George Bush could be a Hubert Humphrey, backed hard, but too late, by his party's establishment at a convention dominated by crazies...

...This, combined with budget cutting, has increased the net worth of the Federation's general fund by $2.7 million in the two years that ended June 30...

...Mondale: Portrait of an A merican Politician, the updated workmanlike narrative by Finley Lewis of the Minneapolis Tribune...

...Mainstream economists expect it to continue only at modest levels, handicapped by Washington's pre-election failure to compromise on reducing impending deficits...

...Yet the report also shows that the AFL-CIO-by hiking its monthly per capita fee from 19 to 24 cents and welcoming the United Auto Workers back to the fold-raised its annual revenue from $32.2 million in 1981 to $42 million in 1983...

...Reubin Askew, still faithful to the $10-million-per-delegate strategy pioneered in 1980 by Republican John Connally, continued to rattle his tin cup in boardrooms, while floating above the vulgar hurly-burly to which less sensitive and more successful aspirants submit themselves...

...and Glenn: The Astronaut Who Would Be President, a fast-paced and frequently funny account by Frank Van Riper of the New York Daily News...

...The ladies were not fooled...

...But the recent hardening of Democratic rhetoric and the senior party's serious consideration of the media-feeding option of a female Vice Presidential candidate does not augur such a passive approach...

...Then she added matter-of-fact-ly, "A running mate who supports our agenda is bottom-line...

...So much for John Anderson redux...

...And in Chicago, Jesse Jackson was playing Hamlet so long that he may become the first minority Presidential candidate in a major party since 1976 to fail to qualify for Federal matching funds by New Year's Day...

...utive primaries to cut off the flow of matching funds that would finance Fernandez' attempt to become the Republican Eugene McCarthy of 1984...

...So to get beyond autumn's political posturing and prepare for the likely eventuality that after next summer's conventions the President will be squaring off against either Mondale or Glenn, one might consider looking at three recently published books: Reagan, the work that prompted the current Congressional investigation into 1980 campaign spying, by Lou Cannon of the Washington Post...

...George Mc-Govern, time-warped back from the pure air of 1972, was applauded politely when he announced that six-sevenths of his seven-person staff is female...

...On his Asian trips this fall and next spring he can depend on soft coverage...

...Nor does the Democratic Party seem poised to emulate the British Labor Party's suicidal Leftward march on defense policy...

...Probably only about 13.3 million AFL-CIO members are working today...

...He controls his party totally...

...The report showed that U.S...

...Among thedeclared hopefuls, only McGovern advocates cuts below present levels of defense spending or a unilateral nuclear freeze, and even he stops short of advocating unilateral nuclear disarmament...

...Among Republicans, meanwhile, the rhetoric of the Reagan revolution was replaced by talk about why the President had remained loyal to the finally departing Secretary of the Interior James Watt after his last roundhouse gaffe in describing the composition of his advisory committee...

...After allowances for overlaps, these constituencies will cast at least 60 per cent of the votes in 1984...

...Some Democrats have not changed...

...Business never liked it very much...

...They would instead resemble the unpopular half-wars in Korea and Vietnam that unseated the Democratic Party in 1952 and 1968...

...The organization was less receptive totwoothercontenders.Ernest Hollings was received with tolerant civility as he denounced tax-tax, spend-spend policies to an audience more interested in how to earn-earn enough to worry about how much it is taxed-taxed...

...John Glenn promptly told the Chamber of Commerce in Des Moines that Democrats are "smart people" and won't respond to candidates who "promise them everything under the sun to get their votes...

...That shows some political smarts advantageous to the Democrats and contrary to the impression left with certain allies dazed by now's erratic tactics during the waning months of the first Equal Rights Amendment battle...

...Reagan would have to hold Fernandez below 10 per cent for two consec-Andrew Mollison, a frequent New Leader contributor, is chief political writer for the Cox Newspapers...

...Domestically, his handlers can isolate him if necessary to limit off-the-cuff blunders should Fernandez or some other improbable Republican do reasonably well in the early primaries...

...A woman is our druthers," a now leader confided...

...Washington-USA AUTUMN'S POLITICAL WINDS BY ANDREW MOLLISON All spring and summer we political camp followers were snarling about the namby-pamby positioning and boring podium style of the Democratic Presidential candidates . But as autumn arrives they are at last obeying the perennial cry of the media: Let's you and him fight...

...Economic recovery is a different matter...

...membership in AFL-CIO affiliates had dropped from an average of 14.7 million in 1981 -82 to an average of 13.8 million in 1982-83...

...An alternative strategy, floated briefly by the usual anonymous White House suspects, would be for Reagan to attempt to get more votes from men than they gave to World War II hero Dwight D. Eisenhower...

...Soon afterward, at the convention in Washington of the National Organization for Women, the normally unflappable now delegates cheered four Democratic candidates-mondale, Glenn, Alan Cranston, and Gary Hart...

...Time and again, they brought the feminists to their feet with fervent pledges to consider a woman for Vice President that were riddled with loopholes large enough to shove a white male through...

...Some conspiracy-minded Leftists have dragged out the hoary prospect of the President purposely or inadvertently starting a war that unifies the nation around him...

...In other words, AFL-CIO members-particularly in steel, autos, machinetools, andmusic-have disproportionately absorbed more than one-third of the3 milliongrowth in jobless Americans that has marked Reagan's Presidency...

...The notion of an enthusiastic male minority overriding a complacent female majority, however, is so silly that to state the premise is to destroy it...

...At least that was the consensus of a procession of philosophically diverse practitioners who lectured journalists recently at the Brookings Institution during a bottom-numbing one-week survey of what passes for contemporary economic thought...

...If he can't talk their lingo, to reach them he will have to focus on reality-that is, a reversal of his deregulation stand so sharp, and an economic recovery so strong and broad that their self-interest requires supporting him...