POLITICS / UPHILL REFORM

...In short, George Wallace's Alabama sounds like heaven on earth, as he tells it, but most Northerners who voted for him wouldn't want to live there—if they knew the plight of Alabamans...

...and in more danger of being assaulted in Birmingham than in Detroit or Washington...

...Chapman moves much around the country covering national politics for The Washington Post...

...At that point, nobody was...

...For example, The Journal wrote that according to the 1970 Uniform Crime Report "a person was in more danger of being murdered in Birmingham than in Chicago, New York City, or Washington...

...Seventy-eight per cent of those who voted in the Wisconsin Democratic primary did vote for a candidate other than George Wallace...

...It is easy to be cynical about the reform process, and cynicism will come easier if significant deals and accommodations are made at the convention in July...

...In state after state, the system of selecting delegates has been changed —radically in some instances...

...Candidates and their staffs gallop from state to state like some itinerant circus, endlessly tearing down their tents only to raise them again on some new grounds...

...That is not happening in states with the most perfect methods of electing delegates...

...It is a wearing, expensive struggle for percentage points, and quite a few members of the press corps— normally delighted to report the spectacles—are bored with all the foolishness...

...But at Miami Beach will they have a choice of candidates firmly pinned down to meaningful tax reform, reduced military budgets, reordering of national priorities, and a program for rebuilding the cities...

...In watching the primaries and caucuses flow by, however, one is struck by the shortcomings of the nominating system...

...But in a convention likely to have more unbossed delegates than any Democratic convention in our time, manipulation of large blocs of delegates by a few big wheeler-dealers of the Daley type might not be readily managed...

...Senator Muskie's people moved first and thought it had Castillo and his Nosotros firmly committed...

...Before the Wisconsin primary, McGovern was credited by the writers as having a "superb organization" there...

...For a long time supporters of George McGovern had said that a victory in Wisconsin or a strong second place showing in that state was critical to his quest for the Presidential nomination...

...Only one of them (Texas) does not hold a primary this year anyway...

...It had an imposing attic full of political endorsements but no cellar at the grass roots...

...The Muskie campaign in the Eighteenth District was built around conventional sources of power there—prominent local Democratic leaders and the United Auto Workers Union at the mammoth Caterpillar Tractor Company plants...

...Mary McGrory, columnist for The Washington Star, has a remarkable gift for combining wit and brevity in her analysis of political developments...

...Florida's new primary law is perhaps the best statute in the country...

...Four years ago there was no contest for delegates in the Eighteenth District—no opportunity for anti-war and reform-minded voters to express themselves at all...

...The delegate quotas may be neatly filled— fifty per cent women, eighteen per cent young people, twenty per cent spokesmen for minorities...

...One wonders what their readers are thinking...

...Castillo is a leader of Nosotros, a new chi-cano community organization that has sprung up in the barrios of South Phoenix...

...Two men building a house decided midway to ask an expert whether they should have started at the top or the bottom...

...Iowa's caucus system is a model of fairness and openness...

...Then Mayor John V. Lindsay's operators, looking for a bargain, early-season show of strength, moved into Arizona and promptly purloined Nosotros away from Muskie...

...One can judge that experience in several ways...

...Accountability is still the most pressing problem...

...Senator Edmund S. Muskie's ticket carried the district...

...The Dixie demagogue boasts of low property taxes in Alabama but omits mention of Alabama's sales tax, one of the highest in the country...

...Some of Lindsay's following is bound to go to McGovern now...

...Arizona Democrats traditionally have sent to Democratic National Conventions the people chosen by a reigning triumvirate composed of the state chairman and the chairmen of the party organizations in Pima and Maricopa Counties...

...Nosotros was formed to promote the influence of the formerly powerless chi-canos in local politics...

...Here, again, the news media bear a sizable share of the responsibility...

...Those candidates who have raised major issues—and not enough of them have—seem to have been drowned out at times in the circus-like uproar of competing campaigns...

...Capturing news media attention becomes a goal in itself, and the issues being debated sink slowly from sight...

...One could draw a number of lessons from that engagement, the most obvious being that well-organized volunteer politics is no guarantee of success...

...The news media bear some responsibility, too, for giving too much air time and newsprint to candidate comings and goings and to speculative commentary on the outcome of the various races, and too little attention to those occasions when candidates do make concrete proposals on the major issues...

...He is a rather cautious liberal who decided early this year that among all the Democratic candidates for President, Senator George S. McGovern makes the most sense...

...Representatives of several Presidential candidates began looking around for promising local organizations, and in the Twenty-eighth Legislative District it was obvious that Castillo's Mexican-American group was what counted...

...While most of her colleagues were cranking out long, learned, and rather dull essays on what happened to Senator Edmund Muskie in the Wisconsin primary, McGrory wrapped it up in these three paragraphs: "Standing in the bowling alley of Milwaukee's Polish Legion Hall the other day, Senator Edmund Muskie told a Polish joke that was really on himself...

...Perhaps the added costs of a national primary would not be so great as some have feared...

...Not until the Wisconsin primary was a really serious national problem—the burden of property taxes and unfair Federal tax laws— brought to center stage...

...If those are true measures of party reform, as I think they are, then the reformers still have a long way to go despite the gains since 1968...

...Its workmen's compensation benefits average $22 a week less than in Wisconsin...

...The convention seat itself seemed the only factor that swung them to the Mayor's side...

...Traveling around the country this winter and spring, I found it easy to pick out dozens of examples similar to the changes apparent in the Eighteenth District of Illinois...

...in more danger of being raped in Mobile than in New York, Chicago, Washington, or Newark...

...Too much attention has been focused on mere participation in the process and not enough on what the process may produce...

...now their powers have been sharply reduced and they must compete energetically to influence the choice of delegates...

...Government bureaucrats, he does not mention that twenty-five per cent of Alabama's total revenue comes from the Federal Government...

...What political writers and politicians had long failed to note was a coming together of two elements: issue-oriented volunteers and an issue-oriented candidate—McGovern...

...Last year, after a wrenching intraparty struggle, the rules were changed and the delegate selection process opened up so that National Convention delegates would be chosen by a state convention whose members would be elected in January, 1972...

...We could not get any promises out of the Muskie people," Castillo recalled one afternoon in an interview...

...The theft was accomplished by one of the oldest gimmicks in the politician's book—promising a guaranteed seat at the National Convention...

...On the weekend before the primary, they recanvassed every potential McGovern voter, encouraging them to go to the polls...

...The phrase, which soon became a bromide, really explained nothing...

...but in the Illinois primary he announced that a major issue was the failure of Muskie delegate slates in that state to include enough women...

...The rest of Illinois' big delegation was chosen by Mayor Richard J. Daley or by local party organizations downstate...

...Senator Harold Hughes of Iowa suggests, as a remedy, that the separate primaries be replaced by a single national primary...

...Somehow the voter must be presented with a choice of candidates clearly and firmly pledged to specific positions on issues that matter...

...The Lindsay people promised us that if we pulled our slate for them in this district they would see that we got one delegate to the convention...

...only 13.3 per cent of Wisconsin's revenue comes from Washington...

...Months ago Tom Wicker of The New York Times warned that political writers and politicians who underrated McGovern might wind up "with egg on their faces...

...The point is illustrated by the case of George Castillo in Arizona...

...He frequently described himself as an "instrument" which people could use to pass a judgment on the important issue of the day, the war in Vietnam...

...Eugene McCarthy accurately observed during the 1968 campaign that the major problem of American politics is to make the government and its leaders accountable...

...For the first time many Americans will be told by the media what McGovern's positions are, a development which can only enhance his strength as a candidate...

...The process could be purified mathematically, McCarthy has said, without producing any promises of fundamental social change...

...It means providing an atmosphere in which those pledges can be explored and challenged...

...It might force attention on a few significant national issues and at least eliminate the purely local or regional candidates...

...George McGovern has enough well-prepared position papers to suffice for ten campaigns...

...But the major event in the early caucuses in January was Hughes's endorsement of Muskie on grounds that he is a "winner" and a man who can unify the party, hardly the most compelling argument to place before a serious voter...

...A fundamental question has been raised by McCarthy as he tours the primary circuit this year...

...The first, and possibly key, cadres of McGovern workers in Wisconsin consisted largely of the idealistic "political amateurs" who had given Eugene McCarthy a victory in the state in 1968...

...Against the McGovern volunteers with Fethke, Muskie's backers had the support of such popular national figures as Senator Adlai E. Stevenson III and Leonard Woodcock, president of the UAW...

...William Chapman (Mr...

...That's pretty much the story of the Muskie campaign in Wisconsin...

...It means forcing candidates to make specific pledges by which they can be called to account if they are nominated...

...Drawn into the McGovern camp as early as the spring of 1971, they provided the foundation for his state organization...

...Until late last year it had never occurred to Castillo, a small, cheerful man with great organizing talents, that he might be involved in nominating a candidate for President of the United States...

...It is obvious that the reforms to date have gone a long way toward opening up the nominating system...

...In the classic sense of American politics, Castillo's chicanos had been absorbed into the "system...

...McGovern came out of the Wisconsin primary immeasurably stronger than he had been before, but not the front runner...

...Months ago, Fethke and many other progressives in Peoria met to form a slate of delegates committed to McGovern in the March 21 Illinois Presidential primary...

...Fethke and his associates carried out a meticulously planned campaign...

...It brought McGovern an outpouring of contributions, far more credibility with, and attention from, the mass media than before, and it caused John Lindsay to drop out of the race...

...But their proliferation this year—to twenty-four from seventeen in 1968— seems merely to have encouraged a high level of campaign gimmickry...

...But something is still missing, and that is a mechanism for making that participation meaningful...

...If expanding the participation were the only criterion, the reforms would already be judged a success...

...Alabama ranks last among the states, or close to it, in the quality of education it provides its youngsters...

...On being told they should have begun with the foundations, one called up to the other, "You better come down from the roof...

...In 1969, Alabama had, proportionately, six times as many murders as Wisconsin, twice as many rapes, and five times as many assaults...

...Some candidates tried to emphasize major issues but they received minimal attention in the press and on the air...

...But the news media which had given him so little attention before New Hampshire, and thereby hindered his campaign, takes him far more seriously now...

...That state's government is notorious for corruption in the awarding of state contracts...

...but Wallace managed to make busing the only pertinent issue, even though it had not been a significant issue in that state for more than a year...

...But it is necessary to step back a bit in time to recognize its real importance...

...On March 21, Fethke and the other five McGovern delegates lost...

...That would probably increase the cost, but not by much...

...So many of them were committed to McGovern as the months went by that such liberals as Senator Harold Hughes of Iowa, John Lindsay, and McCarthy never were able to build a real grass roots organization in the state, nor could the other contenders...

...In theory, the Presidential primary is the most perfect method of testing candidates...

...Even so, his twenty-two per cent of the vote in the Democratic column might have been sharply reduced if more of the state's media had followed the lead of The Milwaukee Journal and The Capital Times of Madison in exposing the sorry state of affairs in Alabama under Governor Wallace, that apostle of law and order and "friend" of the workingman...

...Wallace's Alabama has no minimum wage law...

...A small army of canvassers personally telephoned every Democratic and independent voter in one half of the precincts in the Eighteenth District of Illinois...

...Campaigning in a national primary would naturally be concentrated in the ten largest states...

...Its purpose should be to present the candidates and their positions clearly before the party's voters...

...In Illinois in 1968, when the national Democratic Party was as divided as it had not been in nearly four decades, there were hardly any contests for the privilege of being a delegate to the National Convention in Chicago...

...In 1968, some of the largest delegations were filled by the whims of mayors, governors, legislators, and party bosses...

...But with the help of a huge Republican crossover vote and limited support from Democrats, he placed second to George McGovern...

...His triumph there, with thirty per cent of the vote in the Democratic column and his acquisition of fifty-four of the state's sixty-seven delegates, moved him up into the top level of contenders with Hubert Humphrey and Edmund Muskie...

...A handful of delegates pledged to Eugene J. McCarthy won seats...

...Party reform is being judged largely on a quantitative scale: how many women, minorities, and un-der-thirties make it to Miami Beach...

...But perhaps it was simply another con job in which those at the bottom of the scale offer up their votes and receive symbols in return...

...After Wisconsin, traces of egg were visible on the visages of some pundits...

...It rang all those doorbells because it was made up of volunteers highly motivated by issues, who had been looking for a candidate who was right on those issues—and found him in McGovern...

...The organization was not "superb" because it rang hundreds of thousands of doorbells looking for votes...

...Castillo and his friends, so far as I could tell, were not aware of any substantive issues separating the two candidates who had sought their support...

...While he attacks U.S...

...instead, too often it seems to be obscuring opportunities for choice...

...They are results of the Democratic Party reforms that have opened up the nominating process to people who never had participated before...