Fred Harris: Wooing the Left

...In his 1974 memo, Harris set that percentage, and finishing among the top three, as his New Hampshire goal, and he has worked New Hampshire more than any other candidate except Udall and Carter...

...In the size and composition of the Democratic field, too, the Harris strategy is well served...

...Asked directly about them, Harris says, "I made a mistake...

...Staying in people's homes...

...These will not be gimmicks...

...In this strategy, Harris has had one windfall not covered in the 1974 memo and not fully anticipated by him in the scope of its bounty—the new campaign finance reform law and, specifically, its provision of matching Federal money for small private contributions...

...And so the word "electability" has been thrown up as a roadblock against the Harris candidacy, and in advance of the primaries has caused liberal activists to look elsewhere —toward Udall, Bayh, even Carter—for a more politically palatable alternative...

...In 1964, the Republican voters of New Hampshire said no to Rockefeller and Goldwater by writing in the name of Henry Cabot Lodge in greater numbers...

...They both should be "sued for non-support," he says, a variation on his old slogan, "Get the Rich Off Welfare...

...They loved it on the campuses, but it simply didn't wash on Main Street, and he was forced to abandon that bit of transparent straighttalk...

...Public transportation...

...in 1972, they said no to Edmund Muskie by embarrassing their New England neighbor with a strong second-place showing for McGovern...

...J.W...

...And when he makes economic policy, it's a joke...

...Not until 1968, he says, did he begin to grasp the significance of the Vietnam commitment, even in terms of race...

...But Harris's conviction that he can do it is tied inextricably to the complete personal transformation he has projected in the last few years...

...they will be financial necessities...

...No coy 'non-candidate candidate' status...

...build the kind of grass-roots following he sought...

...No twelve-point programs and new bureaucracies, but common sense steps to diffuse economic and political power more widely...

...No limousines and drivers for the candidate...

...Harris has been operating on that reading of the electorate—though he has couched it in more positive terms—ever since he conceived his plan to win the Democratic nomination guerrilla-style...

...And so, while the professional politicians worry about the electability of a Fred Harris, past performance indicates the voters can brush aside that factor if convinced that a vote for him will get some message across to "them"—that headless Federal establishment that taxes and intrudes and, most of all, fails to do anything about high prices and unemployment...

...Made to order for him is the provision whereby the Federal Government will give a candidate a dollar for every dollar raised in contributions of not more than $250, provided $5,000 in such amounts is raised in each of twenty states...

...Personal contact...

...They recall not only his service to an LBJ-compromised Humphrey, but also his failure openly to oppose the Vietnam war until mid-1968, and his year of friction as Democratic national chairman in 1969...

...As often as not, they have been opportunities for the electorate to register negative feelings...

...Accordingly, Harris now says that his objective has been amended to 25 per cent and finishing among the first three in the total results of these early primaries...

...The odds are high, but so are the stakes...

...The candidate must be plain-spoken, candid, open," Harris wrote then...

...Now the campaign, having outgrown the McLean house, has been moved into a marginally second-class hotel in downtown Washington, an old quasi-flophouse whose kinkiness fits comfortably with the Harris campaign image...

...the maldistribution of wealth in American society that are now central to his pitch...

...And in 1964,1968, and 1972, George Wallace's successes repeatedly demonstrated the penchant for protest among primary voters...

...He scored an upset victory in the Democratic primaries and convention, all right, but the Nixon media experts made mincemeat of him in the fall, painting him as that most frightening of all political creatures to mainstream America, a Radical...

...That may explain why when Ford makes a joke it's economic policy...

...desks and phones were brought in and volunteers trooped in and out daily...

...There are seven candidates on the left end of the spectrum and three— Jackson, Bentsen, and Wallace—on the right...

...He must demonstrate, from the very first and even in little things, that he will tell the people the truth...

...He must campaign like other people live...

...In the bunching-up of Democratic Presidential aspirants on the moderate left, Harris's spiel makes the rest of the liberal field—Morris Udall, Birch Bayh,Sargent Shriver, Jimmy Carter, Milton J. Shapp, and Terry Sanford—sound like a pack of mossbacks...

...keep from going broke in the process, and stay healthy enough financially to put his live-off-the-land approach to the test in Iowa, Mississippi, and Oklahoma, the first caucus states of 1976, and New Hampshire and Massachusetts, the first two primary states...

...After he abandoned the campaign as well, he became involved in a number of public-interest campaigns against General Motors and other corporations, and in a populist tax-reform drive in Washington...

...For all that, however, they must concede that Fred Harris has put his act together far more effectively than most of them would have predicted in 1974, when he Jules Witcover is a national political correspondent for The Washington Post and the author of books on Robert F. Kennedy, RichardM...

...In his brief 1971 Presidential bid, he started campaigning on the slogan, "No More Bullshit...

...Of the seven, Harris clearly holds the left flank and Carter the right, leaving the other five—Udall, Bayh, Shriver, Sanford, and Shapp—to scrap for the middle-ground vote...

...This additional quote from the 1974 memo tells it all: "The campaign will be different...

...Harris's spiel makes the rest of the liberal field sound like a pack of mossbacks' Fred Harris: Wooing the Left JULES WITCOVER "I knew Fred Harris before he was a virgin," says Eli Siegel, a prime political lieutenant in George McGov-ern's 1972 Presidential campaign...

...His article is one of a series ofprofiles of Presidential contenders being published by The Progressive...

...It is ironic that Harris, suspect to party liberals who knew him in his earlier days, runs as the one candidate who can make politics credible to the voter again...

...He joined Humphrey, he says, because Humphrey asked his help and because he had been working closely with Humphrey on economic matters...

...By California (on June 8), Harris now says in the fullness of his indefatigable confidence, the race should be narrowed down to "me and somebody on the right"—presumably Jackson or Wallace, whose treasuries are brimming and budgeted for the distance, but just as possibly Carter, working effectively just to the left of their side of the street with a less flamboyant version of the Harris no-frills style...

...first conceived of the idea of running a political guerrilla-type campaign for the Democratic nomination, living off the land en route to the 1976 primaries...

...Among issue-oriented liberals who like their ideology served up raw and in thick slices, he has by consensus stolen the show at almost every candidate showcase affair with his unmitigated war on the individual and corporate rich and the special governmental privilege they enjoy...

...Harris says his own first public statement in opposition to the war came in July 1968, at a press conference at a Peace Corps training camp in San Juan, Puerto Rico, in advance of the Democratic National Convention...

...He was privy to Robert Kennedy's soul-searching about entering the 1968 campaign against Lyndon Johnson, Harris says, but Kennedy never asked him to join him, presumably because Harris was then supporting the war...

...Harris has had his eye on the Presidency a long time, so long that it doesn't seem possible he has just celebrated his forty-fifth birthday...

...Harris achieved this happy threshold in October, having raised $205,000 in twenty-two states, of which $193,000 was in amounts qualifying for matching money...

...Yet primaries do not have the best track record on measuring electability...

...Harris expected some campaign reform to be passed in 1974, but he did not quite expect Santa Claus to sponsor it...

...Nixon, and Spiro T. Agnew...

...He and LaDonna, earning travel money on the lecture circuit, have held volunteer-recruitment coffees in forty-three states, sleeping as house guests of their supporters, eating at their breakfast and dinner tables, bumming rides with the locals, and generally comporting themselves in keeping with the memo...

...Buses...

...The low-key, low-budget strategy has enabled Harris to survive the most difficult pre-primary stage...

...His scheme for 1976, simply, was to deliver the same message by personal example...

...Since those words were written, Harris has faithfully adhered to that strategy...

...Coffees in homes...

...in 1968, they said no to Lyndon Johnson by giving Eugene McCarthy a moral victory there...

...The candidate must articulate in blunt language the real frustrations that people rightly feel because of elitism, privilege, bigness, and concentrated power...

...This summer, in one of the most cost-effective Presidential campaign ploys on record, Harris crossed the country in a camper, holding rallies and organizing meetings en route and attracting much local press and television coverage...

...All these helped him further develop his ideas about Harris and Vietnam Why was Fred Harris so late in opposing the Vietnam war...

...Since the memo was written, New York has moved its primary to April 6, the same date as Wisconsin (which may yet advance its primary for prestige reasons...

...Harris professes to have urged Humphrey to break with Johnson in the spring of 1968, in advance of the convention, which Humphrey failed to do...

...As his 1974 memo notes, his campaign has been predicated on a perception of an electorate that is tired of old trappings, that yearns for a new kind of open, straightforward candidate and politics, but that is justifiably suspicious of anyone who projects himself as different from the pack of old hacks...

...One of Harris's strongest appeals is his ability to temper his tough message with a leavening humor: "President Ford even has a joke-writer on his payroll who makes almost as much, $36,000, as his chief economic adviser...

...These liberals find it hard to square Harris's left-wing purity, his self-styled populism—and what others call radicalism—with his pre-1970 track record of orthodoxy...

...In sum, long-memoried liberals are often prone to count their fingers after shaking hands with him...

...And in the process, he hit upon the realization that the only thing wrong with that 1971 slogan of "No More Bullshit" was saying it...

...Until late October, the Harris national headquarters was set up on the first floor, in the basement, and in a couple of backyard trailers at the Harris's modest home in McLean, Virginia, a stone's throw but a million miles away in style from Ethel Kennedy's Hickory Hill...

...He resolved to run for the nomination in a way that might build credibility for him not with the pols, who were down on him as much as they could possibly be, but with the voters, who didn't know all that much about him anyway...

...After Wisconsin, the 1974 memo predicted, it would be time for the Harris campaign to "go national," but always guarding against adopting the trappings of the old politics that turn people off...

...Early in the campaign, Carter seems to have done just as well or better...

...a news magazine assessing the New Hampshire field in October brushed him off because he had not yet opened a headquarters there...

...And because he is after credibility at this early stage, and because the bigger the field the more the Democratic primary votes are likely to be splintered into fragments, his public posture is "the more the merrier...

...Those are two of the questions that haunt his candidacy today, and are likely to haunt it through the 1976 primaries...

...About $240,000 was raised by November 1, and the fact that $238,000 of it was spent, leaving only $2,000 in the campaign treasury, matters not under the law...

...Then, he sat down with his wife LaDonna and campaign manager Jim Hightower and drew up a four-page memorandum on how a bare-bones candidacy could succeed...

...But while it gets the old True Believer juices flowing, it also generates memories of what happened in 1972, when liberal activists were seduced in the primaries by the siren song of George McGovern...

...None of this 'people are asking me to run' business...

...He has followed that memo almost to the letter, and although he remains a longshot for the Democratic nomination, his plan has positioned him to function almost on a par with the rest of the large Democratic field in the early caucus and primary states...

...Heavy applause invariably greets his report that J. Paul Getty and Nelson Rockefeller paid no Federal taxes one year because of loopholes for the rich, "and that wasn't what Thomas Jefferson had in mind...

...The Oklahoma City Times reported on August 5, 1968—three weeks before the Convention—that Harris had called for an unconditional halt in the bombing of North Vietnam in order to create "a better chance that Hanoi will respond to serious negotiations, and that the Soviet Union will use its good offices to help the Paris negotiations become a success...

...Democrats now gathering around the country to hear the candidates—even those who like Harris's between-the-eyes rhetoric—express a disinclination to go through "the McGovern thing" again—serving up a candidate who will scare off enough of the natural Democratic constituency to give the Republicans another free ride into the White House...

...In such a multi-candidate lineup, it is conceivable or even likely that the individual who collars as little as 25 per cent of the vote will run first...

...The crack says it all about the skepticism, not to say the cynicism, with which many liberals with memories of the Fred Harris of 1968, when he was co-campaign manager of Hubert Humphrey's successful bid for the Democratic Presidential nomination, view the former Oklahoma Senator...

...The strategy has kept the Harris organization largely invisible...

...And why did he join forces with Hubert Humphrey, rather than with Robert Kennedy or Eugene McCarthy, in 1968...

...In each of the liberal Democratic candidates' forums sponsored so far by Americans for Democratic Action and the reformist unions, Harris has come off the emotional, though clearly not the practical, favorite...

...They have been accustomed, ever since he rode into the Senate in 1964 at the age of thirty-three with the support of the family of the late Oklahoma oil baron, Senator Bob Kerr, to seeing Fred Harris go full tilt to better himself politically, seizing targets of opportunity as they appeared...

...The family—Fred, LaDonna, and one daughter, fourteen-year-old Laura, still living at home—moved up to the second floor...

...No campaign jets and big staffs...

...I was wrong...

...In the mid-1960s, he says, his focus was almost exclusively on the problem of race and the cities, as evidenced by his leading role on the Kerner Commission...

...As of January 1, the Harris campaign claims, it will have raised about $500,000 eligible for Federal dollar-for-dollar subsidy, or more than enough for the early caucus and primary states...

...They recall bow, faced with a tough —some said near-impossible—fight for re-election to the Senate in 1972, he found himself a New York fat cat and opted instead for a run at the Presidential nomination, only to be obliged to fold it six weeks later when the money spigot was shut off...

...And as his Uncle Ralph told him this summer when Harris cruised through Iowa in his camper, "You know, Bud, if you get this job, you'll be fixedforlife...