Tarot Cards, Hoosier Style

Eugene McCarthy: Next August, I'll probably still be the front runner, as I am now.

Hubert Humphrey: We're about where we were.

Robert Kennedy: I'm very, very pleased.

Like competing gypsies, each of the rivals for the Democratic presidential nomination shuffled the tarot cards of Indiana's primary-election results last week to suit his own purpose, and each found consolation in his readings.

The vote spread itself was hardly overwhelming. In the record turnout of 764,000 Democrats. Kennedy got 42% of the vote; Governor Roger Branigin, who adopted a favorite-son stance as Humphrey's not-so-secret ally, received 31%; McCarthy polled 27%. While Kennedy failed both to roll up a ma jority and to demolish McCarthy, the timing of his first-place finish and his surprisingly broad base of support gave the New Yorker's campaign a solid, if less than meteoric, boost.

The Eleventh Campaigner. Kennedy carried nine of the state's eleven Congressional districts, while Branigin took the other two.* Bobby also captured eleven of the state's twelve largest cities and towns. He won 90% of the Negro vote, yet held his own in many of the white, working-class precincts that gave George Wallace a heavy vote in the 1964 Democratic primary. He turned on the electorate in low-income neighborhoods, where voting is not habitual, to produce solid crowds at the polls. And he succeeded in the face of several handicaps. Indiana is a basically conservative state. The Democratic organization, labor-union leadership and the state's two largest newspapers did their best to torpedo Kennedy.

Starting late—just four weeks before the election—Bobby parlayed his longstanding assets. He imported some of the nation's most talented political organizers, led by Lawrence O'Brien and Ted Kennedy. He mobilized three generations of kin—Mother Rose, Sisters Eunice, Jean and Pat, Children David, Michael and Courtney. Ethel, who is expecting their eleventh campaigner in January, did her smiling bit. Meticulous planning and arrangements, plus Kennedy's own crowd-catching personality, consistently made for large audiences, while McCarthy and Branigin frequently dissipated their efforts on small groups.

Lawman. Well aware that he sometimes comes over as a hyperthyroid hippie, Kennedy trimmed both his tresses and his rhetoric to please the Hoosiers. He made vaguely conservative sounds about big, distant government. He never stopped saying that the U.S. must cure the causes of racial unrest, but he stressed the need for peace in the streets. "Violence won't get you better housing or better jobs or better education for your children," he told Negroes. He reminded white listeners: "I was the chief law-enforcement officer of the U.S. for 3½ years. This nation must have law and order."