THE CONGRESS: The Score at Half Time

The battle of the 1960 Democratic presidential nomination, said the pundits at year's beginning, would be won on the playing fields of the 86th Congress. And what green fields they were. The Democrats had swamped the Republicans in the November elections (House 283-153; Senate 64-34); the Republicans were stuck with their refusal to spend their way out of the recession; their once-popular President was held to be an ailing lame duck. Four 1960-minded Democratic Senators —Texas' Lyndon Johnson, Missouri's Stuart Symington, Minnesota's Hubert Humphrey, Massachusetts' John Fitzgerald Kennedy—appeared on every score card. But by the time the 86th Congress got ready to adjourn this week for its half-time break, the four Democratic hopefuls had learned the dangers of underrating the other team. The four:

Texas' Johnson, the adroit, trend-sensing Senate Majority Leader, started the session by delivering his own "State of the Union" message to fellow Democrats, pushed a liberal-spending, twelve-point program (e.g., "bold" housing program, depressed areas bill) that included several items clearly beyond his legislative role and inside the executive area ("breathe life into the newly created space agency," "a consistent policy for Latin America"). He got off to a fast start on a quicker-than-the-eye maneuver to limit slightly the Senate's filibuster Rule 22, hoppered his own civil rights bill as a necessary prerequisite for any ambitious Texan seeking to prove that he is a Westerner, not a Southerner.

But in midseason, Johnson, whose chief political appeal was a habit of success, suddenly lost his rabbit's foot. His own Preparedness Subcommittee failed to fulfill its purpose of discovering dangerous flaws in Administration defense policy. His dramatic proposal for a Congress-authorized commission to study unemployment—a tinhorn political promise thrown the A.F.L.-C.I.O.'s conference on unemployment in Washington last April —gathered dust in a House pigeonhole as the economy boomed to new heights. His civil rights bill got nowhere.

So Quarterback Johnson, backed by his old coach, House Speaker Sam Rayburn, decided to play Dwight Eisenhower's game. Angering the liberals, Johnson refused to hurl their spending bills full-sized against inevitable vetoes, thus make an irresponsible "record" for next year's campaigns. He sought instead to shrink the proposals just enough to get under the veto, but failed in this tactic when Ike refused to compromise on the budget line. Johnson was blamed by labor for swinging key Texas Congressmen to a tough version of the labor reform bill. So by half time, Johnson had picked up a serious new handicap: many a labor leader and many a Northern Democrat have vowed to see that he gets no place on the 1960 ticket.