The Nation: Muskie: The Longest Journey Begins

We have won elections in Maine. We have won more than anyone thought we could. But is that all there is? We now have a chance to reach out to the country, to the world.

THE speaker was Edmund Sixtus Muskie, the scene his state party's annual August clambake near Brunswick. The occasion was both a remembrance and a farewell. For it was just 17 years ago this month, at the age of 40, that he became Maine's first Democratic Governor in 20 years. This week Muskie embarks upon the longest and most difficult journey of American public life -the run for the presidency of the U.S. The race is starting earlier this year than ever before, a full seven months before the first primary in New Hampshire in March, eleven months before the Democratic Convention begins in Miami Beach in July, 14 months before the election. The costs of running have never been higher: between $30 million and $50 million. Yet Edmund Muskie embarks with an enormous advantage over his Democratic opposition: he is the front runner.

For Muskie the journey begins in earnest this week in California, which, with at least 271 convention delegates, will be a crucial state for any Democratic candidate. On Labor Day, Muskie's schedule had him seeking support among Catholic labor leaders in Los Angeles. He will talk strategy with Democratic leaders in Santa Clara, San Francisco and San Diego, pause for a hospital tour in Watts, then head north to line up more party support in Oregon, another vital primary state.

The trip is the first in a series of forays that will take Muskie in the next few weeks to West Virginia, Florida, South Carolina, Tennessee, Illinois, Iowa, Nebraska and Wisconsin. In October he will concentrate on New York and New England, but he will stop in Mississippi, Ohio, New Jersey, Kansas and Missouri as well. By Nov. 1, he will have visited 14 of the 23 states -counting the District of Columbia -that will hold primaries next year. His strategy at this early stage is to drum up intersectional support and create enough political momentum to last through the hazards of the primaries and finally through the balloting next summer at Miami Beach's convention hall.

Search for a Winner

With so many other candidates in the field, Muskie plans to hold the center. If his earnest, sometimes ponderous manner does not project a specific magic, neither does it repel any constituency within the party. His hope is that his personal style will be so suited to the Democratic need for unity that he will become the inevitable candidate. He is counting on building a partywide feeling that he is the man who can engineer victory in '72 by pulling together the right and left, young and old, white and black.