Politics: Missiles from the Michelle Ann

The Republican Party last week armed a Boeing 727 with the G.O.P.'s fastest-firing political weapon—Spiro Agnew—and launched it westward to strike at Democratic candidates in this fall's elections. The mission was the first of a series that will take the Vice President to most of the 35 states in which Senate seats are at stake.

The President himself provided explicit flight plans before Michelle Ann II (named for Agnew's granddaughter) took off. A 2½-hour White House meeting at which Nixon delivered a 90-minute monologue, was attended by Presidential Counsellor Bryce Harlow, Speechwriters William Safire and Patrick Buchanan and Political Advisers Harry Dent and Murray Chotiner. TIME Correspondent Simmons Fentress reports the President's admonitions:

"Bryce, see that Spiro takes the candidates to the airport fences. Don't let him waste his own time there, but see that he takes the candidates over. Safire, I know you'll be wanting to come up with new speeches all the time. Forget it. See what goes and then stick with it. Forget the national press."

Turning to Dent and Chotiner, Nixon instructed them to tell each local candidate to avoid name calling and to seek maximum TV exposure. "We have the Republican vote, but that isn't enough. To win, we must get the Democratic workingman. If we get him, then we can win all the races."

To the Rail. Nixon argued that such Democrats are "decent people," concerned about promiscuity, crime, pornography, drugs, riots, desecration of the flag. Many are Catholics. He recalled entertaining 90 labor leaders and their wives at the White House on Labor Day. "If someone had called a Mass," he said, "80% of them would have gone to the rail." The way to reach people like these, he added, is to take a hard line on social issues and to paint the Democratic Party as "the party of permissiveness." The Democrats are "way out on the left," he observed. "Keep them there." The main problem facing the Republicans is the state of the economy, and he urged that Agnew meet it by pinning a "big spender" label on the Democrats.

Agnew heeded his boss well. Even before his jet was airborne, Agnew began assailing anti-Administration demonstrators. "The primary issue is whether public policy in the U.S. is to be made by elected officials or by people in the streets," he declared at National Airport. At Springfield, ILL., he criticized the "caterwauling critics in the Senate" who oppose the President's Viet Nam policy. They are part of a "misguided movement—an ultraliberalism that translates into a whimpering isolationism in foreign policy, a mulish obstructionism in domestic policy, and a pusillanimous pussyfooting on the critical issue of law and order." Later he said: "How do you fathom the thinking of those who work themselves into a lather over an alleged shortage of nutriments in Wheaties, but who cannot get exercised at all over a flood of hard-core pornography."