Nation: May the Best Man Win

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Concerned that his own re-election apparatus may not be adequate, Carter appears on the verge of some major shakeups. Campaign Manager Tim Kraft is a likely victim. Former Democratic National Chairman Robert Strauss is considering abandoning his job as Special Ambassador to the Middle East to assume direction of the Carter-Mondale Committee.

Vice President Walter Mondale, once a liberal ally of Kennedy's in the Senate, heightened the Carter Administration's criticism of Kennedy and declared that the Senator has yet to give "an issue-based reason for seeking the presidency." Said Mondale: "The real danger is that it [the nomination battle] will be so bitter, so poisonous to the Democratic Party that no Democrat can win."

Indeed, Kennedy will need to justify his candidacy with reasons beyond his personality and ambition if he is to hold his lead over Carter in the polls. Already he has suffered some serious slippage against Carter (see following story). But the power of the Kennedy personality still makes him the most popular of all the presidential contenders.

Larger-than-life personalities are highly prized television commodities in this campaign, partly in contrast to Carter's low-keyed approach and partly because of the seemingly insoluble problems the nation faces. Kennedy used the word leadership 17 times in a recent speech in Philadelphia. On the Republican side, former Texas Governor and Nixon Treasury Secretary Connally managed to use the word five times in a 4½-minute television commercial that was aired last week across the nation on CBS at a cost of $31,000.

The Connally advertisement was the symbol of another element in the 1980 race: its length. The spot was one of the earliest national television advertisements ever purchased for a presidential race. But network executives have had to refuse to sell larger chunks of time to Reagan and Carter, saying that they do not want to give candidates access to the nets until 1980. Last week the Carter-Mondale Committee filed a complaint with the Federal Communications Commission, charging the networks with denying them reasonable access to air time.

The troublesome early start of campaign '80 is the result of the incredible burden the candidates face in having to compete for convention delegates in 36 primaries across the nation. In 1968 there were only 17 primaries, but now the need to organize in so many places, and the need to campaign personally in all sections of the country, has forced the rivals into ever earlier activity. Will the seemingly endless electioneering burn out both the workers and the voters long before next year's Election Day? In Florida, where Democrats are just recovering from the struggle over delegates to a state convention at which a meaningless straw vote will be taken, National Committeewoman Hazel Tally Evans laments, "It's totally out of hand, everything is happening much too early. There's no chance to catch your breath. We're on a continual merry-go-round." The protracted campaign will also seriously disrupt the normal business of Government and perhaps lead to ill-conceived action in order to win votes.