Nation: May the Best Man Win

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Republican Front Runner Reagan risked the irritation of his supporters and the concerted challenge from such early entries as Connally and George Bush by delaying all serious campaigning. But now he too must enter the action. Says Reagan Campaign Manager John Sears: "Politics is motion and excitement. We must now run harder than if we were behind. Our biggest opponent is us. If we do our job right, nobody can catch us."

Reagan still claims the loyalty of about one-third of his party in state after state. The large number of Republican candidates (nine) challenging him tends to split the anti-Reagan vote and thus strengthen the front runner. Reagan, however, carries some weighty burdens. He is 68 years old. If he wins, he will be the oldest President ever elected in U.S. history. Perhaps more important, the theatrics of American politics tends to make any three-time candidate seem shopworn.

The 1980 campaign will soon be a pitched battle among the candidates. But among the people who do the voting, the candidates will be viewed through a prism of what they seem to offer in the way of help on energy and inflation and America's place in the world. More than in any recent election, the country will be looking at the candidates skeptically, doubting their promises, almost cynical about their abilities to alter fundamentally the nation's course. Says Maine's Senator Edmund S. Muskie, himself a failed presidential candidate in 1972: "People no longer believe the system exists to solve problems. There is a quiet kind of bitterness out there."

Nonetheless, the system does exist to solve problems, and it is the only system by which the nation's problems will be solved. That makes campaign '80 a contest of true importance.