A Bigger Club

Though every election has its purely parochial aspects, there were clear signs last week that American politics in off-year 1965 was being conducted in a far tougher and more sophisticated context at state and city levels. Put simply, the voter seemed more concerned than ever with practical results rather than partisan victories, with the contents of the package rather than the label. In races vital to the welfare of their own communities, voters not only crossed party lines but also freely ignored ethnic, religious and economic distinctions to support appealing and constructive candidates.

Minus a Tentacle. 1965's biggest winners were those who capitalized on this hardheaded attitude. "There is no vote in this city which can be taken for granted," concluded Republican Congressman John V. Lindsay after New York's overwhelmingly Democratic voters elected him mayor (see cover story). His comment could have been echoed by politicians in scores of cities and counties where the electorate refused to buy a pig in a poke.

In predominantly urban New Jersey, taken-for-granted Republicans went heavily Democratic because the G.O.P. gubernatorial candidate seemed more interested in getting a Marxist history professor fired than in facing up to pressing statewide problems. Long-docile Democrats in Philadelphia chopped a tentacle off the "Octopus of Walnut Street," as their tired machine is unlovingly known, by electing a District Attorney on the Republican ticket. A Democrat surprised everybody by getting himself elected mayor of Scranton, Pa., and Republicans did the same in Binghamton, N.Y., Waterbury and New Britain, Conn., and Akron, Ohio.

Not even the biggest-name politicians could shake the voters' "show-me" spirit. Dwight Eisenhower, Richard Nixon and Pennsylvania's Governor William Scranton all campaigned for the Republican candidate in New Jersey's gubernatorial election--yet the Democratic incumbent piled up the biggest plurality in the state's history. Lyndon Johnson, Hubert Humphrey and New York's Senator Robert Kennedy lined up behind Democrat Abe Beanie in New York City--yet in Lindsay's shadow their en comiums sounded as if they had come from the party manual. "Look at Hubert Humphrey," chortled House Republican Leader Gerry Ford. "He campaigned in three places--in New York, in Philadelphia and in Ohio. His batting average was zero. Even the Twins won three out of seven."

Boomerang. To many of 1965's successful candidates, the name of the game was consensus politics. Yet in several contests, Negroes lodged powerful protest votes by mobilizing as a monolithic bloc--which is the very opposite of consensus.

Conservatives also showed that they can throw a punch--or in some cases, a boomerang. In New York, sardonic William Buckley led the fledgling Conservative Party into third place in total votes, but there is a strong possibility that he lured away more Democrats (because of his Catholicism) than Republicans (because of his ideology) and helped elect, rather than defeat, John Lindsay. In Virginia, a Conservative Party candidate garnered nearly 70,000 votes--enough to thwart G.O.P. hopes of upsetting Harry Byrd's not-so-purring machine.

Oranges & Lemons. Mostly though, the Republican gains in the cities suggested that the party could find a way to repair the damaging schism that ensued from the Goldwater adventure.

What few main-line Republicans suspected when they went along with Goldwater was that the 1964 disaster would end by encouraging the conservative rump instead of shaming it back into the fold. The Democrats, by contrast, have weathered countless crises of North South schizophrenia and myriad lesser spats and have repeatedly proved themselves capable of closing ranks before the voters go to the polls.

Both parties will always be racked with internal rumbles. Unlike the Democrats, though, the G.O.P. too often lacks the implicit fail-safe agreement to douse all feuds when elections are at stake.

With Lindsay's success--and those in other cities--the G.O.P. has an example and an incentive to elaborate less rigid club rules and, indeed, to expand the club. To be sure, some Republicans are deeply offended by the way in which John Lindsay peeled off his party uniform before the battle. Among them was Nevada National Committeeman Melvin Lundberg, who growled, "If you tie a lemon on an orange tree, it's still not an orange." Yet the Democratic Party has never discouraged expedient hybridization--provided, at least, that oranges and lemons continue to hang from the same tree and wear the grower's label. If, on the contrary, the odd offshoot insists on permanent identification as a new species, it invites pruning. "Break Through!" Thus, in recent months, a host of top Republicans, from House Leader Ford to Senate Leader Everett Dirksen and Kentucky's Senator Thruston Morton, have taken pains to dissociate the G.O.P. from the extremist John Birch Society. G.O.P. National Chairman Ray Bliss read the Birchites out of the party again last week during the biennial Western

States Republican Conference in Albuquerque, N. Mex.

But that was only a necessary backward step toward the goal of providing accommodations for all Republicans--wherever they fit in the party spectrum. Last week's G.O.P. victories in New York and other cities, argued Bliss, should provide forward impetus to our "efforts to strengthen the Republican position in metropolitan areas of the nation." He added: "If you have the right candidate, you can break through." That notion was vigorously seconded by Pennsylvania's Governor William Scranton. "The adage that Republicans cannot win in the big cities," said he, "is now out the window."

By any standard, John Lindsay's victory in New York, however local and empirical, augurs well for the G.O.P. By the same token, it gives new hope to the two-party system, which has been almost asphyxiated by unchallenged Democratic rule in metropolitan areas. For the ultimate justification of the American political system is that the party in opposition, whether Democratic or Republican, should be an alternate government capable of taking over --as Eisenhower Republicans did from Truman Democrats--with hardly a tremor. In last week's elections, it was mainly the adaptable, nondoctrinaire Republican who upheld that ideal.

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