Lindsay Balloons

Pierre Salinger, sometime presidential press secretary and short-time California Senator, told a group of students at Pennsylvania's West Chester State College last week that New York Mayor John Lindsay would have to switch to the Democratic party within ten days if he wanted to run as a Democrat in the 1972 California presidential primary. As it turned out, Salinger was wrong: California's election laws require no such thing. But even that minor incident was enough to fuel another round of speculations about Lindsay's political future.

The signals from city hall remain confusing, which is probably just the way John Lindsay wants it. Deputy Mayor Dick Aurelio, who ran Lindsay's uphill re-election campaign in 1969, dropped a hint that his boss might want to abandon the Republicans and try for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1972. At a Queens political dinner, Aurelio said: "Those of us who believe deeply in John Lindsay have adopted the slogan: 'We'd rather switch than fight.' " A day later Tom Morgan, the mayor's press man, dutifully shot down Aurelio's trial balloon by repeating Lindsay's own reiterated line that he means to stay a Republican and plans only to finish out his term as mayor. The New York Daily News, no Lindsay admirer, jumped aboard with a "Lindsay Switch or Fight" mail ballot, asking readers whether Lindsay should become a Democrat and whether he should run for President. The News promises to publish the first results this week.

Respectable Business. New York's Republican Senator Jacob Javits thinks Lindsay's options are open for 1972: "He could lead a fourth party,* become a Democrat or remain a Republican." Nixon might even tap him for Vice President, Javits believes. Lindsay, however, sees things more narrowly. He is not likely to settle for running second to anyone, and the chance of his winning the No. 1 Republican nomination is small: his liberalism and his not infrequent self-righteousness have alienated him from many Republican leaders. If he switches to the Democrats, he must win enough primaries to convince the professionals that he is their best hope to beat Nixon. That may not be easy, since the Democrats are already supplied with a number of promising presidential possibilities.

Lindsay leads the field with the young, according to a recent Gallup poll, but that is hardly enough by itself to win him the presidency. He has gone about building a wider constituency as the spokesman for the nation's blighted cities first by organizing a coalition of the mayors of New York State's six largest cities, then by cultivating the public support of big-city mayors around the U.S.

Last week to dramatize one aspect of the cities' financial crisis, Lindsay walked into a U.S. Court House in Manhattan and filed a lawsuit asking that the federal and state requirements for welfare payments--which will cost New York City $600 million in the coming fiscal year--be declared unconstitutional. "It's a long shot," Lindsay admitted, but the gesture, aimed not against welfare but the absurdities of its present structure, got him national television coverage. As he filed his suit the mayor took a wry swipe at the whole practice of politics. "This," said Lawyer Lindsay, "takes me back to the days when I was in a respectable business."

* The third: George Wallace's American Independent Party.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.