Revolt in the Midwest

Incumbents are unexpectedly underdogs in three election battles

Anyone who says he knows what's going on this year doesn't know what he's talking about." So said Minnesota Republican Campaign Strategist Vin Weber last week. He was assessing his own state's topsy-turvy politics, but his comment could be applied equally well to races elsewhere. Suddenly the power of incumbency--long an axiom of American politics--no longer seems to apply. Nowhere is this clearer than in the Midwest, where revolts by voters threaten to turn three veteran politicians out of office:

MINNESOTA. Democrat Wendell Anderson, 45, was a popular Governor from 1971 to 1976, but then he made the mistake of arranging his own appointment to fill Walter Mondale's vacant Senate seat. It was a self-serving act that angered Minnesotans, and many of them have never forgiven Anderson, even though he apologized in a series of TV ads. At the same time, Anderson's Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party has been badly split by conservative Businessman Robert Short's upset primary victory over liberal Congressman Donald Fraser in the race for the Senate seat formerly held by Hubert Humphrey.

These liabilities have helped set the stage for an unexpectedly strong showing by Anderson's opponent, Rudy Boschwitz, 47, a lanky Republican who is the millionaire founder of Plywood Minnesota, a chain of home-improvement franchises. Boschwitz is making his first bid for public office but has been widely known to Minnesotans for years because of his firm's zany advertising campaigns. They included such one-liners as KEEP BULLFIGHTING OUT OF MINNESOTA and UNITE THE TWIN CITIES--FILL IN THE MISSISSIPPI.

Boschwitz has designated much of his $1.3 million campaign budget for a TV blitz pressing the issues of inflation and high taxes. He supports the Kemp-Roth proposal for a 30% cut in federal income tax rates. Boschwitz has won support from environmentalists by backing strong restrictions on motorboats in northern Minnesota's Boundary Waters Canoe Area. He has gained favor among right-to-lifers by offering to introduce a constitutional amendment prohibiting abortion except in the case of rape or incest or when necessary to save the mother's life. These are issues on which Anderson has alienated voters by trying to compromise.

When the Minnesota poll gave Boschwitz a 23-point lead in August, a worried Anderson began to hit back hard, insisting that Kemp-Roth would require a 20% cut in federal spending and cause an "inflationary explosion." His name for his foe: "Big Business Boschwitz." One Anderson TV ad portrays Boschwitz as a cigar-smoking, pin-striped fat cat riding in a careering black limousine, forcing pedestrians to leap out of the way. Anderson also does not hesitate to remind voters that Boschwitz was state chairman for Nixon-Agnew in 1968. Complains Boschwitz: "Guilt by association. I thought that went out with Joe McCarthy." Anderson's tough tactics seem to have improved his prospects: the latest Minnesota poll shows him trailing Boschwitz by only four percentage points.

OHIO. Silver-haired and flannel-tongued Republican James Rhodes, 69, who has already served an unprecedented twelve years as Ohio's Governor, has gained considerable favor with voters by driving his own car to work, jawboning his way through all of Ohio's 88 counties and living in his own home (he says he would like to sell the Governor's mansion).

Last week Rhodes told 70 Republicans at a $25-a-plate luncheon in rural Carroll County that employment is the key campaign issue. With typical bombast, he attacked bureaucrats who "do not-understand the courageous mother who has to line her children up and say, 'There's no Christmas this year because your father doesn't have a job.' " Rhodes claims credit for attracting 481,000 new jobs to Ohio and cutting welfare rolls by 40,000 since 1974.

But during those same years, the financing of the state's public schools has become a crisis. Cleveland has had to borrow $20.7 million in state funds to reduce a deficit in its education budget. Similarly, 35 school districts are in danger of closing early this year for lack of funds.

With polls showing that education is the chief concern of most voters, the issue has been seized on by Democratic Nominee Richard Celeste, 40, a Rhodes scholar and father of six who has been Lieutenant Governor since 1974. Celeste favors cutting property taxes and making up the school budget gaps from corporate and personal income taxes. He has carefully refused to provide any estimates of what his proposal would cost and avoids mentioning that it would probably require an income tax increase. Claims Rhodes: "He doesn't have any education program."

Both candidates are employing image makers--Rhodes has Bailey, Deardourff and Celeste, David Garth--and both are spending more than half of their $1.5 million budgets on TV. While Rhodes has only two paid campaign aides, Celeste has built a professional organization throughout usually Republican southern Ohio and is counting on disaffection with Rhodes among normally Democratic urban voters in northern Ohio. Last week a statewide poll by the Akron Beacon Journal showed Celeste moving ahead by four percentage points--quite a turnabout from polls that once gave Rhodes a 20-point lead. But Rhodes professes to be unconcerned. Said he: "I haven't even opened up yet."

WISCONSIN. Fifteen months ago, when Governor Patrick Lucey was named Ambassador to Mexico, he bequeathed to his successor, Democrat Martin Schreiber, a healthy state economy and a budget surplus projected to total $500 million by next June. To soak up the spare cash, Schreiber, a colorless career politician, proposed cutting property taxes by a modest $110 million and increasing state spending on water purification, schools and debt reduction. But Schreiber, 39, has run afoul of Proposition 13 fever, which has been skillfully exploited by his Republican opponent, Lee Sherman Dreyfus.

A political novice who is on leave from his job as chancellor of the University of Wisconsin at Stevens Point, Dreyfus, 52, unexpectedly won his party's gubernatorial nomination after a witty and eloquent campaign. His trademark is a bright red vest, and he speaks out at every opportunity against hack politicians and their moneyed backers. "Who's going to run the show," he asks, "people or money?"

Dreyfus soon managed to hang the state surplus around Schreiber's neck as if it were, ruefully remarks the Acting Governor, "a rubber chicken." Dreyfus proposes giving Wisconsin taxpayers a break by suspending collection of the state income tax for the last three months of 1978. Says he: "It is fundamentally immoral for any state to take from the people money it does not need."

At first, Schreiber called Dreyfus' proposal a gimmicky, vote-getting "quick fix." Replied Dreyfus: "It is a quick fix, I agree. But what do they want--a slow fix?" Schreiber tried to dodge the issue by noting that he had appointed a blue-ribbon commission to report to him on state taxes by 1979. Finally, after a Milwaukee Journal poll last week showed Schreiber trailing Dreyfus by five points, Schreiber came up with a tax reform plan of his own. He proposed giving property owners credits averaging $400 for a family with annual income of $15,000 toward their state income taxes. He also favors adjusting the rates so that cost-of-living raises no longer push taxpayers into higher brackets. Said Dreyfus: "It's the predictable response of a politician. Five weeks before the election and he comes up with tax reform? My question to him is: 'Would you have done it if I hadn't cornered you?' " The final answer will come from the voters on Nov. 7. Concedes Schreiber, stating the obvious: "It's going to be a very tough race." -

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