What Makes Teddy Run?

Liberal convictions, and a refusal to admit defeat

The heat heat from fiery red ingots rose in shimmering waves, and smoke drifted through the air, as Senator Edward Kennedy stood on a platform in the middle of the Universal-Cyclops Specialty Steel mill outside Pittsburgh. Shouting through a bullhorn above the clangor of the plant, he told a crowd of 200 workers that President Carter's proposed budget cuts would reduce safety inspections of steel mills. Roared Kennedy: "I'm not going to let them take that protection away from the steelworkers. He [Carter] ought to come out of that Rose Garden and talk with some of those steelworkers." The mill hands shouted, "Come on Teddy, come over this way!" and held up hard hats for him to autograph.

That scene last week illustrated one of the odder paradoxes of this strange political year. Heading into the April 22 Pennsylvania primary that he must win to retain even a long-shot chance for the presidency, Teddy Kennedy has reversed the usual candidate's emotional progress. At the start of the race last fall, when most other politicians would have been brimming with enthusiasm and energy, Kennedy went through the motions of campaigning so ineptly that many observers suspected that his heart was not really in the effort. Now, after a series of bruising defeats that might have broken the spirit of many another politician, he has at last become a forceful, zesty campaigner.

It probably is too late. To overtake Carter's enormous lead in delegates (957 to 464) to the Democratic nominating convention in August, Kennedy would have to win roughly 63% of the delegates yet to be chosen. Such landslides would be difficult in almost any state and virtually impossible in the West, where his liberalism has little appeal.

Still, Kennedy is determined to reverse the tide, and Pennsylvania is almost made to order for him. It is a heavily unionized state with large Catholic, black and ethnic voting blocs that are traditionally receptive to liberal appeals. There is no "crossover" voting; anti-Carter Democrats cannot stray to the Republican primary, as they have in some states, but must either mark their ballots for Kennedy or stay home from the polls. Indeed, Carter's private polls last week showed Kennedy with a slight lead.

But the situation could well be reversed by primary day; while voters may be souring on Carter, they have shown in primary after primary that they have not set aside their doubts about Kennedy's character. The Senator encounters the Chappaquiddick issue almost everywhere he goes. Last week in the heavily Polish Port Richmond section of Philadelphia, a crowd of several hundred mobbed him. Janet Tokarski presented him with a basket of colored Easter eggs, and an elderly man sprinkled him with rose water, to the momentary alarm of the candidate's Secret Service bodyguards. Nearby, however, Gus Makowski, 44, grumbled, "He's good with the older people, but this kind of stuff won't get my vote. He hasn't been honest enough." Much as the so-called character issue hurts, Kennedy will not even discuss it with his aides. In his view, he can overcome it only by speaking enough about other issues to get voters to forget it. Questioned about whether he is being hurt by Chappaquiddick, he squirms uncomfortably and replies: "Yes, but the decisive issue in this campaign is the state of the economy." Then he launches into a forceful litany of his economic views, again displaying his new style.

The contrast with Kennedy's earlier bumbling performance could not be more startling. Last fall and early winter, he sometimes seemed to lose his concentration in the middle of a speech and wander through rambling, almost incoherent sentences. Now he raps out short, crisp remarks, sometimes punching at the air like a boxer for emphasis, and spices his delivery with sarcastic wit. Deriding Carter's claims that decontrol of oil prices will spur more domestic exploration for petroleum, he notes that Mobil several years ago used some of its rising profits to buy Montgomery Ward. He asks: "How much oil do you think they'll discover drilling in the aisles of Montgomery Ward department stores?"

Last November Kennedy seemed nonplussed when asked by CBS Interviewer Roger Mudd how his policies as President would differ from Carter's. Now he sets out a liberal agenda: wage and price controls, gasoline rationing, continued efforts to achieve detente with the Soviets. This is far different from Carter's programs, and Kennedy sticks to it doggedly, despite the national conservative tide. He insists that balancing the budget will not do much to curb inflation, and he assails proposals to cut social spending: "We cannot fight inflation on the backs of the poor, the elderly, the working people." He continues to push his expensive plan for national health insurance (an extra $28.6 billion a year, by his own estimate). Said he in Johnstown: "If free health care is good enough for the members of Congress, it's good enough for the people of Johnstown." Though his advocacy of handgun control hurt him badly in the New Hampshire primary, he repeats it in Pennsylvania, a state with many ardent hunters. Says he, while stressing that he is not talking about hunting weapons: "My family has been touched by violence, and I'm not going to retreat on this issue."

Each day Kennedy zips through a grueling schedule with energy that belies the constant pain of his aching back, a consequence of an airplane crash in 1964. Returning last week from a day of campaigning in Baltimore, he was so stiff that he could barely walk into his home in McLean, Va.; nonetheless, he plunged soon afterward into crowds at a fund-raising event. In one primary or caucus after another, he has shrugged off defeat with enough humor and grace to win the admiration of political opponents. "You have to respect him for it," says an aide to Republican Front Runner Ronald Reagan. "He is not a whiner."

The change began immediately after Kennedy's crushing 2-to-1 defeat by Carter in the Iowa caucuses on Jan. 21. The shock of the loss ended Kennedy's hope that the power of his name and his vague promises to exert more "leadership" than Carter would give him the nomination. The Senator decided to return to his liberal roots. If he were to lose in the end, he later said, he would at least "go down honorably," taking positions on issues in which he believed. In a speech at Georgetown University on Jan. 28, he set out a detailed liberal program that he has stuck to ever since.

Kennedy also decided to rely more on his political instincts than on the advice of his aides. They had, for instance, urged him to read his speeches and shun ad libbing. As a result, his delivery was disastrously wooden. Kennedy now has gone to the other extreme. Not only does he frequently speak extemporaneously, but he runs what is virtually a one-man campaign, determining each night what he will say the next day, and often abruptly changing his schedule. But there was no indication that his improving style was paying off until he won in Connecticut and New York on March 25. By then, he had lost 583 more delegates to Carter.

What keeps Kennedy going? It is not sheer love of politicking. He leads a lonely life on the campaign trail, traveling with no more than three aides. An intensely private man, he eats many a dinner alone in a hotel room. Early in the race, he confessed to a companion that "the fun has gone out of campaigning." On another occasion, he said with a sigh: "I sometimes get tired of hearing myself speak." Some aides speculate that he is driven to carry on a family tradition. A few observers even theorize that he is seeking some sort of expiation and forgiveness for personal shortcomings by speaking for principle through a losing campaign.

Kennedy snorts disgustedly at such armchair psychoanalysis. His own explanation is much simpler. First, he genuinely believes in the Democratic Party's liberal traditions, and thinks that if he does not speak up for them nobody else will. While preparing to deliver a speech to newspaper editors in Washington last week, he mused that Carter and many other Democratic politicians were "wavering" dangerously, bending their efforts toward "catching up with the prevailing wind" of conservatism. In the speech, he called Carter "a pale carbon copy" of Ronald Reagan.

Though Kennedy assails Carter's policies with growing harshness, he does not criticize the President personally, even with his closest advisers. One aide says that when Kennedy watches Carter make a point on TV, he smiles or nods ruefully, but never says anything disparaging. Nonetheless, he has made it clear that he believes Carter is incompetent and that he would make a better President.

Moreover, against all the evidence, Kennedy clings to a belief that he can still win the nomination. Purring on a cigar aboard his campaign plane, a lumbering Fairchild nicknamed (by Kennedy) "FlimFlam One," he declared last week: "I don't even think about losing." In an interview with TIME Correspondent Johanna McGeary, he added, musing about the change in his own style: "It's sort of like a training program. I spent a long time in training. Now I'm coming into the play-offs and the Super Bowl." He insists that continued bungling by Carter eventually will make the Democratic Party realize that it must not renominate the President. Then, Kennedy believes, the convention will turn to him. It is a faint hope indeed, but one that keeps him campaigning, adding spice to what otherwise might turn into a dull campaign.

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