Wallace A Decisive Factor

Press, Volume CVIII, Issue 31781, 11 September 1968, Page 17

Wallace A Decisive Factor

(N.Z P A.-Reuter —Copyright) WASHINGTON, Sept. 10. In previous Presidential campaigns the phrases “both candidates and “neither candidates” were in every newspaper column. Not so this time, for there are three serious candidates. Mr George Wallace, the former Governor of Alabama, has forced the major parties, and the public, to take him seriously. No-one really thinks he can win, but to both major parties he looks like a wrecker. In any event, he is going to have a good deal to do with the making of the next President of the United States; he is

going to be a decisive factor in this election.

Mr Wallace is really a Confederate, and wherever he goes the old Confederate flag is to be seen. In the south he is arousing the old Confederate spirit which led to the civil war. There are Confederate flags on display everywhere and there is an anti-Yankee feeling about It has been below the surface ever since the civil war and it is beginning to show again More than that, Mr Wallace is appealing to anti-Adminis-tration voters in northern States and to the ultra-con-servatives in the north who distrust Mr Nixon’s new image as a middle-of-the-roader.

The Humphrey and Nixon camps seem to be just as anxiously trying to figure out what Mr Wallace can do to them as they are what they can do to each other. Each camp claims Mr Wallace will do more harm to the other

but both behave as if they really wished they knew for sure.

Exuding confidence, Mr Wallace has everyone guessing. Last spring the general assumption was that he might

take 50 or 60 electoral college votes. Today some political analysts think he may do three times better than that, and there are plenty who consider it likely he could sweep the whole south for 121 votes. If he should take those 121 votes he would leave only 416 to be divided between Mr Nixon and Mr Humphrey and, to win, one of them would have to get 269, because to win a candidate must take a majority of all electoral votes.

It is impossible to find anyone who sincerely believes that there is a difference of 122 votes between Mr Nixon and Mr Humphrey (the difference between 269 and 416). Everyone is agreed that at this stage it looks like a very close race between the Democratic and Republican nominees and, therefore, if the Wallace threat is as serious as it now looks the Ameri can voters cannot elect a President this year—it would have to be done by the House of Representatives. This unhappy possibility has the political analysts (and probably Mr Nixon and Mr Humphrey) fascinated, even horrified. The question posed is this: is the American election system going to break down? Are the primaries, the conventions, the oratory, the expenditure of many millions of dollars, the visits to the polling booths of 75 million Americans to be for naught, and a President chosen by 50 votes in the Lower Chamber of the Leg. islature? Inevitably, the situation will force both Mr Humphrey and Mr Nixon to fight Mr Wallace as well as each other.

Three months ago the polls

showed that Mr Humphrey was likely to beat Mr Nixon easily, but that no longer holds. In the interim he has been slipping badly and tha! hate-filled convention in Chicago did him great damage. It is being called “Mayoi Daley's gift to Nixon.” Mr Humphrey has begun what looks like a recovery process; he looks more and more like his own man rather than Mr Johnson’s marionette And some political wiseacres are predicting that he will yet win back the estranged liberals of his party by advocating a complete halt to the bombing of North Vietnam to test Hanoi’s intentions. Mr Nixon is running a good campaign very ably, which is a vast improvement over his 1960 performance against the late President Kennedy. But he has yet to show that he can persuade conservative Republicans to come under his umbrella with the liberal and middle-of-the-road sections of his party. And over both campaigns looms the shadow of Mr Wallace with his “Give ’em hell” campaign aimed at the conservatives of both parties, especially in the southern States. The Confederacy is once again on the march and will have an effect on the course of the union for the next four and possibly eight years.