Santa Cruz Sentinel from Santa Cruz, California • Page 25

Monday, April 7, 1980 Santa Cruz Sentinel 25 Senfne Editorial JUDGE I Political Outlook HIS CM JIL HENS OF JN GBSOOBE ffifSTBW- I With the next big primary two weeks away in Pennsylvania, the presidential hopefuls have a little time to regroup in their efforts to compete against President Jimmy Carter and Republican leader Konald Reagan. Carter and Keagan continued their winning ways Saturday with easy victories in Louisiana to extend their already formidable leads. Carter won 39 delegate votes in Louisiana compared to 12 for Sen. Ted Kennedy, while Reagan won all but two of the 31 Republican delegates (the two are uncommitted). The president has moved beyond the halfway mark in his bid for renomination while Reagan is far ahead of George Bush and John Anderson.

Reagan is nearing the 40 percent mark for the Republican nomination. Obviously, the challengers need to score victories in Pennsylvania or face a doomsday position. In the light vote in Louisiana there were two voter characteristics which might affect future elections. One a sizeable number of Democrats didn't vote for the president. Two some Democrats tried unsuccessfully to vote for Reagan.

There is no crossover voting in Louisiana. Only about 42,000 Republicans voted in Louisiana and Reagan got three of every four votes. And, only 360,000 of the state's more than 1.1 million Democrats cast ballots with Carter getting about four of every seven votes. The president received 199,221 votes or 56 percent while 159,161 Democrats voted for someone else. Probably the more important fact is the number of Democrats who did not vote for the president.

Even Jerry Brown, who announced his withdrawal from the campaign, got 5 percent of the vote. A suprising number, more than 40,000, didn't vote for any candidate on the Democratic ticket. The candidates did not make a major eflort to campaign in Louisiana, leaving the campaigning to their supporters. As yet, the president hasn't left the Rose Garden although it seems likely he may have to get on the campaign trail soon. Many things might occur in the next couple of weeks which could change the outlook in Pennsylvania.

Some political observers believe Kennedy has a good chance of beating Carter in the Quaker state although the margin could be close. Such an outcome wouldn't be particularly harmful to the president in the number of delegates won or lost, but any change in the current trend might wind up growing into a widespread movement. Even incumbents don't like to see winning trends change so more hinges on the Pennsylvania vote than the delegates to the national convention. On the Republican side, it would take a major change in GOP sentiment to stop the Reagan bandwagon. It is highly doubtful that either Bush or Anderson will win the state.

However, from the position of being the number two choice, a respectable second place finish is important. The third place finisher is just about out of the race unless there should be some drastic and unexpected changes. The fact that the president is not winning independent voters and having some problems within his own party should be cause for concern in the White House. The president needs to demonstrate he can win votes in the big states, that Illinois was no fluke and New York was simply a vote under difficult decisions. The problem confronting the president is not so much winning the nomination, but also showing he can attract all the voters.

He didn't do that in Wisconsin, Kansas or in New York. i Jack Anderson The Greedy Oil Companies Andrew Tully Wit Is Missing In Campaign With motivation like that, it's small wonder the oil moguls shrug off the administration's pitiful, helpless giant stops to control inllation. The only weapons COWPS has against those who exceed the guidelines are the withholding of government contracts aftd the spreading of bad publicity. And these are singularly unsuitable which to belabor big Oil. The government-contract stick works only if there isn't much demand in' the private sector lor goods the government refuses to buy.

Obviously, this is not the case with oil. As for bad publicity, the GAO analysis notes, "To be effective, publicity' would have to have the potential for damaging a company's image. Oil companies are subjected almost daily to a barrage of bad publicity in the media." Concludes the GAO analysis: "It is, then, reasonable to believe that neither pi the sanctions available lor enforcemenCol the COWPS price standard are (sic) likely to have substantial effect on the oil industry's behavior." It's too soon to assess the impact of the administration's blasts at Mobil. But the smart money didn't seem worried. In late February, COWPS accused Mobil of violating the price guidelines, and the firm stock jumped $4.50 per share.

After President Carter's blast, the price of Mobil's stock went up $1.75 the next trading day. (c)United Feature Syndicate' The basic problem is that only refining a small part of the oil industry's operations is covered by the guidelines. Crude oil production, distribution and marketing are not. "The extent of COWPS authority can at best be expected to affect only a relatively small portion the refiners' margin out of the total retail price of gasoline, home heating oil and other refined petroleum products," explains an unpublished analysis of the guidelines prepared by the General Accounting Office. And even in this limited area of supervision, COWPS has been letting the oil companies get away with murder.

In one recent report, for example, COWPS disclosed that there had been an average 4.5-cent per gallon increase in the refiners' margin during the first year the voluntary guidelines were in effect. That was almost a 45 percent rise in the margin. "A standard under which such an excessive increase can occur for reasons other than non-compliance must surely be considered suspect," the GAO study observes. The trouble is that the president's voluntary program relies on the patriotism and moderation of industry and labor, and there are apparently few born-again Christians in the boardrooms of Big Oil. The chief executive of Exxon, for example, was paid $977,993 in salary and bonuses last year while the price of gasoline soared over $1 a gallon.

The No. 2 man drew $611,023. WASHINGTON No amount of jawboning from the White House has been able to keep Big Oil from going its merry buccaneering way, ripping off the American consumer for gasoline and home heating fuel. Even the president's astonishing tirade against Mobil will probably have no chastening effect on the recklessly greedy oil companies. The trouble, as Jimmy Carter's top inflation fighters admitted in a memo late last year, is in the administration's voluntary anti-inflation program itself.

The Council on Wage and Price Stability is a paper tiger as far as Big Oil is concerned, they explained to the president. The confidential memo, written by presidential advisers Stu Eizenstat and Alfred Kahn, boasts that "price guidelines have been remarkably successful in restraining price increases in most other industries," but concedes that the White House effort has not produced a "similar restraint in petroleum products." Eizenstat and Kahn explained that "even if through sophisticated accounting methods it turns out that most individual companies are in compliance with the letter of the standard, the aggregate data leaves no doubt that the industry as a whole has not complied with its spirit." In other words, with a little effort by their accounting departments, the oil companies can rake in enormous profits and still be technically within the COWPS guidelines. Washington Today campaign stop." Similarly, Reagan now jokes about his age. During one debate he mentioned that Diocletian, the ancient Roman emperor, was the first to try wage and price controls. "I'm the only one here old enough to remember him," he cracked.

And when John Anderson refused to say he'd back the GOP nominee, whoever he was, Reagan leaned over with an artificially wistful smile and asked: "John, would you really prefer Ted Kennedy to me?" The rest of the lot are deadly serious by comparison. Anderson recently has seemed a bit too moralistic. George Bush seems impatiently embarrassed when he, essays a witticism. It's too bad Bob Dole had to bow out. His humor is good old-fashioned burlesque show stuff and he has learned to soften with a verbal wink some of his knife thrusts.

But none of the candidates in either party, alas, is my old tentmate Hal Boyle. Without uttering a mean syllable, Hal could have put the whole business in humorous perspective. He was a longtime fan of Harry Truman, but when Franklin Roosevelt died and Truman became president, Hal could not resist worrying whether his fellow Missourian could "find his way around the Oval Office. (McNaught Syndicate, Inc.) words of English to assorted French moppets in his campaign to sabotage several war correspondents he perceived as his political enemies. On one occasion he dispatched several of those kids to trail the statesmanlike and sartorially impeccable Ed Murrow, chanting: "Murrow stole our candy!" Unfortunately, there are no Adlai Stevensons, Jack Kennedys last but not least Hal Boyles chasing votes this presidential year.

Of the present crop, Ted Kennedy and perhaps surprisingly Ronald Reagan are the only candidates who have shown a spark of real humor. Kennedy has some of the family wit, including brother Jack's self-deprecating variety. Usually, he has managed to wisecrack about his primary defeats. In recent weeks he has even managed to deal lightly with his family problems. For example, during a chat with reporters covering him he jested about a panel interview in Boston.

"You know," he said, "those reporters kept asking me about my wife and and I looked up and I thought I could count three or four divorces right on that panel. At the end, I really wanted to go up to the moderator and say, 'Hey, how's your first He's fond of saying he keeps "hoping I'll run into Jimmy Carter eating a bagel at some WASHINGTON Humor in political campaigns is notable mostly for its absence. We haven't had a man of authentic wit trying to get elected president since the late Adlai Stevenson. The man from Illinois was so good some people thought he was too funny to be sent to the White House. Jack Kennedy ran a close second to Stevenson because of his capacity to kid himself.

Nixon was about as humorous as an overripe mackerel, and so was George McUovern. Jerry Ford was a nice guy whose public utterances were about as witty as a warning that the Last Trump was imminent. If Jimmy Carter has a sense of humor, he has always managed to cunningly conceal it. 1 yearn for a presidential candidate in the mold of the late Hal Boyle of the Associated Press, who covered World War 11 in Africa and Europe. Boyle was a smiling, paunchy Irishman from Kansas City who took the war seriously, but not himself.

In a ploy that might profitably be adopted by today's presidential candidates, Boyle painted a campaign slogan on his jeep when he decided to run for "Czar of Casablanca." It read, simply: Vote For Boyle, A Son of the Soil. Honest Hal, the Arab's Pal. Later, in Normandy, Hal taught a few Ben Stein Difficult Third-Party Obstacles U.S. Society In A Crisis from running as an independent where he was a candidate for political leaders. percent of the voters who said they were independents.

And in Illinois' primury, he didn't; do much better than a split. with Reagan among the independents. Anderson is having a hard time with those independents because they are not quite as disconnected from the parties as one would suppose. Party leanings are formed early in life and are difficult to shed. Those "independents" often hold views remarkably i like those of the Democratic or Republican rank and file, look more favorably on that party and generally vote for its candidates.

Anderson's task as an, independent candidate Is formidable. But then, so was his effort to become a major GOP contender. he would have to be winning votes. That might be the hardest task of all. Anderson's campaign has been based on building a new coalition of American voters, particularly the growing number who say that they are neither Republican nor Democrat, that they are independent.

But his strategy has not been particularly successful. He hasn't won a single primary, although he came very close in Vermont and Massachusetts. And he hasn't been been doing that well among the independent voters. In the Wisconsin primary which was almost equal to a general election ballot since voters could choose to vote for any presidential candidate Anderson got only about 28 the Republican nomination. In the other 43 states and the District of Columbia, he has to collect about 675,000 signatures on petitions and file them with the county clerks or state election officials.

Some of those have to be on paper by late April, but some are not due until September. Even as so much energy would be going into complying with the laws, Anderson would have to be putting together a campaign machine, precinct by precinct, county by county, state by state. He couldn't even count on many of his primary supporters in this effort, for at least some of them are loyal Republicans who would be loath to turn against the GOP. Last and certainly not least, quite unconcerned about the fate of a great city and its people relative to their own wages. In a word, we have a symptom of social illness on a significant scale.

But what came forth from Mayor Ed Koch was even more perplexing. In an eerily familiar pattern of political leaders responding to major problems, Mayor Koch issued a call to New Yorkers to meet the crisis by using bicycles. The idea that the appropriate governmental answer to a major political and economic breakdown is to suggest bicycle use would be funny if it were not so pitiful. And it would be shocking if it were not part of a broader pattern of enormous national problems drawing pathetically inadequate, off-the-mark responses from our Last week, New York City fell victim to a transit strike. Unionized workers on the subways and buses of the nation's largest city refused to work because New York refused to meet their contract demands.

The city of New York is virtually broke all the time. It can hardly afford a 30 percent rise in pay for subway workers when such a raise would open the floodgates for all city employees. So, in a city almost totally dependent upon mass transit, the mass transit stopped dead. So far, we have a case of a major social breakdown. New York obviously is incapable of running a major, life-or-death municipal service.

We also have an example of a completely alienated and embittered transit workers' union which is Voice Of The People By EVANS WITT WASHINGTON (AP) If the obstacles to John Anderson's winning the Republican presidential nomination are imposing, the roadblocks to his taking the White House as a third-party candidate are positively breathtaking. First, he would have to comply with a maze of legal requirements in 43 states just to get on the November ballot. For legal reasons, Anderson can't make it on the ballot in the other seven states. At the same time, he would have to be building a national political organization from the ground up. And alter all that, Anderson would have to be right in saying that Jimmy Carter and Konald Reagan are unacceptable to Americans, so unacceptable that they will shed decades of tradition and vote for a third-party candidate.

The moderate Illinois congressman spent the weekend resting in California, and he had told one interviewer that he might emerge from his hiatus with a decision on whether to run a long-shot, third-party campaign. Anderson's bid to be the GOP nominee faltered in the past two weeks, as he failed to win primaries in either his home state or in Wisconsin. Keagan is well on the road to nomination. As his GOP bid has faded, Anderson switched from his firm disavowal of a third-party candidacy to an admission that he's thinking about one and the problems it would pose. There are a lot of them.

To begin with, a third-party candidacy needs brilliant administration to comply with the state election laws. This is yet another reminder that a national presidential campaign is really 51 separate elections with 51 different sets of rules. Anderson can't comply with the laws in seven states either because the filing deadlines are passed or because he is barred Berry's World and Japan would be severed. The Soviets would have the whip hand over the Western world. We could do literally nothing except blow up the world to stop them.

Our president responds by calling for a boycott of the Moscow Olympics (a call which is ignored around the world). In Iran, we are made fools and eunuchs by the terrorists who hold our hostages. Fifty Americans are tortured daily by confinement and brutality. The American nation is humiliated daily by the spectacle of our impotence. The entire ability of America to deal with foreign nations is shown to be non-existent.

The president responds by threatening to close the Iranian embassy in Washington. Across the board, this society is in crisis. As a civilization, we show familiar signs of collapse. We need powerful measures to revive the society. A mended dollar, a restored national defense, a new sense of vigor in preserving our system are needed now, today.

Instead, we get calls to ride bicycles and stern-faced threats to boycott athletic games. We are suffering from critical disease as a nation. Our national physicians prescribe two aspirin and a call in the morning. Even from the other candidates for president, there is a terrifying silence about just how dire are our straits. No one has stood up to say that American civilization is in danger on every front.

No one has dared to wake America from its torpor. Instead, we get "let them eat cake" measures that do nothing but prolong the deadly slumber. I wait eagerly for a man or woman to appear who will tell us just how late is the hour and how urgent the task of saving our country. I have not heard anything encouraging, but I still wait. (cjKing Features Syndicate For example, the economic situation in America is acutely dangerous.

The inflation rate is murderous for a great many innocent people. It destroys hopes, values, discipline, and self-esteem. The national standard of living has fallen drastically. The productivity of workers, which is the ultimate test of a nation's wealth, is falling like a stone. Our financial markets and commodities markets are in chronic panic.

In a word, we face a true crisis of the capitalist state that has given us so much. The response of our president is to propose a limitation on the use of credit cards. A further example: The military balance has shifted dramatically against the United States. Through years of disarmament, the United States is now almost naked against enemy aggression. If Cuba invaded Florida, we would have a hard time stopping them before Georgia.

If the Soviet Union invaded Western Europe, we could not stop them at all. In less than a week, the greatest industrial force on earth, western Europe, would be swallowed up without even a small hope of our being able to recover the continent. In fact, nothing but fear of revolt in the satellites stops the Soviets from simply walking in unopposed to Germany, France, Italy, and the rest. In other words, we face a horrifying crisis in the defense of the western world. What is the response of the leaders of NATO? To discuss a 2Vi percent increase in national defense spending per year an increase which would not change the relative balance of power with the Warsaw bloc within a millennium.

The Soviets have already seized Afghanistan. They could take Iran and Saudi Arabia in eight hours. We could not stop them. The oil lifeline to Europe occur. If and when a major spill occurs the amount of ocean wild life would diminish.

Even though you can't see them, the air receives millions of tiny oil particles. The accumulation of such particles would result in air pollution. Another hazard is that the offshore drilling setup is near the San Francisco to Los Angeles shipping lane, which might cause collisions. The overall question is whether the oil is worth drilling for. We think, as does Gary Patton, that it is not.

Chris Grube Andrew Kashap 214 Sunset Ave. initiative would be detrimental to the county's economy, while others believe that conversion would benefit the community substantially. When the county administrative officer's study showed that the fiscal impact could not be reasonably determined, Liddicoat threw it out as being "too impartial." Liddicoat seems to think that, if a statement or initiative is not in tune to her opinions, it is incorrect for everyone. I'm glad we have "perfect people" like Marilyn Liddicoat on our Board of Supervisors to decide what is good and bad for us all and to let the county counsel know when they are becoming (politically) impartial. Every county board needs a person like Marilyn Liddicoat to represent the closed-minded sector of our society.

1 Michael Bliden 327 Sunlit Lane Oppose Drilling Editor: We are eighth graders at Mission Hill Junior High and we recently had an interview with Supervisor Gary Patton concerning the offshore oil drilling situation off the Santa Cruz coastline. We strongly oppose the offshore drilling in this district. The federal government owns the land and they plan on leasing it to the highest bidder among the different oil companies. In the Santa Cruz area near the border of San Mateo County, there will be an estimated five separate platforms, possibly more. These platforms would feed the nation with enough oil for five days.

But, the catch is that it would take 15 years to drill out all the oil. Hazardwise, this particular set of wells would more or less have the same potential for spillage as a big oil outfit. No matter how careful the oil workers are, minor spills do Impartiality Editor: "Too impartial" was Marilyn Liddicoat's description of the county counsel's fiscal impact statement on Measure A (the nuclear weapons initiative). Well, isn't that what it should be? Liddicoat believes that the 'MO by NE. Inc "I'll bet you're trying to scare me, aren't you?" hi'.