First family plot

Nicholas von Hoffman

Washington There are days when this election seems to be between not Ford and Carter but the Ford family versus the Carter family. Never have families been used in a presidential campaign as they are being used in this one.

The Carter campaign is based on a point system by which a visit to a city or a state by Carter is counted as seven points, a visit by Mondale counts as five, a visit by either of the wives is scored as three points. The kids only count as two, as does an oration by Carter's Aunt Sissy. What point value may have been assigned the Democratic candidate's mother hasn't been made public, but, whatever it might be, it's still unlikely that even though visits by three Carter children and Aunt Sissy would outpoint dad, the voters would accept them as a substitute.

A few speeches by Mrs Mondale, a woman of tireless and tiresome probity and matchlessly humourless recititude, should sabotage the point system soon enough unless some of the players are to be given minus values. Nevertheless, it appears that the campaign managers will continue to use family members and families as never before.

Families, of course, attest to the wholesome morality of the candidate himself. The members provide a specificity of persons which may compensate for the general conviction that there is none in the discussion of issues.

In times past the family members stood in a semi-circle behind father, smiled, looked nice and kept their mouths shut. No longer. Just as the candidate must make public his tax records and the results of his medical examination, the family members must divulge more and more about themselves. Recently Mrs Carter told us her three sons had confessed to her that they'd smoked marijuana. The lady told the country that, although she didn't approve of pot smoking, she was so thankful she and Jimmy had the kind of relationship with the children that allowed for full and free communication.

Communication and relationship are both plus words with the middle class so she scored heavily on that. Her children's confession helped her with the Bible belt but the fact that she didn't have them arrested reassured the millions of young adults who smoke a reefer with their pre-prandial, after-work martinis. We can expect Mrs Ford any day now to tell us that daughter Susan has confided in her mother that she's a part-time hooker.

Betty Ford is the only member of any of the campaigning families to disagree with father, husband and candidate. This she has done over women's questions like equal rights and abortion. While the President has stuck to a socially conservative posture, his wife has publicly disagreed and taken a profeminist position. Far from being embarrassing, what the Fords have done is to invent a new way for a politician to talk out of both sides of his mouth; with Betty zooming about the country saying in effect, don't pay any attention to my dear old stick-in-themud husband, when I get him alone, I'll pillow talk some sense into him.

Thus far nobody has called the Fords on their ingenious, new form of duplicity. It has allowed Ford to get away scot free on the abortion question while Carter has been taking a pummelling from the anti-abortionists who've been picketing, demonstrating and shouting in just enough numbers to give the television viewers the impression he has considerably more people opposed to him than he has.

Most Americans are reluctantly in favour of legalised abortion but they don't feel too strongly about the issue. The antis do, and in a close election they might make the difference. Ford has been able to win them without losing the pro-abortionists because of Betty. Beyond that Mrs Ford has been able to make her husband look less callous and less indifferent to working people's pains and problems than his record shows he is, and she has been able to do it while staying outside of all controversy.

Eleanor Roosevelt, the last presidential wife to take such an active hand, could infuriate certain segments of the society. Betty doesn't. She is that rare person in politics who only makes friends, not enemies.

Ford will need every vote his wife can get him. The unemployment figures were slightly higher again this month. This is the third month in a row they've been going in the wrong direction for Ford and, although the rises haven't been terribly large, they reinforce the impression that the man can't do much about them or anything else. He is a president for serene and trouble-free times and even though they dress him in a suit with a waistcoat when he appears on the telly to make him seem like a man of resourcefulness and inner substance, he still makes you feel that if he's the captain of the the ship of state, it would be just as wise to book passage on another steamship line.

His FBI problem will not go away. Director Clarence Kelley, it has been discovered, used bureau personnel to decorate his apartment. The sums involved were trivial but recently Kelley forced one of his own subordinates to plead guilty in a court to doing the same thing on an even pettier scale. Again the double standard of justice which reminded people another time that it was Jerry Ford who pardoned Richard Nixon, an act that continues to infuriate more than a few people.

At the same time, almost every day there is more evidence and new information about the FBI campaign to deprive non-conformists of their rights. Against this background Carter said the other day that he would fire Kelley, not because of the FBI's continuing invasion of civil liberties under Kelley, but because of the apartment decorations. Ford immediately leapt on that one and accused Carter of lacking 'compassion' for Kelley whose wife was dying of cancer during the period that the FBI director was freeloading his interior decorating. Such is the level of the discourse in the early days of the campaign. Enough of that sort of thing from Ford and he may goad the as yet lethargic and unenthusiastic Democratic liberals to start campaigning against him in earnest.

They aren't the only lethargic ones. A new poll estimated that 70 million or more eligible voters, or more than 50 per cent of the electorate, may fail to vote in November. The percentage of non-voters has been climbing for decades and for decades politicians and priofessors have been attributing the mournful numbers to the difficulties the various states placed in the way of people registering to vote. For the most part those obstacles have been cleared away. Anyone who at all wants to can vote and still more and more choose not to help elect their officials.

In the past non-voters have tended to be young, the poor and the black so that low voter turnouts were considered to be good for the Republicans. That's not so certain now. There are millions of middle class nonvoters who reject the often expressed notion that, if nothing else, you should vote for the lesser of two evils. You can see bumPer stickers on cars owned by non-voters which read : The lesser of two evils is still evil'.

Despite his landslide in the 1972 elections, the voter turnout was so low that Richard Nixon probably received significantly less than 40 per cent of the eligible vote. The dimensions of his victory obscured the fact that many could not bring themselves to vote for either man. This year people are much more aware of the non-voter: people are no longer ashamed to speak up and saY that they are electoral teetotallers. Hence we could see a winner of a two-man race with scarcely 25 per cent of the possible vote. That would be a victory bled of all authority but between that outcome and now there are the presidential debates, Plus one vice-presidential debate. And if that fails to excite interest, we could pit the wives, the children, even the Ford and Carter family pets against each other.