Williams-Cavanagh Primary

Most of this year's more interesting primary contests involve clear-cut ideological differences. In California, actor Ronald Reagan and former San Francisco Mayor George Christopher are staging a rerun of the Goldwater-Rockefeller contest, while Governor Pat Brown has been challenged in the Democratic primary by the hero of the casual bigots, Mayor Sam Yorty of Los Angeles. In Alabama, Lurleen Wallace is facing an increasingly liberal Attorney-General Richmond Flowers. In contrast, it is impossible to find such differences between the two Democrat Senatorial candidates in Michigan, former (1949-1960) Governor G. Mennen Williams and Detroit's Mayor Jerome P. Cavanagh.

Williams and Cavanagh are both solid supporters of the Administration's domestic programs; they both rather uneasily back the President's conduct of the war in Vietnam. The real difference between them is one of style and the way they look at politics. The difference between them is distinct to the politicians backing each candidate. Virtually all Michigan Democratic leaders favor Williams, while official Washington is generally rooting for Cavanagh. Only the sentiments of Michigan voters remain a mystery.

The style difference can best be understood by thinking of Williams as a Fifties liberal and Cavanagh as a Sixties Liberal. These labels correspond to years in which the candidates' political perspective--and that of their followers--was shaped. Williams was first elected Governor in an upset in 1948 and retained office only after thorough recounts in 1950 and 1952. Throughout his six terms he faced hostile Republican legislatures, whose conservatism can hardly be made comprehensible today. The Republican legislators were not Goldwater-like ideologues with sleek suburban backgrounds, but simple small-town businessmen who saw no use for government above the township level and prided themselves on never having seen a city larger than Lansing (population 92,000 at the time). The automobile companies' lobbyists, who had seen bigger things, were able to control the legislative process. Williams built an honest, efficient administration, but was able to increase spending for items like education and mental health only as revenues rose from the state's intredibly regressive tax structure.

William's most enduring achievement was rebuilding the state's Democratic Party, which had been virtually nonexistent before 1948. Under the leadership of Neil Staebler, Williams Democrats flourished and swept all state elections from 1954 to 1960, and they still dominate the party today.

Despite their successes, these Fifties Liberals retained a feeling of isolation. Virtually all articulate opinion in the state, outside the inner circles of the Party and the United Auto Workers, was ranged solidly against them. The newspapers were stridently Republican, and the constant barrage of derision and criticism tended to put these idealistic Democrats purely on the defensive. Advertising and public relations were looked upon as weapons that could be used only by the opposition.

This defensiveness, plus the huge ideological gap between gubernatorial Democrats and legislative Republicans, made it difficult and rather useless for Fifties Liberals to conceive of any sort of political compromise. This attitude did not serve Williams well in the 1959 cash crisis--the incident which destroyed his national and severely damaged his local reputation. State revenues had simply dried up during the 1957-58 recession, and when Williams presented a reasonable tax program, the legislature, eager to increase the sales tax, refused to budge. So did Williams. As a result, the state could not meet its payrolls and phrase "payless paydays" became permanently attached to the Governor. The Detroit newspapers, the Luce magazines, etc., did a brutal hatchet job on Williams from which he has never recovered.

When Soapy Williams left Michigan to become Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs, Jerry Cavanagh was a completely unknown 32-year-old Detroit lawyer. His election as Mayor in 1961 was an even greater surprise than William's victory in 1948, and it left Cavanagh owing little to Williams and the Fifties Liberals, some of whom opposed him. As a nonpartisan Mayor with few debts, Cavanagh was free to make a different kind of record and form a different political outlook. His major achievements--improvement of police-Negro relations, a city income tax, and an imaginative anti-poverty program--won him the support of most Negro and labor organizations, the Greater Detroit Board of Commerce and of 67 per cent of the city's voters in November, 1965.

Cavanagh has a taste for consensus (if we can still use that word) which he has been able to indulge as Fifties Liberals never could. He has a flair for public relations, and there has been an endless stream of articles praising him in the same newspapers and magazines that have always attacked Williams.

Cavanagh and other Sixties Liberals including, perhaps, Robert Kennedy, have profited from the success during the Kennedy and Johnson Administrations of all the causes that men like Williams and Hubert Humphrey fought for in the fifties. What the Detroit newspapers railed against ten years ago, they now accept, and Cavanagh, like LBJ, knows how to use their acceptance to make further gains. At the same time, Republicans--even Michigan Republicans--have changed. George Romney managed to convince voters that he was not the same kind of politician as the reactionaries that controlled the State Senate (although he is closer to them than most people think). Sixties Liberals have worked uneasily with Romney, but the Fifties Liberals have not been able to adjust successfully to the Romney appeal. They have a hard time realizing that state elections are no longer automatically theirs, and that their tactics (which they tend to confuse with principles) failed to win the governorship in 1962 and 1964.

It is not suprising, then, that Cavanagh enjoys the favor, and patronage, of the President and that Williams is not well thought of in Washington. (They say that the President does not forget the sight of Soapy and Nancy Williams climbing on their chairs and shouting "No!" to the motion to make unanimous the Vice Presidential nomination it the 1960 convention.) Nor is it surprising that most Michigan Democratic politicians, who retain the Fifties Liberal perspective, passionately favor Williams.

The outcome of the Democratic primary in August is harder to predict. Cavanagh is counting on edges among Negro voters (his excellent civil rights record being more recent this Williams's), young voters (who tend to associate Williams with the bitter recession years and Cavanagh with prosperity), and Republican crossovers (there are no major Republican primary contests'. Williams has the backing of the Democratic organization and of most labor unions, including the state AFL-CIO. Odds currently favor Williams, but the result probably depends on which groups of voters turn out in greater numbers.

What almost everyone overlooks is the fact that either candidate is likely to have a tough time beating his Republican opponent, Congressman Robert Griffin. Williams will suffer from his unearned reputation as the man who bankrupted the state, Cavanagh from commuters' resentment at the city income tax. Both candidates are apparently restraining themselves from attacking these weak spots, but if the hatred that really does exist between Fifties and Sixties Liberals becomes too intense, they might give Griffin the opening he will be all too ready to use.