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ENERGY. Although environmentalists may object, a major Nixon aim is a matter of genuine national urgency: to find new fuel and electrical-energy sources for the U.S. This will include support of oil supertankers, an Alaskan pipeline, nuclear breeder-reactor plants, more offshore drilling.
HEALTH. Nixon never seriously pushed any general improvement of health services, although this was one of the goals of his proposed "revolution." The Administration did not follow up its proposal to enact a comprehensive health insurance plan that would heavily rely on private insurance carriers and employers. Nixon is expected to propose this again, however, if only to counter a more sweeping plan by Senator Edward Kennedy that would require a greater financial role by Government.
WELFARE. Welfare reform is another of Nixon's first-term priorities that have been unfulfilled, again partly because he seemed to want a political issue more than a fairly compromised law. It is sure to become once more an issue of contention between the President and Congress. Despite his campaign denunciation of McGovern's abandoned $1,000-per-person income guarantee, Nixon's plan embraces the minimum-income principle, although on a far more modest scale. Just where to place that income floor may remain a topic for argument. Nixon's decisive re-election may reinforce his desire to make the work requirements more stringent.
EDUCATION. Nixon's highly political manipulation of the school-busing issue has thrown a huge question mark over the future of school integration, just at a time when it began to affect large Northern cities. New York City, for example, has recently seen some anti-integration scenes just as ugly as that in which white mothers in Little Rock jeered black youngsters 15 painful years ago. Nixon has proposed upgrading deficient neighborhood schools instead, but he has vetoed as too expensive legislation that might help do that.
Nixon heads into his last term under a cloud of partisan acrimony engendered by the charges and counter-charges growing out of the Watergate political-espionage investigations. A criminal trial, several civil suits, a Senate committee investigation led by Democrats, all may poison the atmosphere. The highly protective and pugnacious White House domestic staff seems more adept at political infighting than at helping the President govern by conciliating contending factions.
Nixon's final flurry of legislative vetoes, ostensibly to check federal spending, makes a second-term honeymoon with Congress highly unlikely. Despite Nixon's huge win, each elected legislator feels that he, too, has earned a mandate of his own. Too often Nixon was either overantagonistic toward Congress or blithely aloof concerning the fate of his legislation; he sorely needs to improve on his 1972 record of winning only 65% of the votes on which he took a clear stand (the lowest percentage since President Eisenhower's record in 1960) and on his taking such a position on only 81 votes, the smallest number since such an accounting began in the 1950s.