THE phrase does not trip lightly off the tongue: President Agnew. Yet with the landslide victory of Richard Nixon, his once and present running mate Spiro T. Agnew immediately becomes the first unannounced presidential candidate for 1976. Recent history favors his chances. Since World War II, only one Vice President has failed to go on and capture his party's nomination for the top job, or accede to it; that was Harry Truman's Veep, Alben Barkley, who was 74 years old when his turn came in 1952. In his victory speech on Election Night, Nixon went out of his way to praise Agnew's campaigning for the ticket while he himself remained at work in the White House.
Of course Agnew is not running yet, and his intimates say that he will not even think about running until after the '74 congressional election. But that is part of the required ritual, and it also makes a good deal of common sense: Agnew watched what happened to Front Runner Edmund Muskie this year and his own party's George Romney in 1968. He knows that even more attention than he gathered in his more vitriolic days will be focused on his every move for the next four years. He also knows, as do both his advocates and detractors in the G.O.P., that if the party were to reconvene next month to pick a 1976 ticket, Agnew would top it in a walk.
All this seems heady indeed for a man who just ten years ago won his first public office as Baltimore county executive. Or even for the disappointed and dispirited Vice President of two years ago, whose curare-dipped diatribes against "nattering nabobs of negativism" were being blamed in part for the Republicans' indifferent success in the 1970 off-year elections. Good at raising money, he was poor at mixing with the local G.O.P. leaders whose turf he visited, secluding himself in his hotel or disappearing to play golf or tennis.
But all that has changed. Agnew on the trail in 1972 was a model of assiduousness, going out of his way to flatter every Republican officeholder or seeker in his travels, be he the Senator or a county clerk. In keeping with the tone laid down for the campaign by the President, his principal surrogate mainly stayed on the high road of rhetoric, proving himself in fact a sometimes more thoughtful and frequently better public speaker than Nixon. Emulating the President, Agnew, secure in the affection of conservatives, is already moving toward the center and the image of the statesman.
There will be more to come. Agnew hopes to pay his own visit to the Soviet Union some time in the second term. Once campaign fervor has died down, he intends to visit more U.S. campuses. Agnew is convinced that he, like Nixon, can win over large segments of the young, whom he regards as opposed to him only because they do not understand him. Early in his political career, Agnew was considered liberal, and although he had to serve as what he termed the President's "cutting edge," he feels he holds liberal attitudes that may displease some conservatives in the future.