Nation: The Republican Assault on the Senate

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national temper. Viet Nam remains the No. 1 concern of Americans, but so successfully has the President neutralized it as an issue that candidates are seldom even questioned about the war as they move around campaigning. The Republicans have put the emphasis of their attack on the themes most explicitly propounded by Agnew: that the permissive attitudes of radic-libs have led to a youth revolution, slackening moral standards, disrespect for order, rocketing rates of crime and dope use. The radic-libs, says Agnew, have "made the public aware of the deficiencies in America rather than the deficiencies in these [troublemaking] individuals. By rationalizing crime and violence and attributing it to lofty causes, they have contributed to it. These people allow martyrs to be created where in fact criminals are present." The Democrats have made their central charge the economy, blaming the Republicans for recession and unemployment.

Thus both campaigns seek to make each Senate race part of a national referendum. The labels do not adhere readily: nearly all Senators and many of their challengers are strong figures in their states. To a large extent, they are engaged in man-to-man personality contests. Their jousts are less dependent on national issues and partisan positions than are House elections, where the antagonists are usually less well known, and a voter is more likely to vote party.

Both sides are unsure of how the campaign is going, and both are running scared. A Republican Senator who insists that his party was well on the way to winning the Senate a few months ago now laments: "It's no longer true." He believes that the radic-lib theme was overplayed. Democrats, scurrying to the center like frightened rabbits under Agnew's tongue-lashings, are not so certain. Adlai Stevenson III, running for the Illinois Senate seat of the late Everett Dirksen, now wears an American-flag pin, plumps for increased pay for police (whom he described after the Chicago convention as "storm troopers in blue") and regularly recounts his own combat service in Korea. Hubert Humphrey and Edward Kennedy berate terrorism. Two major anticrime bills with patently unconstitutional features were whooped through the Senate with hardly a liberal nay.

The Senate this year is vulnerable to Republican designs. Twenty-five Democratic seats, compared to only ten held by Republicans, must be defended. To assume political control, the Republicans must win 17 of the 35 races, for a net gain of seven seats, to offset the current 57-43 Democratic advantage. That would divide the chamber evenly, allowing Spiro Agnew, as presiding officer of the Senate, to cast the tie-breaking vote. But to win ideological control of the Senate, Republicans need make only a net gain of four additional conservative seats. Though Republicans would be unable to organize the Senate with a four-seat gain, they could make common cause with the 19 conservatives in the Democratic Party; thus there would be enough conservatives at hand to fashion victories on most ideological issues.

Not all 25 Democratic incumbents are likely targets. At least a dozen Democrats are presumably invincible, including three presidential prospects: Maine's Edmund Muskie, Hubert Humphrey in Minnesota, Edward Kennedy in Massachusetts. Also on the untouchable list are Montana's Mike Mansfield, the