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Just how Kennedy will keep on campaigning is a mystery. He faces a severe cash shortage. In the week before Super Tuesday, while he was traveling 14,000 miles to campaign, he had to stop off at a dozen fund raisers to whittle away at his campaign debt, which is close to $1 million. Most likely, in the two months before the convention, he will only try to stay visible. He will advance his economic views at hearings in Washington and at meetings around the country with representatives of the unemployed, the elderly, blacks, Hispanics and others who have been hit hard by the recession. He will give a few major speeches, perhaps on TV if he can raise money for air time. He may even show up at some conventions in the five states that have not yet finished selecting their delegates by the caucus system. But the odds against his wresting the nomination from Carter are overwhelming. Under the Democratic Party's rules, delegates pledged to a candidate must vote for that candidate on the first ballot at the convention. Moreover, the rules permit a candidate to replace any potential defectors among his delegates with staunch supporters.
Old Kennedy associates, including Udall and House Speaker Tip O'Neill, are determined to persuade him to drop out amicably, though not necessarily any time soon. Said Udall: "If he wants to go on, I don't see any great harm. I don't think that anyone should be bludgeoning him to get out." Added O'Neill: "The main thing is that when the convention is over, Kennedy and Carter walk out arm in arm." Still, Kennedy's obsessive insistence on a debate with Carter struck some longtime aides as wrongheaded, even absurd and perhaps damaging to his future with the party. Said one: "The demand for a debate made sense before the primaries were over, but now it doesn't. I don't know why he has stuck to it."
Some Kennedy aides predict that he eventually will close ranks behind Carter, though perhaps not until the convention. Said an adviser: "After all, Ted's a Democrat and Reagan is Reagan." But Carter and his political advisers fear that in the meantime, Kennedy will do considerable damage to Carter's chances of beating Reagan in the fall. As last week's primary voting showed, Carter can ill afford more bloodletting at the hands of fellow Democrats. According to a New York Times-CBS News poll of primary voters in the three largest states, the recession was a major reason for Carter's defeats in California and New Jersey and nearly cost him Ohio. The economy probably will be the chief issue in the fall as well. The Labor Department announced last week that the jobless rate in May climbed to 7.8%; some economists are forecasting unemployment of 10% by Election Day (see ECONOMY & BUSINESS).
But there was even worse news for Carter in the three big primary states. Polls of voters leaving the booths showed that less than half of the Democrats who cast ballots for Carter expect to support him in the fall. Moreover, two-thirds of Kennedy's backers in those states said that they would vote in the election for either Reagan or Independent John Anderson. Their mood was captured by Roy Brown, a food-company executive in Fort Lee, N.J., who declared: "We need a change. Anything would be better than four more years of Jimmy Carter."