California: Challenge from the Purple Right

In the Hollywood Palladium, home of Lawrence Welk’s champagne music, Dr. Max Rafferty had a few remarks for 1,000 enthusiastic supporters. ” Today,” he said, “the hydraheaded enemy wears different disguises: the sick mask of obscenity, the wild and raving false face of drug addiction; the sullen mask of subversion; the devilish domino of lawlessness. And so the great wheel of time has come again full circle in our day, and the mantle of our fathers has fallen to our shoulders.”

They don’t hardly talk that way any more. But Dr. Max Rafferty, California’s superintendent of public instruction, does, and he loves his purple style. So do a lot of voters. An author of alarmist books on the U.S. educational system, he is also his state’s alltime champion vote getter. At the Palladium last week he declared his candidacy for the U.S. Senate seat held by fellow Republican Thomas Kuchel, and as the darling of California’s hard-lining conservatives, Rafferty just might give Tom Kuchel a tough fight for the nomination. Kuchel, the Senate minority whip, has been an unabashed liberal Republican in the Senate since he was appointed to his seat in 1952 by then Governor Earl Warren.

Superconservative. In the past, Kuchel gained few friends among conservative Republicans by refusing to support the campaigns of Barry Goldwater, Ronald Reagan and George Murphy. Reagan is publicly remaining “neutral,” though privately urging Republican contributors to withhold funds from Rafferty in order to maintain party unity. Yet Rafferty’s supporters claim that they have already raised $250,000 from small donations and seem confident that they will be able to get $500,000 more in order to meet the anticipated costs of the campaign. Says Industrialist Henry Salvatori, a leading G.O.P. fund contributor and staunch Reagan supporter: “There is a feeling among Republicans that Kuchel hasn’t been a Republican.”

No such ambiguity surrounds Rafferty. He is a super-Republican, a superpatriot, a superconservative. He won his nonpartisan educational post in 1962 by 237,384 votes; he was re-elected in 1966 with a record tally of 2,925,401, or 1,580,000 more than the combined total garnered by his three opponents. A lifetime educator, Rafferty built his popularity on his harsh criticism of progressive education, which he calls “slobism” and the “fraud of the century.”

Soup Circuit. Though Rafferty has not been an innovative superintendent of education, he has, according to a friendly critic, “been magnificent on the soup circuit and the P.T.A.’s love him to death.” He promises to be just as flashy and captivating on the campaign trail for the nomination in the June 4 primary. Democrats are quietly rooting for a Rafferty victory. They believe that with the party’s 4-to-3 majority over registered Republicans in the state, Conservative Rafferty would be easier to beat in a general election than Liberal Kuchel. No Democrat of national stature has yet entered the primary campaign for the nomination, but several possibilities are sitting in the wings closely watching Rafferty’s progress. They include Los Angeles’ maverick Mayor Samuel Yorty, State Assembly Speaker Jesse Unruh, and perhaps even former Governor Edmund Brown. Not one of them can match Rafferty’s turgid prose style—but that, in a long, hard-fought campaign, may prove more of a virtue than a handicap.