Word: kuchel
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Given the conservative mood of California Republicans over the past four years, Senator Thomas Kuchel had become almost an anachronism, the last high-level moderate in a state party dominated by George Murphy and Ronald Reagan. In last week's G.O.P. primary, voters decided to retire Kuchel. By nearly 67,000 votes out of 2,168,117 total cast, he lost the Republican senatorial nomination to California Superintendent of Public Instruction Max Rafferty, a granitic conservative...
...years as a U.S. Senator from California, Thomas Kuchel has never felt constrained to spend much time back home. This month, however, he is stumping his state with what for the easygoing Kuchel amounts to near frenzy. Max Rafferty, the fiercest tongue in the West, has Kuchel in the fight of his political life...
...Although Kuchel is a formidable vote getter, his opponent in the June 4 Republican primary racked up a thumping vote himself when he was re-elected Superintendent of Public Instruction in 1966. Rafferty, an ultraconservative, is trying to unseat the liberal Kuchel by branding the G.O.P. Senate whip a traitor to the party. Item from a pamphlet claiming Kuchel sided with Democrats 61% of the time: "Would you have voted for the wasteful war-on-pov-erty programs and Great Society welfare schemes?" Rafferty is a man of harsh rhetoric who spatters his speeches with attacks on filth, flapdoodle...
...part, Kuchel is mending fences from the Mexican border to the Oregon line, defending his past failure to support fellow Republicans Reagan, Nixon and George Murphy, and hammering so hard for law and order that, as one critic put it, "he makes Barry Goldwater sound like one of the charter members of the A.D.A." No match for Rafferty on the stump, the Senator so far has avoided a direct confrontation. His tactics appear to be paying off. Kuchel has recovered from an early slump in the polls, and by last week seemed headed for another victory in June...
...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...