POLITICS ’88 : Victory at Home Gives Simon Bid Needed Respect

On Tuesday morning, Sen. Paul Simon planted a few peach trees in the yard of his southern Illinois home so that at least “something constructive” would come out of the primary election day on which many saw his political future at risk.

By Tuesday night, it was clear that Simon gained a lot more than just fruit trees in his back yard. “I have renewed my strength by touching the ground of Illinois,” the senator said of his easy victory in the Illinois Democratic presidential primary.

Simon, who had not won a single primary this year and whose campaign was teetering on the brink of financial and political bankruptcy, swept the state’s popular vote and captured a majority of the convention delegates elected in a separate vote.

Brokered Convention Possible

After running second in Iowa, finishing a distant third in New Hampshire and not campaigning for Super Tuesday, the Illinois senator looked to his home-state primary to give his campaign credibility. Top aides believe that he succeeded in making his bid respectable and in helping to force a nominating convention that will be decided by party power brokers.

“There are now four front-runners,” said Brian Lunde, Simon’s national campaign coordinator. “That means there will be a lot more strategic campaigning from now on.”

Simon’s strategy, like that of many of the candidates in this unusual primary year, will involve picking and choosing the states where he will mount major campaigns.

Although the Michigan Democratic caucuses are next, Simon aides say the senator will probably leapfrog that competition and concentrate on the April 5 primary in neighboring Wisconsin, where most of the votes are concentrated in the southern third of the state, just north of the Illinois border.

‘It Would Be Hard’

“We have not been targeting Michigan,” Lunde said. “If you haven’t targeted a caucus state by now it would be hard to accomplish anything.” He said that Missouri Rep. Richard A. Gephardt and civil rights leader Jesse Jackson have the edge in Michigan.

After Wisconsin, Lunde said, Simon will campaign in the major Eastern industrial, urban states--New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio and Indiana. He will also mount a campaign in Oregon, where he was born and reared before moving to Illinois.

The key to Simon’s strength at a brokered convention, Lunde said, will be the California primary.

“The candidate with the late wins has the momentum going into the convention,” said Lunde, outlining the Simon scenario. “We will have to win in Indiana (on May 3) and California (on June 7).”

Simon’s victory Tuesday not only may give him a voice in determining the outcome of the Democratic nominating convention, but also it solidifies his political strength in Illinois, where party leaders had feared that a weak showing would have made him potentially vulnerable in the 1990 Senate race.

Those concerns were apparently erased in a campaign that was won without any major investment in mass-media advertising, without the endorsement of the state’s two biggest newspapers and with Democratic Party leaders spending the last two weeks telling reporters that voter support was eroding and his campaign was collapsing.