An election year and caucuses were in full swing. President Carter has beaten Edward M. Kennedy in their first New England contest, but the challenger claimed satisfaction in second place, and his main allies said today he had gained momentum for the New Hampshire primary. The president’s men scoffed at the claim, but said it will be difficult to duplicate their Maine victory in New Hampshire’s presidential primary ‘election two weeks from Tuesday. The victory Carter scored Sunday is sure to be an asset in that campaign, for all Kennedy’s claims that the president did not match his expectation in Maine’s Democratic town meetings. “It’s clear that the momentum is with Senator Kennedy,” said Maine Gov.Joseph Brennan. “We feel very strongly that Senator Kennedy now has momentum to go to New Hampshire and do very well.” He based that claim on the fact that Kennedy did better in Maine #i than in his landslide loss to Carter in Iowa three weeks ago. Lt. Gov. Thomas P. O’Neill III of Massachusetts said he is confident Kennedy will improve on his Maine showing in the New Hampshire primary. He said Carter’s momentum had been blocked. “I happen to think we stopped a train here, a fast-moving train,” said O’Neill, son of the House speaker. Carter gained 45 percent of the Maine vote to Kennedy’s 39 percent, with results from about 50 Democratic town caucuses still to be tallied.
The state Democratic chairman called it “democracy in action.” Somebody else called it the first “cover-charge caucus.” For perhaps the first time in history, the national spotlight was trained on this small, central Maine city of Augusta, where returns were amassed from the Maine Democratic caucuses Sunday. The state party wanted a little publicity, said chairman Harold Pachios, so the town caucuses all were held on one day. In previous years, they were dragged out over three weeks, and nobody really noticed them. This year, hundreds of persons paid $2.50 each to converge on a local restaurant where the returns were announced and posted.
Meanwhile, members of the International Olympic Committee were angry Sunday over a speech by Secretary of State Cyrus Vance but some were wavering in their determination to keep the Summer Olympic Games in Moscow Monique Berlioux the IOC’s salaried director said members were shocked by Vance’s political remarks at the opening of the IOC session Saturday night He declared the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan made Moscow an unsuitable place for the Olympic Games and called for them to be moved or canceled if Russian troops are not withdrawn “In the history of the IOC this was the first time a purely political speech had been made at the opening of a session” Berlioux said.
And while the caucuses were rolling along, that’s just a little of what happened, this February 11, 1980 as presented by The CBS World News Roundup.
