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Ideologies Clash In Ann Arbor Race

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ANN ARBOR -Listen to the harsh words that Robert J. Harris and Jack J. Garris have been throwing at each other lately as they run for mayor of Ann Arbor, and they each sound a bit excessive. "He's an ultra-liberal," attorney Garris says of incumbent Mayor Harris, who "caters to radical minority groups" and does not act against those who "desecrate the American flag, smoke narcotics in public and show disrespect to women and children." "He's a right-wing extremist," Harris says of his opponent, "a demagog. playing on the whole middle-America set of fears that Nixon does." But they are talking about much more than just each - - ' ■ other, and that is why next Monday's e 1 e c t i o n in Ann Arbor - the adopted home of Michigan radicalism in t h e heartland of Midwestern caution - is important to more than just the 100,000 people who live there. Harris and Garris, the most opposite of men, are talking about the most opposite of groups of people: The activist and counter-culture students of the University of Michigan and t h o s e who sympathize with them, versus the masses of people in Ann Arbor and out who watch those students with a fear and confusión that finally becomes revulsión. It makes strong politics. HARRIS, a 40-year-old law professor who tecame maycr in an upset two years ago, paints himself as the rational moderate amid a gaggle of politicians who would propose "meat ax solutions" to the city's problems. "The RIP (Radical Independent Party, which has its own university-based, 1 e f twing mayoral candidate) is mad at me because I'm not a socialist, and Garris is mad at me because I won't (have the pólice) beat up on the people I he doesn't like," Harris says. Back in 1969, Harris' image was of the man above politics, but he has slipped short of puiling Aon Arbor's divergent loose ends together. GARRIS, on the other hand, rejects the conciliatory role altogether. He refuses, if elected, to even talk with "those people who would try to induce me to handcuff the pólice," meaning primarily Ann Arbor's youth culture, street people and their imitators, and especially groups like the White Panthers. Garris, 51, is a blunt-talking, square-j awed supporter o f Washtenaw County Sheriff D o u g 1 a s Harvey, the hardnosed, crew-cut, tnaverick Democrat who, like can Garrís, stands foresquare against Mayor Harris' views of how pólice should behave. Garris' political identity has grown out of Concerned Citizens of Ann Arbor, a group he formed initially to protest rowdy rock concerts in city parks, some of which were painfully close to his home. Several hundred Concerned Citizens marched on City Hall to protest the rock concerts, and later Garrís' forces circulated recall petitions against Harris and six Democratie councilmen. The recall effort failed to get enough signatures to force an election. Last September, Garris and his Concerned Citizens were incensed by the street distribution of the "White Panther Statement," an irreverent political treatise full of fourletter sexual references, with the stated purpose of "total assaiult on the culture." When Garris failed to persuade the city attorney to declare the Panther statement pornographic, he sent reprints to the city's 38,000 households addressed to "occupant" and marked "for adults only,i' probably a wider distribution than the Panthers dared hope I for. GARRÍS HAS won thel stated, if not active, support of the GOP organization. He crossed party Itaes to becömc a Republican only months before the primary election, then succeeded in upsetting tiie expected winner, Ann Arbor Republican Party chairaran Louis Belcher. Among the Har ris programs that Garrís doesn't like arf: 0 O z o n e House and Drug Help, two independent social agencies which try to assist runaways, drug addicts, street people and others in need. 0 Scatteredsite, low-income public housing. 9 The reduction of the penTurn to Page 4A, Column 2 alty classification for possess] ing marijana from a felony I to a misdemeanor. Though he has not elaborated, Garrís pledges in his I campaign literature to "keep I the drifter, the criminal, the I drug pusher, the purveyor of pornography and the revolutionary who advocates the I overthrow ór destruction of our American way of life from I finding a haven in our city. University of Michigan students erpress horror over the thought of Garris victory. Said one: "It would mean a total breakdown . . . this community would explod e withtwo weeks' notice." But Mayor Har ris says: "They (the students) don t take Garris seriously. They laugh at him. It's not going to help if they all think I can t lose." Harris estimates that students" cast about 20 percent of his 10,861 votes in 1969. Some of those same students, now ardent RIP mernbers are disenchanted with Harris. They are dismayed I that he has not led a strong I fjght for rent controUmnine