October 31, 1991

For all the debate over what placing limits on politicians' terms of office would do for American democracy, the money now pouring into the campaign for the most restrictive such measure ever to go before a state's voters tells an altogether different story. Billed by its supporters as a prairie fire of populism, the term limit proposal on the Nov. 5 ballot in Washington State has been bankrolled by a group founded by a handful of wealthy, out-of-state industrialists with a conservative political agenda. Two brothers, David H. Koch and Charles G. Koch, listed by Fortune magazine as among the 20 richest men in the world, are the main financial backers of the group leading the push for term limits.

Gov. Mario M. Cuomo pegged the shortfall in the state's budget at $689 million today and said he would summon the Legislature back in special session to deal with the problem. At the same time, New York City officials said they faced at least a $200 million gap in their own budget, even without the threat of further state cuts. [ Page B7. ]

Citicorp, facing huge and growing losses, has summoned more managerial firepower to tackle its commercial real estate portfolio. The nation's largest banking company announced this week that Robert A. McCormack, who cleaned up the bank's big loan debacle with third world debt, would become its point man in charge of working out its domestic real estate problems.

They came to the conference today with barely a handshake and left with barely a backward glance, and the mood seemed as chilly as the fog that deadened the city. But that was not surprising. At just about every point where Arab and Israeli came together here, in public, from the colonnaded grace of the conference hall to the scramble of the press rooms, the sense of wide gulfs and deep suspicion was the same, as if tentative openings collided at each turn with suspicions and hatreds too raw for soothing.

In 1883 a group of upstate lawmakers, desperately afraid that the railroads would put the Erie Canal out of business, led a successful campaign to have the canal declared "forever free from tolls." The free ride didn't work, of course, when it came to thwarting competition from the railroads, not to mention interstate highways and the airlines.