The Hard-Luck Crusade

ONCE, George McGovern had hoped that his stand on Viet Nam, above anything else, would carry him to victory in November. But wildly improbable as it seemed earlier, Richard Nixon gradually made the issue his own and emerged in the popular mind as the peace candidate. It was, after all, the President who had been wheeling and dealing with the Communist bosses in Peking and Moscow and had kept Henry Kissinger in constant motion on the road to work a settlement. Then, last week, whatever momentum McGovern may have been gathering came to a halt again when the White House was finally able to announce that peace--real peace--is just around the corner.

There was Nixon, in one of his infrequent campaign swings, confidently assuring a friendly crowd in Huntington, W. Va., that the remaining obstacles to a peace settlement would soon be overcome. And there was McGovern, darting about in a plane festooned with Halloween black and orange crepe paper, first casting doubt on the peace rumors, then gracefully if a little grimly saying that he hoped they were finally true. He argued that peace could have been achieved four years ago, that the antiwar movement deserved the credit for forcing the President to conciliate.

Round the country, McGovern workers, dejected for most of a campaign marred by blunders and bad breaks, had begun to get the scent, not of victory to be sure, but of some improvement. Small contributions were coming in at a brisk rate through the mails. There was something in the air that caused a middle-class homeowner in Burbank, a jar of olives in hand for his martini, not to close the door in the face of the earnest, shaggy McGovern canvassers but to wish them well. In Chicago's 47th ward, a housewife accepted a bumper sticker from a McGovernite. "I'm only a step ahead of poverty," she said. "The middle class gets nothing. You can tell McGovern that. But thanks for the bumper sticker. As soon as I get a car to put it on, we'll be all set."

Creeping Thing. McGovern workers in Chicago were confident, despite adverse polls, that their man had a fighting chance now that they had Mayor Richard Daley on their side, lock, stock and poll watchers. They prided themselves on their realism, a fact verified by a Daleyite who was prepared to hate the kids until one showed up "so full of vim and vigor and so willing to listen to my advice that I guess I softened." As Columnist Mike Royko mused, Daley, after his humiliation at the Democratic Convention, "has to enjoy seeing all those admiring liberal faces looking up to him."

Despite such modest upbeat signs, there was nothing resembling the final surge that almost swept Hubert Humphrey to victory in 1968. Said George Christian, L.B.J.'s former press secretary who is now a Democrat for Nixon: "It's a creeping thing."

McGovern is not normally given to self-reproach, but earlier in the week, while waiting to appear on a TV show, he summed up his woes: "It was Eagleton and that lousy $1,000!" he blurted. He had never been allowed to stop explaining why he had dumped Tom Eagleton (who is now, according to one poll, the most popular politician of all those who sought the presidential or vice-presidential nomination) and why he had once proposed giving $1,000 to every American as part of an ill-conceived welfare program.

As he approaches the end of his hard-luck crusade, McGovern has grown even more righteously indignant. Asked by a reporter if he considered the election a clear-cut contest between good and evil, McGovern had no trouble answering, "The Nixon Administration has betrayed the great ideals of this country." But as often happens with him, McGovern seemed unable to communicate his own passion and indignation to his audiences. Some 5,000 students at Cleveland State University braved the chill wind off Lake Erie to hear him talk on the campus quad. They cheered lustily when McGovern referred to the peace talks: "We may not be able to dictate peace to General Thieu, but he's not going to dictate war to us."

In a mid-week TV address on morality in government--an issue he felt was beginning to work for him--McGovern came across far better. More relaxed than usual, modulating his rhetoric, McGovern commented again on morality in one of the most eloquent speeches of his campaign: "The people want a President who will restore their trust in government by trusting them. They want a leadership that will set not one standard for the powerful and one for those without power, but a single standard for us all. They hunger for that clarifying vision of national purpose that only a President can provide--a President who will lift our eyes above the daily entanglements to a more distant horizon, to the time when, as Thomas Paine said, 'No land on earth shall be as happy as America.' "

Nixon, meanwhile, campaigned on the premise that Paine's vision has more or less been achieved. Exuding total confidence, he went to friendly Republican territory in Westchester County, N.Y. The 50-mile, 31-hr. motor excursion was a symbol of his party's current harmony. With him were his erstwhile rival, Governor Nelson Rockefeller, as well as New York Senator Jacob Javits. Though anti-Nixon signs popped up frequently along the route, the crowds that lined the roads on the warm, sunny afternoon were mostly in his camp.

The President tried to cover as much political ground as possible. He wanted to alert the Republican faithful to the dangers of apathy. He was anxious to make still another pitch for the vote of the ethnics, who have moved in increasing numbers to the suburbs. He managed to get in a good word for every state in the Northeast; if he had not visited the state or campaigned in it or lived in it or attended Officers' Candidate School in it, he had sent his daughters to summer camp there. Once noisy protesters had been dragged out of the Nassau County Coliseum on Long Island, Nixon offered what he called an "eleventh commandment": "No one who is able to work shall find it more profitable to go on welfare than to go to work." If it is not the Lord's Commandment, it certainly is Nixon's. He has issued it on almost every possible occasion. He has also continually attacked "big spenders," even though he has rolled up the biggest budget deficits of any President since World War II. Last week he took action as well and vetoed nine appropriation bills that would have threatened his spending ceiling.

Punishment. He must know what he is doing, because Democrats as well as Republicans have been rallying to him--the makings of what Nixon calls a New Majority based on an appreciation of traditional American values. He seems to have a better understanding of the electorate's current mood than McGovern, who has preached that a New Politics would supplant the old. It has done no such thing. Youth, minorities and liberals have not rallied in sufficient numbers to form a new alignment. The traditional coalition still prevails, only it is Nixon who, for the present at least, seems to have taken it over. Some of the basic ingredients of the Democratic Party--the South, labor, ethnic groups--have deserted in considerable numbers to the Republican candidate. These defecting Democrats have not learned to love the man they used to love to hate (see box). But he has earned their esteem in many respects, while McGovern has not. They fear the Senator as being too mercurial and too unorthodox--if not too far left. Some feel that they will be doing their party a favor by voting for Nixon; once McGovern has been properly punished, this reasoning goes, centrist forces can recover control of the party.

McGovern has also been hurt, if accidentally, by the tragedy of another powerful Democrat. Once he was shot, George Wallace had no chance of running as a third-party candidate. Most of his votes are expected to go to Nixon. His replacement at the top of the American Party ticket is a virtual unknown, John Schmitz, a member of the John Birch Society and a former California Congressman. He will take few votes away from the President; in fact, he is grateful to the Secret Service for swelling his crowds by their presence. He has received so little attention that he has sued the three TV networks for $20 million in damages because their failure to cover him, he claims, has prevented him from getting campaign contributions. Small as his crowds are, Schmitz keeps them entertained with such one-liners as "Some day Henry Kissinger is going to make a secret trip to this country." Or: "There is nothing wrong with the Catholic Church that a good inquisition wouldn't cure."

The Democrats have scheduled a blitz of TV spots for their finale. One spot will show a troubled Democrat pausing in the voting booth as he fingers the Nixon lever. "This hand voted for Kennedy, you know. I mean, it's just possible McGovern's straight." He drops his hand and votes Democratic. A satisfied voice concludes, "that's the way." In other vignettes, McGovern appears in shirtsleeves, earnestly reassuring traditional Democrats on the issues that most concern them: law-and-order, taxes, unemployment. By contrast, the G.O.P. spots show the President not chatting with the folks but consorting with the likes of Mao Tse-tung and Leonid Brezhnev. McGovern, on the other hand, is portrayed in Republican commercials as a waffler on the issues or a demon for defense cutting.

McGovern heads toward Election Day betting on corruption as a crucial issue. Yet even that has been pushed out of the headlines by the prospective peace settlement. It is an ironic predicament for a candidate who, above all, wanted to have a bold and decisive airing of the issues. The Higher Morality, it would seem, is no match for the New Majority.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.