TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/election/72elect/72elect.002

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                                                                                July 17, 1972

POLITICS

The Battle for the Democratic Party


     He got his start in politics passing out leaflets for John
Kennedy. Four years later he worked to help re-elect Lyndon
Johnson. In 1968 he was out on the streets for Robert Kennedy.
In this campaign, George McGovern was his man. Working out of
shabby walk-up headquarters, he and other McGovern amateurs
canvassed Brooklyn's 13th District to saturation, blanketed the
neighborhoods from Kings Highway to Coney Island with pamphlets
and, on New York's primary day last month, swept into party
power, defeating one of New York's more redoubtable Democratic
bosses in the process. So this week Kenneth Elstein comes to
Miami Beach to collect his delegate's badge and claim a green
folding chair at the Democratic National Convention. He is 24
years old.

     What is remarkable about Kenneth Elstein is how
unremarkable his age was to be in the convention hall. In one
of the most fascinatingly improbable assemblages in the history
of American politics, the young are everywhere. One survey shows
23% of the delegates under 30 (v. only 2.6% in 1968), and
McGovern estimates that nearly 500 of his are in that category.
Elstein is thus a symbol of an astonishing new force in the
Democratic Party: the young politicians come of age. It is a
force that may save -- or sunder -- the Democrats. It may
galvanize the election -- or the defeat -- of George McGovern.
It contains the potential for a struggle that may make the issue
of Miami Beach even larger than the selection of a candidate.
What is at stake is the Democratic Party's future and its
political soul.

     The battle lines are clearly drawn. The McGovern young can
argue with considerable justice that America's alienated youth
were invited to work within the system, and (BAM! POW! SPLAT!)
they did. Armed with the reform rules that McGovern helped to
formulate, the young legions this year shattered political
assumptions and shut down party machines that had been grinding
on for decades. Through New Hampshire's bitter months, through
the endlessly tedious precinct caucuses and state conventions,
they mimeographed and telephoned and pounded door to door,
living on peanut butter and jelly and spending their nights in
sleeping bags on someone else's living-room floor. Their numbers
grew with success; duty became dream became destiny; the
impossible turned possible turned probable. Often with scant
direction or help from the candidate himself, they built from
the ground up the best political organization in the U.S. today.

     The party's old guard does not deny that the new young
pols beat them at their own game, but that does not keep them
from resenting it -- sometimes bitterly and unfairly. Said
Rhode Island State Chairman Lawrence McGarry: "McGovern's got
draft dodgers going to Miami." The list of party veterans and
major officeholders who were shoved out of their delegate seats
in Miami Beach reads like a who's who of the Democrats. Said
Delton Houtchens, the Missouri state Democratic chairman who
went to Miami Beach as a delegate-at-large: "I came through
politics and worked my way up. We didn't do it overnight. These
kids in Miami will be there for a lark, and that'll be the end
of it." Beyond the anguish of power lost, however, many pros
contend that they still know best what is good for the party and
the country -- and McGovern is not it. Or so it seemed to them
before Miami. Later, with the campaign ahead and Nixon as the
common enemy, some measure of party unity might become possible.

     As the 35,000 delegates, alternates, newsmen and other
observers descended on Miami Beach last week, the battle
between insurgents and regulars was being fought furiously and
appropriately on the issue of who would be the delegates from
California and Illinois. All week long, the credentials
question caromed from one court to another, leaving McGovern's
delegate count an open question. The crucial issue centered on
the ownership of California's 271 delegates. McGovern captured
all of them on June 6 -- according to the state's
winner-take-all rule - - a rule curiously at variance with the
spirit of reform. In the Democratic Credentials Committee last
month, a stop-McGovern coalition led by Hubert Humphrey's agents
pushed through an after-the-fact change in the rules, parceling
out the California delegation proportionately -- a move that
threatened to cost McGovern 151 delegates and prevent his
victory on the first ballot.

     Early last week, a federal district court judge in
Washington upheld the Credentials Committee not only on the
California question but also on the issue of Chicago Mayor
Richard Daley's 58 uncommitted delegates -- a bloc that had
been successfully unseated by a McGovernite challenge charging
that Daley had violated the reform guidelines. Then, two days
later, the U.S. appeals court in Washington affirmed the
judgment on the Daley delegation but ruled against the
Credentials Committee on the question of California. With that,
George McGovern's delegate count shot back up again to within
a few votes of the 1,509 he needed for nomination. Expelling 151
McGovern delegates from California, said the court, was
"inconsistent with fundamental principles of due process."

     Not so, said the Supreme Court, called into conference to
decide the case. In a 6-3 vote, the court granted a stay of the
appeals court ruling, contending that the matter was for the
convention to judge. That in effect sanctioned the proportional
allotment of the California delegates that the Credentials
Committee had voted, and McGovern's total strength coming into
the convention dropped once again by 151 votes. Thus the issue
would have to be fought out on the convention floor.

     While all this was going on, the candidates were savoring
the lull before the final battle. Humphrey retreated to his
house in Waverly, Minn., where he puttered with his Model T Ford
and insisted: "I'm the best man to beat Nixon." Muskie
vacationed with his family at Kennebunk Beach in Maine, keeping
in touch with his staff by telephone. Edward Kennedy watched
events from Cape Cod, though there were hints he might come to
Miami Beach to help the cause of party unity.

     George Wallace, gaunt and subdued after almost eight weeks
in the hospital with gunshot wounds, still paralyzed below the
waist, made good his determination to get to Miami Beach and
see what ideological leverage he could apply with his 373
delegates. It has been for him a grim and courageous
convalescence. After appearing at a Mass in Maryland and reading
the 23rd Psalm, Wallace flew in an Air Force jet supplied by
Richard Nixon to Montgomery, Ala., where, seated in his
wheelchair behind a low, bulletproof lectern he delivered an
airport speech, a wan version of his old campaign rousers. Then
he flew on to Miami. All the while, a stop-McGovern coalition
led by Arkansas' Wilbur Mills continued its last-minute efforts.
A small Washington group of strategists bent on heading off the
South Dakotan included Humphrey Aide Stan Bregman, Muskie's Berl
Bernhard, Wallace's Billy Joe Camp and the ALF-CIO's Al Barkan.

     Acrimony. At his summer house in Maryland, McGovern tended
his swimming pool and delegate arithmetic. At one point he paid
a second courtesy call on George Wallace, presumably to feel
out the Alabaman's intentions. Occasionally McGovern spoke
apocalyptically of the consequences if his nomination were
"literally stolen in a naked power play." He did not discount
running as a third-party candidate. Said McGovern: "I don't
think people have fully assessed how the party could destroy
itself if the reform process is denied after all that has
happened in American politics these past few years."

     Many regulars, humbled by the McGovern young and suddenly
astonished by their own impotence, already see ruination for
the party. St. Louis Dentist Martin Greenberg, for four years
the Democratic chairman of St. Louis County, found himself
outnumbered by McGovernites in the spring caucuses and defeated
for delegate. Last week he contemplated the prospect of a
McGovern nomination and said dolefully: "Unless the party comes
to its senses, it will destroy all of us. The acrimony and
dissension will be suicidal. The disaster this fall will not
only be felt on the national ticket but on statewide Democratic
tickets as well."

     Some anti-McGovernites regard the young insurgents as a
wave of barbarians. After he was defeated for delegate in
Montana, Jim Murry, an AFL-CIO official, mused angrily: "I'll
be a son of a bitch! I'm only 37, and I've always been a
liberal. And there I was being fought by the McGovern people,
being made out as some kind of old conservative. Me, who has
been called a Communist! Old! A conservative! Christ!" Some of
McGovern's more abrasively doctrinaire followers persistently
offended the party's regulars during state conventions this
spring, demanding platform planks in favor of legalized
marijuana, abortions on demand and homosexual marriage. Observed
California Pollster Don Muchmore: "McGovern has got a great
issue with alienation, but I wonder if he knows the cause. The
people who are alienated are the ones who don't want pot, who
don't want abortion, who don't want to pay one more cent in
taxes."

     Above all, many regulars are seized by the simple dread
that a McGovern nomination would mean a November defeat of
Goldwater proportions, a debacle that might cost the party
scores of state offices round the nation as well as control of
the U.S. Congress. For one thing, some labor leaders, including
AFL-CIO President George Meany, were hinting that they might
remain neutral this fall if the choice is between McGovern and
Nixon. Teamsters President Frank Fitzsimmons has been noticeably
friendly to Nixon. Henry Hall Wilson, an old pro who was once
Lawrence O'Brien's aide in the Kennedy White House, reflected
recently on the McGovern phenomenon: "You know, the people are
on a binge."

     That is a matter of interpretation. It can also be
observed that McGovern's legions of the young, the force that
propelled him to Miami Beach with at least 1,400 delegates, are
some of the soberest and most serious practitioners of politics
in the U.S. today. Whether or not McGovern is the nominee, his
aide Fred Dutton is probably right when he observes that with
the 18-year- olds voting and the young elaborately schooled in
the art of politics, "elections will never be the same. The
shape of the ballpark has changed, and so have the rules of the
game."

     The McGovern forces rose, in part, out of the wreckage of
the Eugene McCarthy movement in 1968. The next year, the
Democrats' reform commission, originally chaired by McGovern,
began its long, intricate task of overhauling the party's
structure, changing the rules of delegate selection to open it
to the poor, the young, to women, to blacks and other
minorities. At the same time, the 26th Amendment abruptly
enfranchised some 11 million Americans aged 18 to 21.

     Mystique. McCarthy, obeying some inner music of his own,
faded into what he liked to call his acedia. But in George
McGovern, the young activists found a willing repository for
their ideals and ambitions. His opposition to the war was early
and insistent. If he seemed somewhat colorless, that was all
right; the movement was the thing, not necessarily the leader.

     There was of course vast skepticism and discouragement in
the early days. Says one McGovern worker: "If you were a
`realist' then, you decided that McGovern didn't have a chance;
you went to work for Muskie." New Hampshire was crucial. From
Yale and Harvard, from New York and Vermont, the young trekked
to the state to ring doorbells and organize -- 500 of them each
weekend for six weeks, 2,000 for the weekend before the March
7 primary. "Without question," says Edward O'Donnell,
McGovern's national youth director, "it was those seven weekends
that turned the campaign around. We really had to pull teeth to
get those kids up there." But enough of them came to enable
McGovern's volunteers to canvass 200,000 in the state.

     McGovern lost New Hampshire to Muskie -- 37.6% to 47.8% --
but because he came so much closer than expected, his showing
there may have been the key to all his later success. The
volunteers started flowing in. Tim Boggs, 23, dropped out of
the University of Wisconsin to work for $50 a week as
McGovern's state youth coordinator; he registered 13,000
students at the university in Madison, and 10,000 of them voted
for McGovern in the Wisconsin primary. Larry Diamond, 21,
provided 200 volunteers for McGovern for Northern California and
got 5,000 Stanford students to the polls.

     "This campaign has a soul of its own," says McGovern
Campaign Manager Gary Hart, 34. "The volunteers don't want it
to become just another political campaign. There is a mystique
about it." Some fascinatingly complex psychologies were
involved. Said Patrick Johnson, 25, a probation officer and
delegate from California's Calaveras County: "What this
nomination and election represent is a test of whether the
liberal and the young are willing to win. There are a lot of
people involved in the campaign who have a sort of suicidal urge
to lose. The reason is that in losing you can prove you're
right, because in losing you never have to see your man
compromise." A McGovern delegate from Georgia, Beatrice Smith,
32, disagreed. "People who see youth as monolithic are crazy,"
she said. "Number 1, they are pragmatic. They understand the
need for compromise faster than some liberals." Observed Ed
Rogoff, McGovern's 20-year-old New York campaign manager: "The
people in the campaign this year are more proud of their
professionalism than their morality."

     Spadework. There is no doubt that the volunteers -- young,
nimble, dedicated -- gave McGovern an enormous edge in both
primary and nonprimary states. In primary states, McGovern
headquarters swarmed with them, boys and girls in jeans and
sneakers, cranking the mimeographs, telephoning voters. In the
nonprimary states, the McGovern zealots had the advantage of
understanding the new reform rules and how to use them. They
organized early, often stunned the regulars by their success at
precinct caucuses and state conventions. In Iowa, for example,
McGovern's brilliant young aides Rick Stearns and Gene Pokorny
crisscrossed the state in 1970 to establish an organization,
starting with only a list of 15 people who had contributed to
the McGovern campaign. By last January, 2,000 volunteers were
working the state for McGovern. When the state caucus met,
McGovern took 18 of Iowa's 46 delegates, the most of any
candidate.

     While Edmund Muskie organized the courthouses, Stearns'
volunteers concentrated on the precincts. In Kansas, Stearns
recruited college students; in one district, they started
working simply with lists of members of the American Civil
Liberties Union and the Unitarian and Methodist Churches. They
won 17 delegates. "No wonder the Democrats can't carry Kansas,"
says Stearns, a 27-year-old Rhodes scholar. "There's something
wrong with a party organization if they can't prevent a delegate
sweep by a bunch of college kids."

     The party reforms worked well for McGovern. Moreover, the
other candidates never competed effectively in the nonprimary
states. Muskie's strategy was based on the assumption that he
would have the nomination wrapped up after winning the
Wisconsin primary. Humphrey entered the campaign too late to
develop an adequate organization anywhere. But McGovern's
principal asset was the willingness to do the exhausting
spadework in state after state.

     Kenneth Elstein in outlook and experience is in many ways
typical of the young McGovernites. A high school math teacher,
Elstein began his political experiment last October when he
read a short item in the New York Times describing a
professor's effort to put together a McGovern slate. Elstein
volunteered. Strictly obeying the new party guidelines, Elstein
and the other McGovernites help open caucuses to decided their
slate, which included Elstein and seven others.

     They dispatched squads of youngsters to sell McGovern
buttons on the streets. "Those kids literally wouldn't let
people go by without buying a button," says Elstein's wife
Barbara, a systems analyst. "We raised $500 that way." Elstein
walked up and down the Coney Island boardwalk, interrupting the
afternoon dozes of elderly Jewish voters in straw hats. "Hi,"
he said, extending his hand. "I'm Ken Elstein, and I'm running
as a McGovern delegate." He stood for hours at Brooklyn El
stations, bullhorn in hand. Comedian Sam Levenson, who lives in
nearby Rockaway, was enlisted to tell his jokes at fund-raising
parties.

     Support. One difficult problem in the heavily Jewish
district was persuading voters that McGovern was not, as
rumored, opposed to aid for Israel. When the votes were counted,
the McGovern slate had swept the district, Elstein running third
with 23,591 votes. The top candidate of Brooklyn Democratic
Leader Meade Esposito received only 11,890.

     For all the McGovern delegates' reputation for
intransigence, Elstein is no ideologue. "We want to win in
November," he says. "All of our effort becomes useless if Nixon
wins, so we've got to go to all possible sources of support --
the labor unions, the regular organization." But he adds: "The
thing that really gets us is that when we were elected, the
regulars all over the country say they should get to go to
Miami because they've served the party all these years. That's
the problem. They haven't served the party. They spend all
their energies fighting us."

     Like many McGovern workers, Elstein got into the campaign
as a means not only of expressing himself against the war but
also in hopes of revitalizing the political process. "Everything
is rotting away, and we've got to do something about it," he
says. "You have 200 million people in this country and an
incredible sense among them that they don't really count, that
they don't have any influence."

     Service. Elstein was born in 1948 -- the year that Harry
Truman, amid predictions of Democratic ruin, defeated Thomas E.
Dewey. He hopes there will be parallels this year. The son of
a retired high school history and economics teacher, Ken grew
up politically aware, listening to dinner-table conversation in
his parents' two-family house in the Sheepshead Bay section of
Brooklyn. He played stickball, batted an even .000 (no hits in
14 at-bats) in his first year in the Little League. In 1968 he
graduated from Harpur College, part of the State University of
New York at Binghamton, where he majored in mathematics. Partly
to avoid the draft, he decided to become a teacher, working as
a trainee in an all-black school in Bedford-Stuyvesant. Today
he is on a leave of absence to work on his Ph.D., writing a
doctoral thesis on algebraic topology, dealing with the property
of geometric figures that, like rubber bands, do not change
under bending or stretching. "What good is topology?" he says.
"It's a pure field of learning. What good is Beethoven?"

     His interest in politics is entirely practical. Recalling
that his forebears emigrated from Poland, Elstein observes,
"When they came in from Ellis Island, they needed jobs and
homes. Often the first person to help them was the local
Democratic politician. The party provided a bridge between the
ordinary citizen and his government. But as time went by, the
Democratic organization grew remote." In this analysis, the
practitioners of the new politics are arguing in effect that the
old politics really is not old enough, having lost the
traditional function of service to people. Elstein believes that
would change with McGovern.

     Elstein's story is duplicated, with variations, in
hundreds of other McGovern delegates and workers:

     -- Donna Eddy, 19, a black student at the University of
Wisconsin, got her first taste of politics distributing
Humphrey leaflets in 1968. Last September, she went to work for
McGovern after she heard him address a local Young Democrats
meeting. She began by writing letters and stuffing envelopes in
the Milwaukee headquarters for the Wisconsin primary and soon
found herself devoting at least 40 hours a week to the task.
After Wisconsin, she decided to let her studies slide and
followed the McGovern campaign across the country, to Ohio, to
California, to New York. "In California," she says, "I slept in
a church a few nights and then stayed with a Republican family
in Whittier. That really was a blast -- being right there in
Nixon's homeland." This week, she was to be on the convention
floor as a Wisconsin delegate-at- large.

     -- Maryellen Fleming, 28, is a seven-year veteran of
political causes, especially women's rights in Cincinnati,
where she is an officer of the local chapter of the National
Organization of Women. She was elected as an Ohio delegate in
May. She takes the McGovern phenomenon calmly, seeing it
neither as a vindication of "the system" or its last chance to
accomplish good. "The system," she says, "will be around for a
long time. It's a dynamic, always changing thing. What's
happening now is that the McGovern people have made the changes
in it."

     -- Keith Thompson, at 18 the youngest Ohio delegate,
disagrees. "If the nomination is stolen," he said last week,
"then it may be the last chance for the system." At the same
time, Thompson, who has been working in Ohio campaigns ever
since he watched the Chicago debacle on television four years
ago, would not object to McGovern's drifting to the right in
order to build a larger constituency. "We want to elect a
President," he said. He has nothing but contempt for Jerry
Rubin and Abbie Hoffman and their codes of manic anarchy.
"Their philosophy of `Do It!' is laughable. They are
hypocrites." Thompson is finding that politics and love can
produce explosions. "I'm trying to convince my girl friend that
she is really no less important than George McGovern," he said.
"It's just a matter of priorities right now."

     -- Sally Peil, 22, is a West Georgia College senior who
went to Miami Beach as a delegate. Like her merchant parents,
Sally was an ardent Nixon supporter four years ago. "The other
day," she says, "I told my mother I've never been so
disappointed with anything in my life as Nixon. She almost
cried. She thinks I'm turning into a Communist." Since she
became a politician, she says, "I'm watching every news program
on TV, reading the papers every day." One problem after her
election, Sally notes, is that "you get a lot of junk mail. You
know, like, Peabody for Vice President, and from the Sanford
people, and, uh, is there a Mills running? Yes, from somebody
named Mills.'

     Against the argument that McGovern could not possibly win
in November, his men have insisted all along that besides an
anti- Nixon restiveness in the land, the arithmetic of the new
youth vote would be sufficient to carry him into the White
House. Even before the convention, McGovern's strategists were
planning a vast voter-registration drive aimed at signing up 18
million of the 25 million first-time voters.

     Assuming McGovern's nomination, McGovern aides aimed to
deploy an army of 100,000 young volunteers on July 20 to start
registering. This effort, Dutton believes, "is the real
sleeper" in the presidential politics of 1972. This is the first
year, he notes, that a Supreme Court ruling is in effect
allowing registration until within 30 days of Election Day; in
past years it had to be done much earlier and it was difficult
to generate political interest six months or more before an
election. By Dutton's hopeful forecast, McGovern would get 13
million of the new youth votes, to 5,000,000 for Nixon.
Considering the fact that Nixon won by only 500,000 votes in
1968, the McGovern planners thought they were going to the
convention with a plausible argument.

     Tidal Change. But there is a dispute as to whether the
youth vote would be so overwhelmingly enthusiastic for McGovern
-- or nearly as large as McGovern hopes. Psephologist Richard
Scammon believes that the young will follow their parents'
example, although he concedes that there is a verifiable
tendency for the young to be more liberal than their elders by
about 5% to 10%.

     The proportion of registered voters among college students
is much greater than among noncollege young, but it is of
course dangerous for politicians to assume that "the young vote"
is a college vote. About 70% of the potential new voters are
noncollege. Richard Nixon's campaign workers are already busy
courting the working young. Besides, for all the volatile
possibilities of the youth vote, the average age of American
voters is still 45 -- including 50 million people over 50, a
group that tends to turn out in far greater numbers than those
under 25.

     Those looking forward to a McGovern nomination also had to
deal with a kind of repugnance factor in his case: even
assuming that he got 13 million of the young, how many other
voters -- essentially workers and "ethnics" -- would his
policies on defense, welfare and redistribution of wealth scare
off? So far, a TIME-Yankelovich survey indicates that many
voters see McGovern as a mainstream candidate. As the convention
approached, some radicals were sneering at the idea of McGovern
as a radical. Columnist Nicholas von Hoffman, for example,
examined McGovern's ideas and found him "a wild-eyed moderate"
whose proposals were only mildly reformist and, in the case of
welfare, not very different from Richard Nixon's. Yet the
question remained as to how many voters, including more
conservative Democrats, would in due course perceive McGovern
as a dangerous candidate and, in apprehension, pull their levers
for Nixon.

     Does the youth movement involve a vast tidal change in
Democratic politics, a new direction for the party? Or is the
McGovern phenomenon a brief eruption, a peculiar coincidence of
a mobilizing issue -- the war -- and party reforms that the
regulars simply did not understand in time? Historian James
MacGregor Burns recalls the French youth who rioted in 1968 and
then rather quickly fell into a cynical apathy. Says Burns:
"You can't expect youth involvement indefinitely unless the
system proves workable."

     Fred Dutton, on the other hand, foresees an enduring role
for the young, with new waves in 1976 and 1980. McGovern, he
observes, is not the cause of it, is almost incidental to it.
Involved are widely held beliefs, desires and hopes, a sense of
the regeneration of the individual, a turning away from the
traditional Democratic pattern of massive Governmental programs
- - even though McGovern himself favors a number of such
programs. Dutton argues that just as this wave is developing,
Nixon is adopting Democratic Party precepts of the past. "The
young are not preordained Democrats." Dutton argues, "but the
Republicans are not doing much to grab them. Nixon is saving his
own skin at the expense of the future of the Republican Party."

     Eugene McCarthy understands the significance of what the
young have become. "If we'd had the 18-year-olds in 1968," he
says, "the outcome might have been different." Congressional
Aide Mark Talisman thinks the young might become involved in an
alliance with the elderly -- a fascinating possibility, since
the under 30 and over 50 total more than 88 million voters. Says
he: "The kids are sympathetic to Social Security increases,
health programs and so on. I sense an Oriental feeling --
respect and sympathy for the very old."

     In Miami Beach last week, there was a curious little drama
that lent color to the theory. Although the residents there
were initially horrified by the prospect of an Aquarian
invasion, they have got to know one another, with the result
that 50 senior citizens joined the Yippies in a march from the
Convention Center, and another 16 gave the Yips a key to the
city. This week Guru Allen Ginsberg was to perform a mammoth
marriage ceremony symbolizing the union of the young and old.
Said Yippie Allen Katzman: "Many of these senior citizens are
really hip. They've been fighting the IRS and Social Security
and the health-care system longer than we have." The Yippies,
of course, are very different from the young activists inside
the hall, but their gestures toward the elderly were intriguing.

     If McGovern is the nominee, he may find that his young
followers have higher and more doctrinaire expectations than
any politician could sanely cope with. Political novices tend
to forget that men seeking office traffic in promises that
older, more cynical voters routinely expect will be ignored.

     Whatever the future, the young, by their sheer numbers and
in the galvanic example of the McGovern campaign, have
profoundly altered the chemistry of American politics.
Committed, surprisingly professional and potentially volatile,
they are a huge, insistent presence in the Democratic Party, as
irritating in the political family as a suddenly mature prodigy
who has aggressive manners and uncomfortable ideas. To beat
Nixon, the Democratic nominee must somehow bring the family
intact through the battle of Miami Beach or, if that proves
impossible, put it back together again before the real war is
joined on Labor Day.

_______________________________________________________________
A TIME Citizens Panel:
How Voters Assess George McGovern v. Richard Nixon

     The emergence of Senator George McGovern as the Democratic
front runner has been so swift that only recently have voters
begun to appraise him with any great degree of familiarity.
This is reflected by the TIME Citizens Panel, a group of 205
Americans chosen from a scientifically selected cross section
of voting-age citizens and interviewed by the attitude-survey
firm of Daniel Yankelovich Inc.

     Not exactly a household word outside his native South
Dakota and the U.S. Senate, McGovern at the outset of his
campaign had to strive for the very basic accomplishment of
making his name well and favorably known. That he has done in
convincing fashion; the majority of panelists speak of him with
the kind of open, easy freedom that indicates widespread
recognition. Among Democratic panelists, the consensus is that
McGovern is a likable, attractive candidate of indisputable
stature. More important, panelists from both parties feel that
he represents a broadly based constituency and not just a small
radical minority. Most agree with Laura Kent, a writer-editor
from Washington, D.C., who sees McGovern as "a man very much in
the mainstream of American views." Despite charges that he is
"the Goldwater of the left," only one panelist in ten considers
McGovern a radical. The remainder are equally divided in
describing him as either a liberal or a moderate/conservative.

     That perception of McGovern is apparently based more on
manner than matter; many panelists are uncertain about what
precisely he stands for. Their differing views are revealed in
the opinions of three groups of panelists:

     PRO-McGOVERN DEMOCRATS.

     The Senator's strong stand on ending the Vietnam War
remains the most binding issue among his supporters.
Surprisingly, however, half of McGovern's backers think that the
Senator's own promised timetable for ending the war is
impractical. Gerald Cooper, a Kenosha, Wis., schoolteacher,
staunchly supports McGovern's antiwar position but says: "I
don't know if he can end the war within 90 days. I'd like to see
him try it, but I would give him a year."

     McGovern's call for tax reforms is favored by a solid
majority of all panelists. The danger he faces on this issue is
that of overpromising, for most of the panelists equate the
closing of loopholes for the rich with a lowering of the taxes
of the average wage earner. Of all the Senator's programs, his
welfare reform plan causes the most confusion. Panelists want
to see the welfare "mess" straightened out, but they are
dubious about the implications of a program they do not
understand. "Some people need all the help they can get, but
others are just freeloading," says Richard McDuffee, a chemical
analyst from Little Rock, Ark. "If my tax dollars can help one
family get what they really need, then I feel good, but there
ought to be an option for those who want to work."

     PRO-NIXON REPUBLICANS AND INDEPENDENTS.

     Three out of four Nixon supporters credit his trips to
China and the Soviet Union as major, meaningful efforts to
achieve peace. Most, like Janice Lehr, an Independent for Nixon,
tend to feel that the President's decision to mine North Vietnam
harbors and increase the bombing "took a lot of courage and
showed we couldn't be pushed around." Consistent with their
approval of the President's foreign policies, pro-Nixon
panelists strongly oppose McGovern's proposal to reduce defense
spending by $32 billion over three years. "In order to keep us
a first-class nation," explains Harry Kaiser, a Flint, Mich.,
truck driver, "there's no way of cutting without affecting our
status. Russia is already the No. 1 power."

     Panelists who back Nixon tend to do so out of respect
rather than affection. Says George Hunt, 87, a lifelong
Republican from Madison, Wis.: "Nixon is a schemer, a quiet man
who hasn't taken the public into his confidence completely.
McGovern talks more freely, appealing to young people and
frustrated people. But I've already decided who gets my vote:
Nixon."

     PRO-NIXON DEMOCRATS.

     Conservative Democrats will pose a crucial problem for
McGovern if he becomes the party's nominee. Like their
counterparts in the rival party, they tend to view his stands
on the war and some domestic problems as extreme. They make
their sharpest break with the Senator on Vietnam, fearing a
settlement that would amount to a defeat for the U.S.,
abandonment of the South Vietnamese or the sacrifice of American
prisoners of war. They criticize his proposed cut in the defense
budget as jeopardizing the nation's safety and reject his
welfare reform program as an expensive giveaway to people who
will not work.

     These conservatives are more inclined to trust Nixon, a
known quantity, than McGovern, whom they regard as a risky and
untried leader. Says Mrs. Betty Brush, of San Jose, Calif.:
"President Nixon has four years of experience, McGovern has not
had any of consequence. I believe Nixon is just getting
started; so why not let him finish? He's a good man." If the
South Dakota Senator is to mount a serious challenge for the
presidency, he will have to do a lot more to convince the party
conservatives that now is the time for all good Democrats to
come to the aid of their candidate.