TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/election/72elect/72elect.014

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                                                                                October 2, 1972

THE CAMPAIGN

The Confrontation of the Two Americas



     The country seemed in an odd, suspended mood. The great
quadrennial division of the national house to elect or re-elect
the President did not yet seem to have seriously begun -- or
else had already taken place so early and quietly that in effect
there would be no real contest. Certainly the campaign has thus
far failed to catch the national imagination, a fact that has
something to do with the candidates who are running. There was
little buoyancy and no euphoria in the American mood, but some
of the stronger political poisons seemed to have been drained.
The war, taxes, inflation, unemployment, the environment -- no
one could claim that these issues had disappeared, but they
were festering less now. Some curious instauration of the '50s
seemed to be at work in the psychology of 1972, almost a
conscious revolt against the extravagant, Halloween '60s.

     One saw it, for example, on the nation's campuses  as the
first fragrances of autumn suffused the air and the football
season started. If the hair was often as long as before, there
was also a deja vu of cardigans, Bass Weejuns and button-down
collars. Fraternities were pursuing pledges as if Pat Boone and
Johnny Mathis had never gone away. One recent night at George
Washington University in Washington, the student rathskeller
and the bowling alleys were jammed. Berkeley, cradle of the
free speech movement, reverberated to the thock of tennis balls.

     In large and small ways, the Republican political effort
reflected and enhanced this mood. By campaigning little, Nixon
suggests, as he means to, an air of ordered normalcy, of the
business of the country going along as usual. When he does
swing out on a rare foray, as he did last week to Texas, there
are overtones of other days. His major remarks there were an
old-fashioned scolding of "permissive" judges whose leniency
from the bench in dealing with hard-drug traffickers is a "weak
link" in the attack on the heroin problem. At one point during
the trip, visiting a high school in Rio Grande City, he sat down
at a piano like Harry Truman and banged out Happy Birthday on
the old 88 for a Democratic host Congressman while the students
chorused the words. In fact, of course, Nixon has moved way
beyond the '50s politically and philosophically, as is shown by
his major diplomatic moves of conciliation toward the Communist
powers and a number of his domestic proposals. But in his manner
and calculated appeal, he invites the electorate to come home
to an earlier, no longer quite real America.

     In contrast, the McGovern campaign marches to the rhythms
of the long, Wagnerian '60s: the blacks' upheaval, the war and
the defense machine, a generation's uprising (or dropping out),
the industrial-ecological dilemma, the battle for privacy, the

feminist movement, the sexual revolution. It was in this
context that McGovern's candidacy was shaped and his nomination
became possible. For McGovern and his people it is not possible
after such events to envision the nation relapsing quietly into
some smooth semblance of the middle Eisenhower years. Too much
has changed. Another awareness, another America was born in
these years of the last decade.

     Rot. Hurting in morale and above all for money because of
his bad showing in the polls, McGovern lashed out: "I think the
polls are a lot of rot. I think they make these things up in the
back room." Nonetheless, he released his own poll, which showed
his cause not nearly so hopelessly behind as the general
surveys. Touring the big cities last week, sometimes he was the
angry, fundamentalist McGovern. Holding aloft a U.S. pineapple
bomb in Philadelphia, he cried, "Does it increase our honor
because the color of the bodies has been changed from white to
yellow? Their blood is still red. They are still children under
God." Before an assembly of unionists in Detroit, where
antibusing sentiment runs high, he was uncompromising. With the
exception of the war, McGovern said, "there is no darker chapter
in the presidency of Richard Nixon than his exploitation of the
difficult questions and emotions surrounding this issue of
busing."

     So far, McGovern's call to moral arms if going largely
unanswered. It is as if the comfortable had closed ranks
against the claims and the calls to conscience put forward by
the less fortunate, or were at least arguing that their approach
would ultimately most benefit all. And the comfortable seemed
to be in the majority in the fall of 1972. They are in rebellion
against the mass consciousness of the '60s, and weary too of
the depredations of youth culture and the S.D.S., the noise of
rock carmagnole and the further anarchisms of the "do it" ethics
of Rubin and Hoffman. In the adolescence of 19th century
Romanticism, the French Poet Theophile Gautier proclaimed:
Plutot la barbarie que l'ennui. Now the American mood would
reverse the formula: better boredom than that new barbarism.
Says Sociology Professor Robert K. Merton of Columbia
University: "What McGovern faces is a cumulative counterreaction
to much of the mass protests of the last few years, and he is
being penalized for them. He is representing the wave, in the
short run, not of the future but of the recent past."

     Choice.  McGovern is trying to fight his way clear of
association with past radical excess. As he told a group of New
Jersey labor leaders almost apologetically: "It's nothing
radical to call this nation to the principles on which it was
founded." The central theme of his candidacy, he argues, is not
that darker side of the '60s, but the decade's loftier impulses:
civil rights, equality, more open and humane government, the
older and classically Democratic concern for the little man
against special interests and corporations. In those enthusiasms
he has had a wider following, and probably a firmer hold on the
future, than his polls would indicate. It was Nixon who first
declared that the election offered the clearest choice of the
century -- and McGovern quickly and happily agreed. Both
candidates may have been right. What seems to have intervened
is McGovern's personal failure.

     Professor Sidney Hook of New York University believes that
the country is ready for most of McGovern's domestic proposals,
but that "what people fear most is his unpredictability." Or,
as a Princeton student told an interviewer scornfully: "You can
say that I'm 1,000% behind McGovern." In modifying his stands
on some issues, in failing to control his staff, particularly
in the Eagleton affair, whose negative resonance across the
country still haunts McGovern to a remarkable degree, the
Democratic nominee emerged in the public view as an ineffectual
leader and manager. Indeed, his seeming ineptness may well have
become the issue obscuring all others, thus diluting the purity
of the "clearest choice in a century" between two programs and
philosophies. If McGovern is turning off the voters to the
extent that the latest polls suggest, it is nearly impossible
to determine to what degree they are resisting his program --
or their perception of it -- and to what extent they merely
distrust his effectiveness as a leader.

     McGovern's program as amended is actually less radical
than many voters seem to think; with some exceptions, it is a
quantitative extension of past Democratic propositions, and in
some areas it comes quite close to Richard Nixon's own plans.
But the two men are nonetheless each embodiments of ideas
larger than either of their somewhat unprepossessing
personalities. They represent different instincts about America.
In their casts of characters and processes, the Republican and
Democratic conventions this year said much of it. They suggested
almost two different countries, two different cultures, two
different Americas.

     In the face of the ruinous polls, where is the McGovern
America? McGovern apparently commands a majority of only the
college young, the blacks and the Jews. But the McGovern
constituency, actual and potential, is not a matter of race,
economic class or education. Like Nixon, McGovern has support
among millionaires, blue-collar workers, suburbanites -- not
nearly so much as the President of course. But it may be that
as an idea, an instinct, the McGovern phenomenon is more
widespread than the polls indicate. "In a broad sense," writes
Arthur Schlesinger Jr., "the election of 1972 will be the
politics of authority and the Establishment versus the politics
of change. If McGovern is right on the currents of change, his
appeal will reach into every part of our society."

     Republicans smile at such thinking as a species of
self-delusion. Nixon, they argue, is just now in the process of
mobilizing an extraordinary new G.O.P. coalition from blocs
pirated from, or abandoned by the Democrats -- the South,
Catholic ethnics, blue-collar workers, the noncollege young --
along with more traditional Republican voters. Says Kevin
Phillips, author of The Emerging Republican Majority: "McGovern
represents a new radical elite that has taken control of the
Democratic Party and alienated much of the traditional party
structure in the process."

     The ideas of the two Americas can be found deeply
laminated in the characters of the candidates themselves. It may
be, as TIME's Hugh Sidey observes, that the difference is rooted
in the Sunday schools of Yorba Linda, Calif., and Mitchell, S.
Dak. Richard Nixon was the Quaker, sitting in a tiny loft room
with a few neighborhood children beside his father, who was the
teacher. The children were taught to look inward. The emphasis
was on the individual, what he felt, what he could and should
do. Each person created his own world.

     For George McGovern, there was the constant cry for self-
sacrifice, to reach out beyond oneself to help and teach and
preach. Personal striving was part of it, but people should be
uplifters, missionaries, and should share with the poor,
comfort for the bereaved.

     In youth, Nixon carved out his commercial and educational
way in a California that was luminous with opportunity, even in
Depression days. The Nixons worked hard and suffered, but
always there was opportunity through discipline. Sheltered but
driven, he was molded by the society of merchants in which he
developed.

     Out in George McGovern's prairie, the dreams faded in the
'20s. Mitchell would never be Detroit. For some reason --
climate, falling farm prices, no jobs -- people left South
Dakota. Instead of the sunny optimism that glowed through the
hard years in California, there was little more than
grasshoppers and blizzards in answer to the prayers of country
parsons. They were people who felt overpowered not only by the
elements but by other men. McGovern saw it from the front pew,
saw it when he hunted rabbits over the parched countryside.
Always there were the Scriptures ringing in his head -- someone
worse off to be helped, someone more unhappy to cheer.

     Nixon went after personal achievement and material
success. Life became a contest where the strong and persistent
endured, the controlled and clever won the field. Each person
looked out for himself and his, worried about his own life more
than his neighbor's. Horatio Alger may have entered McGovern's
life, but not nearly so much as the apostle Peter. If there was
endurance and struggle for self-improvement, it was often
related to other people or grander designs. In those small towns
of Depression days the churches taught history through the Bible
and the music that came out of musty pump or organs. There was
the faint whiff of adventure from the missionary letters. So
McGovern went out to serve people and to understand the world
a little better.

     Neglect. Not much has really changed in the two men since
they both went off to war. They learned their arts, studied
their legislative and political crafts. But Nixon sees the world
as an arena of individual initiative, where each man is expected
to do all he can within his abilities. His nation, he still
insists, is a place of almost limitless opportunity where hard
work and brains can bring a man wealth or power, which translate
very easily with Nixon into happiness. George McGovern still
sees the world as a place of natural cruelties, where strong men
are supposed to help others before themselves.

     In the world of the presidency, Nixon believes that the
people can pretty much run themselves if left alone. A spirit
of laissez-faire -- to the point of "benign neglect" -- suffuses
his thinking. Thus a major purpose of Washington is to guard
against too much governmental encroachment. It is ironic that
under Nixon, the Government has imposed economic controls and
grown bigger than ever. But he believes that he has stirred
more initiative in the courthouses and state capitols.

     In a more missionary spirit, McGovern would use government
as a moral force to create equal rights, to give to the poor,
to provide jobs for the jobless, food for the hungry, security
for families that cannot compete, medical care for the old and
the very young. He sees government as the problem solver. His
view is fundamentally domestic, concentrated on the problems
around him that he can see and hear and understand. The foreign
scene tends to intrude only in cases like Vietnam, which he
feels is a moral outrage that has depleted the nation's
resources.

     Nixon, in his preoccupation with personal achievement,
with toughness and endurance, assumes finally that almost every
American has had the same open field before him as he has had.
Classic competitive liberalism too often leaves little room for
compassion. His best friends are self-made millionaires. His
inner sense of America harbors no place for failure and limited
room for mistakes. Work is all. "Because I believe in human
dignity," Nixon has said, "I am against a guaranteed annual
wage. If we were to underwrite everybody's income, we would be
undermining everybody's character." Yet he himself has proposed
a guaranteed annual income. He admires strength, both moral and
physical, and equates negotiating strength with military power.

     Privacy. Nixon calls them "the old values" -- parental
authority, a stand against permissiveness, law-and-order before
civil rights. In the process he has presided over increasing
surveillance and broader arrest patterns. Despite his praise for
traditional values, the question of privacy has been submerged
in the fight against crime and subversion. He too often lacks
compassion and equated conformity with conscience. He is apt to
ignore basic changes occurring in the U.S. by simply conjuring
up an image of national well-being, perhaps a sentimentalized
vision emanating from the America of his young manhood.

     McGovern's America, by contrast, is tinged with utopia --
a land of peace and prosperity. The rich would still be rich,
but a lot less so. The poor would be poor no more. The hungry
would be fed, the unemployed would have work, crime would be
curbed, schools and hospitals built and the drug pushers jailed.
There would be no war, but the nation's defenses would remain
strong. Aid for Israel, but none for Vietnam. The environment
would be cleansed. Inflation would end.

     It is a glowing vision, but is it realistically
attainable? And if so, how much would it cost to sustain it?
Most of his life, McGovern has been an influencer, a talker, a
thinker. He has the visionary sense, but his campaign thus far
reflects his distaste for details, for organization -- a quality
that has disturbed many American voters, even among his own
followers.

     Each candidate has a resonance to his own America. Within
each constituency, voters repeat their candidate's themes and
even rhetoric with a precision that is sometimes eerie. A
one-word common denominator prevails in the Nixonian America:
the sense of "system." The free enterprise system, the
law-and-order system, even the "family unit" system -- they are
the recurring images among Nixon supporters. Their antonym is
"chaos," not utopia. They are apprehensive of the disorders that
the late '60s adumbrated to them, the turmoils that they suspect
a McGovern accession might bring.

     In two weeks spent in interviewing Nixon supporters across
the nation, TIME Correspondent Champ Clark found that
"Nixonians are not against change. I have yet to meet one who
wants the U.S. to stay exactly the way it is. But they have in
kindred spirit a sense of orderliness, of tidiness. They are
fond of saying that their political stance is `evolutionary, not
revolutionary.' It was in this meaning that Richard Frank, vice
president of Schenley Distillers, Inc., rolled his eyes
heavenward and summed up his political desires: `Please don't
rain on my parade.'"

     The Nixon nation is a varied and obviously populous place.
The issues of the campaign, strangely enough, strike little fire
-- the talk is apt to be more of principles. Where Nixon
supporters do discuss issues, their opinions tend toward the
predictable: "peace with honor" in a war that the President
inherited and is only trying to end -- just don't turn it over
to the Communists overnight. (It is interesting that the word
Commie has all but disappeared from the political lexicon.) No
amnesty for draft resisters. Busing is bad, or else does not
matter much any more.

     Nixonians generally are against wage and price controls in
principle. But in practice they are not so sure. McGovern's
economics, they agree, would be disastrous, especially the
Senator's proposals to tax capital gains as regular income.
Welfare arouses even more emotion -- against it. A retired
Floridian summed up the Nixonian attitude: "Give 'em a shovel."

      -- Ewell Pope is 44-year old self-made Atlanta
millionaire who came back from Korea with a Silver Star, a
Purple Heart and a lucidly aggressive desire to "aspire and
achieve in the system." Today he is a partner in Crow, Pope &
Land Enterprises, one of Atlanta's largest real estate
developers. Having grown up on a tiny Georgia farm, he feels
entitled to declare: "This country has always been a place where
anyone who was willing to work at it could rise up to some
degree." He is anti-racist: "If someone asked my wife to sit in
the back of the bus, I'd be the meanest man alive." He explains
part of the reason he is voting for Nixon: "The political values
of this country are mainly middle-class. Because this group
believes in human rights, people have sometimes been too anxious
to right any human wrong that occurs, and they have given the
Federal Government powers to go in and right what seems wrong
at the time. But you are never going to get those powers back
from the Federal Government. I have been in almost every country
in the world by now. I can still come back and marvel at how
great it is."

      -- Paul Berg, 19, of Seattle, Wash., was one of the Young
Voters for the President who cheered from the galleries in
Miami Beach last month. A student at Shoreline Community
College, he works part-time tending pumps at a local gas
station. Berg is one of the thousands of young voters with whom
the Republicans mean to disabuse the McGovernites about their
hold on the young. "I never went in for protests or
demonstrations," Berg says, "but some of my friends did. The
country has broken out of its low point. In 1968-70, everybody
seemed down on the United States. But now I think the country
is getting back on its feet. We've got a good system, you know.
I do wish we had a little more patriotism. I don't mean `America
-- love it or leave it,' or anything like that. But just a
little more pride in our country."

      -- G. S. Donnell, 62, sold out his North Carolina
oil-truck fleet two years ago and retired to Fort Lauderdale,
where he lives with his wife in a stylish condominium apartment.
"After I retired," he says, "we traveled all over the United
States in a station wagon, sleeping on the ground in sleeping
bags. I know this nation. I have felt it. I have smelled it. It
is a beautiful country, and it has got a good system. I am a
strong believer in earning what you get. This is what life is
all about."

      -- Michael O'Neil, 43, emigrated from Ireland 20 years
ago, now works as a carpenter in Manhattan's Rockefeller Center.
He voted for John Kennedy in 1960, but this year is going for
Nixon. "This ultraliberal bit is just too much," he says. "You
know, promising people the sun and the moon when you know you
can't give it to them. My nephew lost his life in Vietnam. He
believed in being over there, in living up to the responsibility
of large countries to help little ones. It's like living in the
neighborhood around here in Flushing. When a neighbor has
trouble, you help out where you can."

      -- Sanford Fray, 58, a black optometrist in Harlem,
disputes the Democrats' complete hold on black Americans. "Our
country needs a strong President if we are to survive," he
says, explaining why he favors Nixon. "There is no doubt in my
mind that McGovern will get a lot of votes in Harlem, it being
a heavy welfare area. But America didn't become great by the
inhabitants sitting down and stretching their hands out to the
Federal Government. You know, I can't get an errand boy. It's
more profitable to be on welfare."

     If in Nixon's America the language tends to be angular and
mechanical, to speak of systems and order, in McGovern's nation
it is more humanistic vocabulary of "decency," "compassion" and
"integrity." The idea of "a restoration of faith in government"
recurs, a vaguely spiritual impulse focusing on confidence and
trust. If Nixonians talk of what is "right with the country,"
McGovernites almost by definition are impelled by a sense of
the U.S. gone awry, of government wrested form the people to
serve unholy ends -- a war the people did not want, or
corporate privilege.

     In two weeks of interviews in McGovern's America, TIME's
Gregory Wierzynski found that the operative word is almost
always "tone" -- to change the tone of government, of the
country. A young McGovern pollster, Pat Caddell, explained his
feelings: "It is more a question of moral leadership than of
program. It is the goal of reconciliation and salvation, of the
spirit he gives the country more than the bills he proposes or
programs he initiates." Yet if McGovern's America is a
reflection of his personality, the man himself evokes none of
the adulation that characterized, say, the John and Robert
Kennedy campaigns, or even the Eugene McCarthy campaign. Even
among his own faithful, he comes across as a cool and somewhat
distant figure, perhaps a touch pedestrian. No waves of
shrieking teenagers engulf him; his cuff links are always in
place when he emerges from a crowd.

      -- David Benway, 37, of Excelsior, Minn., a salesman for
a mail-order printing house, voted for Barry Goldwater in 1964.
But in 1968, he explains, "I was in Chicago during the
Democratic Convention. I took three days off and wandered around
the riot zones and listened to McCarthy. I became very
despondent about the machine, the whole state of affairs. I
started listening to the kids and to McCarthy, and I got very
excited. Now we're [he and his wife] active in the ecology
movement." Benway favors busing: "I want my kids exposed to
blacks, and to poor blacks. I think it would be nothing but
good." But the basis of his support for McGovern is Benway's
commitment to "total nonviolence." Says he: "Kids with guns
aren't allowed in our yard. We're trying to stress that we feel
killing is bad." He sees and ethic of militarism in Nixon:
"We're supposedly a democracy, and yet we're approaching an
authoritarian state here."

      -- Samuel Koffler, 66, is a dapper Chicago importer who
grew up in a Jewish enclave of Harlem. He has donated $1,000 to
the McGovern campaign and plans to give more. "What concerns
me," he says, "is that Nixon and his Government treats us as
chattels, as if this country were their own special province and
they lead us to do what is right for them. We are spending $80
billion a year on defense, and frankly, I don't feel any safer."
The specifics of McGovern's proposals don't concern Koffler.
"I've learned not to pay attention to campaign oratory," he
explains. "My feeling is only that McGovern is to be trusted.
To me, McGovern represents the good, solid, wholesome America
around which our traditions were built. Rather than putting
billions into destroying Vietnam, think what a wonderful country
this would be if we invested the same amount into jobs and
hospitals and housing."

      -- Harold Willens, 58, calls himself a "dyed-in-the-wool
capitalist." A wealthy Los Angeles realtor, he started out in
utter poverty. "McGovern," says Willens, "is a man whose
concerns are deeply human and deeply moral. As things are, we
are putting our money where our myths are -- like the myth of
the domino theory -- and we napalm little children and
contravene the ideals for which this country was founded. We
have lost our soul in Indochina, and this has created a
fantastic crisis of confidence. People have lost faith in their
Government, and the economy depends on confidence in our
democracy." Nixon, says Willens, "is looking at the world
through a rear-view mirror. Meantime these devastating problems
are creeping up on us. We need leadership that's interested in
the country and the world rather than its own hang-ups --
cliches like not being the first President to lose a war." Nor
is Willens concerned that McGovern's tax policies would ruin his
own fortune. "We will get what we pay for," he says. "Not an
extra mink coat for Mrs. Willens, but more stability and the
survival of the system that I love and that has worked for me.
We must share in order to keep."

      -- Golfrey Connally, 53, is a liberal economics professor
at Texas' San Antonio College. He is also the younger brother
of former Treasury Secretary John Connally, who now heads
Democrats for Nixon. Golfrey and Brother John do no see eye to
eye on the presidential campaign. "Nixon," says Golfrey
Connally, "is a master of the art of manipulation -- equating
patriotism with support of his policies. By implication, critics
are subversives." Nixon understands the public fear of dramatic
change, says Golfrey Connally, "but there is no alternative to
coming to grips with the complex issues. Nixon cannot talk away
rising crime or worsening trade imbalance or never-ending wars.
The divisiveness of this Administration -- openly pitting rich
against poor, old against young, white against black -- is
unprecedented in our time. Nixon and his boar-chairman friends
are usually cynics who believe society to be incapable of much
improvement."

      -- Marjorie Benton, 37, is the daughter-in-law of former
Connecticut Senator William Benton, the publisher of the
Encyclopaedia Britannica. Active in politics since the first
Adlai Stevenson campaign, she has been an effective McGovern
fund raiser, drumming up over $1,000,000 from wealthy
acquaintances and friends. "There are a lot of people being left
out of the benefits of the society," she argues. "Benefits such
as being able to get off welfare and get a job. To have decent
cities and play areas and unpolluted lakes. It sounds utopian,
but I really feel that way. I feel very privileged, and I just
wish everyone had as much as I do. And I'm willing to give up
something and try to have that happen. Money is a product of
society, and I really feel that you owe it back to society."

     Harvard Sociologist David Riesman sees the McGovern
constituency as an expression of the anti-institutional force
that has long existed in American life -- a force today heavily
represented in the press, the advertising community and the
liberal Protestant and emancipated Catholic clergy. Says
Riesman: "Their attitudes have strong roots in frontier
anarchism and feelings of independence" -- though it is a
frontier and an independence quite different from Nixon's
version.

     Riesman argues that the McGovern constituency is basically
a professional elite but "is not part of the institutional,
organizational, day-by-day, America. They don't think this
America is really necessary, that is can all be done
mechanically. They have very little sense of that other day-by-
day America." It may be that McGovernites, in espousing income
redistribution and higher inheritance taxes, have profoundly
misjudged the American character and some of its deepest
aspirations. Even some of McGovern's own supporters use the
curious argument that such proposals are not to be taken
entirely seriously, because, after all, Congress would still be
there to put the brakes on any idea it thought too radical.

     As an example of that lack of touch with the other
America, Riesman cites the abortion issue. "It was madness to
confront the country with it at the convention," he says. "It's
an issue of great importance to liberated women -- and others
of course -- but think of the unliberated women. For many of
them the right to get an abortion simply means that they have
no way of holding on to their men when they get pregnant. A
considerable part of the blue-collar and farm population only
gets married when the girls get pregnant." That tactical
judgment is quite aside from the moral substance to many people
who consider abortion simply wrong. Nor is abortion in any sense
a significant campaign issue; McGovern's present official stand
is the same as Nixon's -- the matter should be left to the
states to decide -- and there is no doubt that in the near
future the U.S., as a whole, will allow women to have abortions
more or less at will. To Riesman, the whole question is simply
an illustration of how McGovern comes across to the voters.

     Robert Coles, a psychiatrist who has written
sympathetically of Middle America, suggests that the electorate
as a whole is very much like the individual voter. "In every
person," he says, "there are various contradictions and
ambiguities. These shift, and in an election it is as if magnets
were pulling them one way or the other." Desires for peace or
better education or tax justice or income redistribution are
balanced against anxieties about change, about losing what one
already has.

     In Coles' view, the dissatisfaction with the war,
inflation, unemployment, the cost of living, political espionage
and the like  --  all these strands could have been seized by
a Democratic candidate and woven into a decisive electoral
majority. In some ways, Nixon himself made this possible by his
dealings with Russia and China, removing in Coles' phrase "the
connection between social changes and some sinister foreign
force." Coles and many other observers believe that McGovern has
been trapped on the left and is in the nearly impossible
position of having to move convincingly toward the center. Some
other candidates, such as F.D.R. and Robert Kennedy, started in
the center and moved progressively left, drawing their
constituencies with them.

     "There is no section of the country," says Coles, "where
complaints and difficulties and a yearning for something better
doesn't exist. Most people still want to vote for the
Democratic party, but they are afraid that the party is not what
they want to be, that some odd sector of the party has seized
control."

     Weary. So for the moment, the Nixonian star is ascendant
 -- not so much because the President has captured and guided
the nation's imagination but almost by default. Indeed, there
are those who suspect that this election has as much to do with
1976 as 1972: an enormous Nixon victory might enhance the
party's post-Nixon chances four years hence.

     For this year, neither candidate so far has been much of
a national inspiration. In fact, it may be that the American
people themselves are far ahead of both Nixon and McGovern  --
 more conservative perhaps that they used to be but weary of
simplicities on both sides. Within the two Americas, one common
denominator is a sophistication in the people that neither
candidate has been respecting very much, and beyond that, there
is a desire for one America rather than two  --  something that
neither candidate seems capable of meeting.