Lessons of an Election Year
Morris, Joseph
Lessons of an Election Year by Joseph Morris Let us have a new majority, said Richard Nixon. Let us have decency, said George McGovern. These watchwords dominated the 1972 presidential campaign. It...
...Many people, and not just the Sixth Ward's sewer workers, found that less than decent...
...Let it not be forgotten that the fall's appeal for decency was but a fresh translation of the spring's call for a New Politics...
...Decency and majority are the necessary elements of good government...
...He travelled up to Chicago and shook hands with Dick Daley, while the Mayor's boys smiled and winked at each other...
...George McGovern spent too much time running against himself, living down his excesses of the happier spring...
...He had come to be respected, albeit grudgingly, by people who, four or twelve years before, could not bring themselves to smile on his name...
...Successive election-year scandals, which might have toppled regimes in other times, were dismissed resolutely by the public as unrelated to the President...
...In a statement delivered before the television cameras, the Senator asked rhetorically how anyone receiving his party's presidential nomination one evening after midnight could be expected to make a creditable choice of a running-mate by mid-afternoon of the same day...
...Millions of people marched into the voting booths, closed the curtains, and pulled the Nixon lever, mumbling to themselves about how much Richard Nixon had improved over the last four years, and about how the Democratic party had been stolen from them...
...The majority thought him a little silly, scurrying about after popular positions...
...Who can recall, for example, any legislation - aside from a few end-the-war resolutions, which failed - that bore the name of George McGovern...
...Senator McGovern's decency evaporated...
...In order to judge this man, who tended to avoid affirmative standpoints except on one issue, and who had no other record, the electorate was forced to . judge him by his campaign...
...Such a statement might well be honest, but, coming from George McGovern, it didn't sound decent...
...The lesson of Election Year 1972 merits some reflection: a campaign, like a nation, must have an agenda, a set of objectives, and plans for their . attainment...
...The voters tend somehow to look beyond the watchwords, to sense which of the candidates has the wherewithal to put his theoretical pronouncements into practice...
...Moreover, the challenger, unlike the incumbent, had not a record upon which to stand...
...The Senator was confronted with a dual task: to elaborate a theory of governmental purpose, and to persuade the electorate not only to the theory's right-ness, but also of his own ability to apply it...
...Reformist zeal proved so strong, however, that great, puissant, and loyal party leaders, among them Mayor Daley and Governor Harriman, were barred from the meeting hall...
...In the wake of the 1968 Chicago convention, many people urged extensive reform of party rules, and Senator McGovern himself was asked to chair the committee that would, and did, draft the new convention procedures for the Democrats...
...at least in our time, on the occupants of the White House...
...McGovern supporters admired him for his open-mindedness...
...He battered his way through the year's primary season, earning the reluctant admiration of the Democratic party's professionals at the same time that he incurred their anger...
...The problem with that excuse, of course, was that no one believed that his midnight nomination was any surprise to George McGovern...
...But historians may conclude many years hence that, in fact, Mr...
...Whether he has succeeded is not yet possible to tell (though there is increasing evidence for doubt), for there is more than one kind of majority, and it is altogether possible for minority opinions to control the institutions of government...
...Incumbents often are easy targets, but it is difficult to assail some productivity, however inconstant, without suggesting alternatives...
...Amid the prospect of spoils, what had happened to the New Politics9 The Eagleton affair soaked up fully half of the McGovern campaign...
...This was the test, then, to which the President and the Senator were subjected...
...It was remarkable that the two candidates should seem to address themselves so directly, and so distinctly, to the central problem of American government: How to sustain a government that is at once of the majority, and decent...
...America judged Richard Nixon on the bases of his values, which were familiar and somehow rooted in the country's traditions, and of his accomplishments, which seemed dramatic, but reassuring...
...The campaign began in Miami Beach...
...But Senator McGovern essentially was a new figure in the public's eye, and he never managed to shake his early self-identification with one question, the Vietnam war...
...More than once in the past had it altered forever the quality, temperament, and vocabulary of American political discourse...
...Of the many factors which influence the decisions of the American electorate, language is among the most important...
...It may be that the Nixon majority was a presidential, rather than a national one, as the evidence seems to indicate in the first weeks after the election...
...Without such provisions, the worth of the enterprise may be lost.se may be lost...
...Nixon succeeded only in having himself re-elected by a majority of votes, and that a basic rearrangement of the nation's political forces did not take shape...
...The fatal flaws, in the end, were in the Senator's treatment of the issues...
...Meanwhile, McGovern aides publicly began fighting among themselves to see who would have the biggest office in the White House...
...For Mr...
...He attempted to lift the issue out of the gutter of mere electioneering, and to raise it to the level of institutional criticism...
...But alone it is not decisive...
...Instead, in drafting the platform and in stumping the land, Senator McGovern strung together long lists of existing evils, and offered, as his alternative, "decency...
...Now, the Democratic party's platform is a venerable, and a significant, institution...
...George McGovern had worked tirelessly for more than four years, building a campaign machine of impressive competence and dedication...
...Nixon, the task was to translate his dream of a majority into a working alignment of political interests...
...The events of history seem to focus...
...Nixon's orderly pursuit of executive business earned him re-election...
...But even though George McGovern controlled the platform-making machinery, he erected no philosophical overview of American problems, nor did he set down a concrete program for their solution...
...People began to wonder if it were a McGovern habit to defer planning and decision-making until the last minute...
...Expectations rose, therefore, that 1972 would bring a truly "open," verily "democratic," party convention...
...With each step he took in those days, Senator McGovern lost some of his "credibility," some of his fair claim to decency...
...By enraging the professionals before the convention, the Senator had to cater to them afterward...
...Finally, in the week before the voting, the Senator huffed that, if he were to lose, he could not perform the loser's ritual call for national unity...
...From the beginning, his base of support was not a broad cross-section of the population, but a strange coalition of those who, in one way or another, were fundamentally disaffected from the political order...
...The Nixon campaign was surprisingly understated, but its effect was to award the President a mantle of dignity unknown to the holders of his office for almost a decade...
...The country had felt impotent, but this unlikely president, Richard Nixon, was generating leadership...
...It is ever the pride of the party's grass-roots adherents...
...Even so, the size of his vote reflected an underlying public confidence in the President's ability to guide the affairs of state...
...His last attempt at graceful self-extrication from the morass may have been his greatest mistake...
Vol. 6 • December 1972 • No. 3
