The Voters Talk Back

...and those who prophesied that Nixon would patch up the economy in time for the election knew little about the President and less about economic forces...

...By the time he got to Nebraska, however, Humphrey was hot on his heels and the South Dakota senator's winning margin was whisker-thin...

...Each of these issues has a special attraction to a special constituency...

...Last month marked the end of the first stage in the primaries: namely, the battle over who would control the Democratic left, right and center...

...He won the ear of the mature blue-collar workers, the senior citizens and the racial minorities...

...They have told some candidates to go away, others to stop shouting, and all to realize that the voters are not as single-minded, simple-minded or sellable as politicians often think...

...Wallace and McGovern have a distinct advantage over Humphrey...

...for the right, social disorder...

...At last count, however, he had managed to accumulate more delegates than anyone else...

...The frontrunners are well aware of the need to broaden their base...

...Early in 1972 there was even talk of embarrassing Wallace in his home state by running Henry Jackson against the governor...

...They are joined in their affection for McGovern by the radical chic, by the not-so-radical upper-income intellectuals who live above the recession and outside the urban combat zones, and by a scattering of disaffected blue-collar workers who prefer McGovern over the Humphrey who is the present choice of their black fellow workers...

...more aspirants volunteered to be his delegates than he could use...

...In sum, while the candidates have been busy speechifying the people, the people have been quietly saying a few things themselves...

...Humphrey talks about Vietnam as if he were continuing the 1968 crusade of his fellow Minnesotan, Gene McCarthy...

...Muskie's other state, for instance, was New Hampshire, because it was next door to Maine and virtually home ground for Big Ed...

...for the center, the economy...

...Needless to say, Hanoi's spring offensive and Nixon's reescalation of the war gave McGovern an added boost...

...a prairie preacher crying ah wilderness...

...While a darkhorse candidate remains a possibility, the field has been refined by the grinding primaries...

...Yet, despite all the favorable indicators, Muskie dropped from active to passive candidacy early last month...

...Still, by spring Jackson had joined Muskie and Lindsay as a bystander...

...Hence, in the primaries, where the most-driven can win even if they are few in number, McGovern and Wallace come out stronger than they are with the electorate as a whole, and Humphrey comes out weaker...

...In the fight between McGovern and Lindsay for possession of the left, the former won handily, thanks mostly to the New York mayor's rejection by the organized forces of the "new politics...

...When he was swamped in Florida, his defeat was attributed to New York refugees in Miami Beach...

...To begin with, the seers perceived Edmund Muskie as the inevitable Democratic Presidential candidate who would run Richard Nixon a close race: The man from Maine had carried the mantle of party leadership since his nationwide preelection broadcast in 1970...

...a champion of a strong defense posture able to raise funds from the military-industrial complex...

...To the prognosticators they have also been saying, don't make the mistake of taking the public for granted...

...Though he was hardly alone in advocating a swift withdrawal from Vietnam, McGovern became the peace candidate because he was the first to oppose the war and had not been attached to the '64 Administration or the '68 campaign...

...George Wallace was seen as the Southern candidate, an echoing gasp of '64 and '68...

...The young buy peace to preserve their conscience and corpus...

...Seizing what Richard Scammon and Ben Wattenberg have dubbed the "social issue," instead of "defusing" it (as the pros agreed a Democrat should do) he "reinfused" it to knock out Jackson and pummel his other Democratic rivals...

...McGovern's other state was Nebraska, where-by his original plan-he was going to have his first sweeping victory to give his campaign momentum...

...Hubert H. Humphrey came onto the hustings tagged as a has-been...

...He began campaigning late this year, trying to run fast with the millstone of Vietnam around his neck...

...Yet after he was deluged in Wisconsin, it became evident that distance did not make the voting heart grow fonder for Lindsay...

...Humphrey, reawakening the economic and ethnic appeals of the Roosevelt and Johnson years, talked jobs and pay, homes and health, civil rights and social wrongs...

...just about everybody who was somebody in the party was openly declaring for him...

...It is the strong identification of the three frontrunners with one of the paramount issues that has carried them into the final stages of the contest...

...Nonetheless, by mid-May Humphrey had won primaries in Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, and West Virginia...

...In addition to the candidates already mentioned, there were Shirley Chisholm, Vance Hartke, Wilbur Mills, and Sam Yorty...

...The cognoscenti also predicted that a dozen or more Democrats would arrive at the national convention with sizable blocs of delegates, converting the proceedings into a free-for-all...

...As it turned out, New Hampshire was the beginning of the end for him...

...a hand-me-down McCarthy...

...BEsrDES sorting out the candidates, the primaries showed that all three issues are important to the electorate -not only within the Democratic party but for the nation as a whole...

...But by the time of the assassination attempt at Laurel, Maryland, it was clear that he could sweep the South, take Northern states like Michigan, and even place second in a liberal stronghold such as Wisconsin...

...Finally, the hard-working urban and small-town whites who feel powerless in this wild new world find a ray of light and a pillar of strength in Wallace...

...the organized doves of the land saw him as their invention...

...Humphrey's other state was Wisconsin, because as a neighboring Minnesotan he served Wisconsin Democrats as if he were their "third" senator...

...Their individual constituencies consider them unique, and thus work hard for them in the primaries, where only a limited percentage of the electorate turns out to vote...

...Wallace proved to be the man who hollers loudest about busing, crime, welfare, kids, kooks, and Communists...

...Wallace soft-pedals race, speaks publicly of his Jewish mish-pochan, and has learned to make dovish coos through a hawk's throat...

...George McGovern was slated for early extinction: a noncharismatic hick tossed about on a way-out wave of the beaded, bearded and beat...

...In Pennsylvania he could not induce enough people to fill up his delegate slate...

...Left and right stimulate strong juices, but the center is bland...

...John Lindsay was presented as a national figure who, though unpopular with New York residents, looked attractive to those who only visit Fun City...

...In the contest between Wallace and Jackson for the right, the senator was bound to lose because of his consistent and continuing liberal stand on all domestic issues, and his unwillingness to pander on either race or the war...

...In each of these factional subcon-tests certain concerns emerged as predominant: For the left, it was war and peace...

...Scoop" Jackson was billed by some as the sly sleeper: a liberal on domestic matters who earned early labor support...

...In two tries for the Presidency he had failed to win even a single primary state, whether against John F. Kennedy in 1960 or against Eugene McCarthy or Robert F. Kennedy in 1968...

...Ah, poor Hubert, sighed his friends, I knew him when...

...The further you get away from New York, the more they like him," the pundits proclaimed...

...those who pronounced the social issue a thing of the past were equally wide of the mark...

...The battle for the center was won by Humphrey after he topped Muskie in Florida, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania...

...But it is now evident that only three men can claim a meaningful following: Wallace, Humphrey and McGovern...

...Those who said the war would be a dead horse this year were wrong...

...Of course, this strength in the primaries could be a weakness at the convention and a fatal flaw in the November election, for by itself the appeal of each candidate is too narrow...

...When the convention assembles in Miami in July, he will be far less a contender than if he had never declared...

...a hawk on Vietnam who could pick up all those who were disgusted with the dovism of the other Democratic hopefuls and disappointed with Nixon's desertion of our allies in Asia...

...Alas, in the primary he finished third...

...McGovern has been concentrating on the blue-collar vote like an undernourished, cigarless George Meany, and has been developing a legislative stance on busing that will enable him to do what he doesn't want to do without seeming to have done it...

...The better brains among the political prognosticators made special forecasts about particular states where they thought certain candidates were certain to do well-the so-called "other" states...

...People who are hurting from the recession and who recall the good old times of the New Deal and the Great Society have joined the 3-H club...

...the polls showed him occasionally tying or beating Nixon...