Between the Two Miamis

...Yet it is a mark of his status that not one of his potential rivals would be deterred by the prospect of challenging Spiro Agnew for the '76 Presidential nomination...

...But, as Gus Tyler recently noted in these pages, the McGovern candidacy is a long-shot because it marks an abrupt fissure in the post-Roose-veltian coalition...

...As it turned out, most of the Agnew-might-go talk had been spurred by White House second-stringers under instructions from The Boss to amuse Washington columnists between trips to Miami...

...With McGovern running 19 points behind in the public polls, the answer, it seems, is not much...

...This is a high-stakes game, dangerous even for highly experienced politicians like Dole and Nixon...

...Unfortunately for Richard Nixon, the "new individuality" means that American politics is moving and changing at a highly rapid rate, and he may not be moving fast enough to respond to these pressures...

...So the real story of the Republican National Convention is unlikely to be viewed on television screens or published in newspapers...

...McGovern had yet to return to the base of Mount Rushmore when Senator Bob Dole of Kansas, chairman of the Republican National Committee, said on Meet the Press: "I would call on Senator McGovern today, if he can be reached, to contact some of the antiwar leaders and tell them to let us have our convention in peace...

...Nixon dampened the preconven-tion infighting somewhat by letting it be known that he will run again with Spiro Agnew, the darling of the Human Events set...

...Some political observers contend that the Roosevelt victory of 1932, capped quickly by the proliferation of New Deal programs, prevented the emergence of a strong radical Socialist party in the United States in the remaining years of the decade...

...It is unlikely that he can bring himself to muzzle his low-road compatriots even if their attacks backfire and damage his campaign, for over his entire political lifetime Nixon has covered all the bets he could...

...In the same vein, the McGovern candidacy may prevent the emergence of a new, white, populist, suburban, environmentalist, con-sumerist, Ralph Nader-like party by 1976...

...To put it as delicately as possible, there is no reason to think the state of American politics will be uplifted by anything that happens between now and Election Day...

...The anchor man for one network is apt to be informing the audience that the Women's Caucus has no clout with the Republicans, while another network might be interviewing a delegate from Walla Walla who unhappily journeyed 2,000 miles only to find that hamburgers are selling at $4 the patty at his seaside hostelry...

...Instead, the struggle to inherit Nixon's political power will take place for the most part in perhaps a dozen or so Miami Beach hotel suites...

...In any event, the prospect of replacing Agnew with John Connally, which had stirred some talk here, never appealed to the President...

...He still has a while to vent his ambitions, should they develop...

...Should he win in November, those in the Republican party who yearn to succeed him in 1976 will soon start trying to build support for their own candidacies...

...Yet Nixon thinks Connally reminds people of Lyndon B. Johnson, who, despite all his prior good works, is out of fashion...

...I am informed that Nixon is well aware of the political maneuvering the August gathering is fostering...

...If the past is any guide, some of the best action will also occur in lovely private estates, placed at the disposal of influential senators by wealthy men...

...The White House, of course, has arranged in advance for a sufficient number of troops and helicopters to make the event suitable for filming in color...

...Who remembers now that in 1968 Hubert Humphrey was one of the intended victims of the street marchers...

...Although there is little reason to believe that democratization of the GOP would markedly shift its current ideological balance, such reforms could some day make it possible for a Republican-bred McGov-ern-type to make a daring move for the White House...

...Should he lose to George Mc-Govern...

...Even before the rank-and-file delegates arrive in Miami Beach, the scramble for power will unfold in the committees entrusted with shaping the party's rules and platform...

...A politically itchy White House may determine that the time has come to jettison its busing-moratorium package and throw overt or covert support behind a plank endorsing a constitutional amendment against busing for purposes of racial balance...

...The rules group has on its agenda a proposal that would open entry into the GOP delegate structure in much the same way as the McGovern-Fraser Commission transformed the Democratic party's convention apparatus...

...But it is still too early in the game to see which of these powerful gambits will control the center of the board...

...It is often the lot of a senator to seek the Presidency and it is often the lot of his rich benefactor to affix a tasteful plaque to his living-room wall attesting to the fact that this is where the campaign actually began...

...The platform fight is likely to focus on the busing issue, since there is not much else in the Nixon arsenal of ideas that most Republicans feel is worthy of a public quarrel...

...Professional that he is, the President is more or less tolerant of what is happening, since as far as he can determine it presents no direct threat to his interests and may enliven what might otherwise be a rather dull reunion for many of his old friends...

...Richard Nixon's politics leave no room at all for social malcontents, and vice versa, so the prospects for a violent clash are quite good...

...The key fact about this election is that there's a new individuality- breaking out of categories and pigeonholes...

...Nixon admires Connally more than any other Democrat, or pseudo-Democrat, he knows...

...Yet Humphrey took the rap for their behavior and for defending the response of the Chicago police force...

...Meantime, Agnew is suggesting that he is the first Vice President in memory who does not want to be President...

...the most he can look forward to is being photographed at state funerals standing beside Lyndon Johnson...

...In other words, it's going to be a dirty campaign...

...A sliver of the underground contest may be visible from the convention podium in the guise of who is allowed to offer a resolution, who is barred from delivering a seconding speech and the like...

...Unfortunately for George McGovern, Dutton's "new individuality" will not get his campaign out of debt, will not register black or youthful voters, will not make skeptical Jewish voters think better of him, and will not induce the AFL-CIO political cadres to ring door bells and pass out flyers in working-class neighborhoods...

...The sole question raised by the Javits initiative is why the senator has yet to discover that Nixon is inherently prone to pursue whatever course Javits assails...

...Since the prospects of any Republican blood spilling along the Miami shores are meager indeed, Dole was saying that if the kids riot and get beat up it is really McGovern's fault for dispatching them there or, at the very least, for not trying to persuade them to stay away...

...Clearly it cannot be said with any degree of finality that in 1972 Richard Nixon will be treated any differently in the public mind...

...Fred Dutton, the amateur political theoretician and professional political decision-maker who has recently been added to the McGovern campaign regards his candidate as the first aparty nominee...

...So the politics of hope will clash with the politics of fear...

...The decision was probably triggered by Jacob Javits, who had told reporters he would like to see Agnew dumped...

...That is precisely why the reforms will probably be diluted, with the overall aim of avoiding an embarrassing roll call on the convention floor...

...To this lesson, McGovern has now added his own pithy postscript...

...In Dutton's view, "party and elected officials are becoming less important in the equation than the electorate as a whole, which at the same time is atomizing...

...The President's political career has shown the young bulls in the GOP corral that it is never too early (or, for that matter, too late) to paw the ground in a bid to run the country...

...Speaking of crushing, as we all know the Republicans are expected to attract a larger and more diverse group of young protestors to Miami than the Democrats did...

...For his part, McGovern is likely to draw all sorts of contrasts between the two conventions and suggest that under a McGovern Presidency the nation would at long last regain its internal sense of tranquility...

...But if the networks are unable to improve on their performance at the Democratic National Convention, these moments will probably be denied to most of us when they do come along...

...The President, who sits atop a $12 million campaign kitty, has prudently spent several thousand of it to inquire of his pollsters how much of a liability Agnew presents to his reelection...

...Should that occur, the liberal members of the Senate who come to Miami Beach as reluctant members of the Nixon wedding party might be tempted to crush their bouquets...