Four More Years Or Decades?
TYLER, GUS
Countdown '72 FOUR MORE YEARS -OR DECADES? BY GUS TYLER When Richard Milhous Nixon was elected President of the United States in 1968, many political analysts asked: Is his victory a passing...
...In the light of the 1972 returns each side can maintain it was correct, for both Republicans and Democrats can claim????And partially prove????A victory...
...The most dedicated affluent liberals stayed with McGovern, contributing time and money generously...
...In every ethnic group, including Jews, blacks, and Hispanics, there was some shift to Nixon compared with 1968...
...though the Democrats did pick up a few seats in the House, the gain was smaller than might be expected in an off-year contest when the party in the White House traditionally loses seats in Congress...
...Instead of de-fusing the "social question," the Democratic party, starting with the miracle in Miami, re-fused the most explosive issue in the nation...
...Nixon commented in an interview the Sunday before Election Day, "Senator Mc-Govern's views, even though he won the nomination, probably did not even represent a majority of Democrats " (Actually, about 30 per cent of the Democrats voted for Nixon...
...I don't think that the American electorate will buy it, and there will be fatal slippage in the Western and Northern Catholic New Deal Democratic strongholds...
...But re-monstration could become even more bitter in the event that the President wins 58-60 per cent of the national vote and the GOP fails to win Congress...
...only 49 per cent voted for Eisenhower in the landslide of 1956...
...small-town and community-college youth do not talk the same way as their colleagues on the big-time campuses, but they cast at least as many votes...
...While "social question" and "liberal chic" are hardly identical, in the minds of millions of Democratic voters the ills of acid, abortion, amnesty, busing, quotas, mugging are brought on and nourished by the patent medicines of the would-be societal "doctors...
...In fact, as we have noted, the blue-collar vote was 55-45 per cent for Nixon...
...The blue-collar workers went for Nixon 55-45 per cent...
...From now to 1976, the work is cut out for the would-be architects of a majority party in America...
...As he explained last March in Politeia, the official journal of the American Association of Political Consultants, "Liberal chic is where the national Democratic party is at these days, in Presidential elections at least...
...Most liberals preferred waiting for peace with Nixon to rushing it with a McGovern, who threatened to redistribute their precious incomes and inheritances...
...Although "union" and "blue collar" are not identical, they are sufficiently close to reach a rough conclusion...
...At a conference held back in 1969, a politico who wrote a book predicting a victory through the new coalition announced bluntly that the backing of organized labor was not worth two cents...
...Peace, yes, but not at any price...
...Not only were McGovern theorists wrong about their new coalition, but they also misunderstood the meaning of organized labor in a Democratic campaign...
...In 1972, those who were inspired by him acted accordingly...
...He fudged the economic question by arguing that a little bit of unemployment is the price we must pay to check inflation, disengage from Vietnam, or tolerate unions...
...The President obviously did not run as well with these workers as with the country as a whole, but he reversed their normal voting pattern...
...McGovern, meanwhilewhatever this minister's son might truly beappeared the embodiment of the counterculture, with all its vulgar connotations of inverted values...
...The McGovern theorists proved to be victims of their wishful thinking, projecting the world of youth they personally knew (the articulate antiwar people in the Ivy League universities) onto the rest of the country...
...As it happened, Nixon captured more than 60 per cent of the vote, but the Republicans actually lost a net of two seats in the Senate and gained only 13 seats in the House...
...Phillips assumed a Nixon landslide because the Democratic party was in the hands of the chic clique...
...Yet blacks are just 10 per cent of the population, and a considerably smaller proportion of the vote...
...The black vote remained solid, if not as solid as in '68...
...a black ghetto with a white intellectual trim...
...They projected a "new voter" turnout of 18 million, with McGovern getting at least 13 million, to give the Democrat a plus factor of 8 million youth votes...
...For the Republicans, the task is to elect a Congress with a presence as broad as that of their President...
...Of the new voters, a CBS survey shows 52 per cent for McGovern and 46 per cent for Nixon?giving the Democrat a national advantage among the young of merely 720,000 votes, instead of the anticipated 8 million...
...they did vote for the party of their choice...
...they had to make marked headway in the 1972 Congressional contests...
...Other polls, not as generous as CBS, found the new voters about evenly divided between the two candidates...
...But their fellow-travelers deserted them in droves...
...Three years ago, I explored the fallacy of this notion in these pages ("The Academic Question," NL, June 23, 1969...
...He was also the beneficiary of a divided Democratic "center" split among Muskie, Hubert Humphrey...
...In their books, both Phillips and Scammon - Wattenberg accurately pointed to the same answer in different ways...
...Thus it was hoped that the 1972 election would offer better evidence of the long-range trend...
...Last April, he made an uncannily accurate forecast that Nixon would carry every state except Massachusetts and the District of Columbia...
...Noncollege youth do not think like college students, and they are more numerous...
...He subdued the "party" problem????knowing full well that most voters are Democrats ????by running without a proclaimed narty label, much to the chagrin of GOP candidates for Congress, but much to his own advantage...
...They have already seriously distorted the outcome in several states...
...So far as the Committee to Reelect the President was concerned, the campaign was over the day McGovern prevailed at Miami Beach...
...In short, the GOP muffed its chance to use a Presidential landslide to bury the Democrats...
...Democratic Senate gains came in such unlikely places as South Dakota, Colorado, Delaware, Kentucky, Iowa, Maine...
...for the Democrats, it is to nominate a Presidential candidate with a base as broad as that of their Congressional majority...
...Between '70 and '72 two best-selling books appeared, predicting quite different futures for American politics: Kevin Phillips' The Emerging Republican Majority saw a significant realignment developing that would make the GOP the dominant party...
...Catholics, for example, supported him 53-46...
...the original welfare-tax proposal came across as Rube Goldberg making like Karl Marx...
...finally, the most militant of the student activists often turn out to be purists who will dump a McCarthy or a McGovern as quickly as a Johnson or a Humphrey if the candidate ap-appears to be straying in the slightest from their demanding straight-and-narrow...
...This brings us to Phillips' belief that 1972 was the perfect year to crystallize a basic regrouping around the GOP...
...The theoreticians who were largely responsible for McGovern's nomination had a counterconcept to offset the fear of a massive working class swing to Nixon: a "new coalition" of the affluent liberals, the young, and the blacks...
...They saw him as the Democratic Goldwater...
...BY GUS TYLER When Richard Milhous Nixon was elected President of the United States in 1968, many political analysts asked: Is his victory a passing moment in a continuing Democratic Era...
...This strategy????executed primarily by the President's acts in office rather than by campaign rhetoric?enabled Nixon to put together the coalition that Kevin Phillips envisioned as the basis for an "emerging Republican majority...
...He further anticipated that the GOP would find a base in middle-America, winning over large chunks of the white ethnic working class...
...Retrospectively, we know that they did more than pray...
...On all counts, the Republican seer was right...
...Given all of these factors, how was it that the GOP was unable to make any real headway in the races for Congress...
...And the above-$10,000-income vote for Nixon exceeded his overwhelming margin nationwide...
...The end result was that, with an assist from the Kennedys, McGovern won where staunch liberals cum Ivy League articulates predominated????massachusetts????And where the black vote counted????the District of Columbia...
...In an earlier column ("Sabotaging the Primaries," NL, May 1), I warned that "Republican crossover voters are threatening to make a farce of the Democratic primaries this year...
...inarticulate students do not share the opinions of their more outspoken classmates, even on the same campus...
...91 per cent of the business community went for Nixon...
...Phillips prophesied that Nixon, far from being a one-term President, would come back stronger the second time out...
...Nixon, on the other hand, proceeded with his defusing of the other questions that might have turned public attention away from the plebiscite over anarchy...
...Or is it the beginning of a Republican Era similar to the long reign of the GOP after the Civil War...
...The Democrats helped Nixon complete this cartoon: The national convention looked like a superklatsch of the chic clique with its PhDigreed beautiful and bright, denimed and dashakied...
...A top leader of the McGovern campaign in New York bluntly told the spokesmen of the New York Labor Committee for McGovern and Shriver that union backing was not really too important: McGovern won the primaries without it and he would go on to win the national election the same way...
...On Election Day, only 12 million new voters turned out, a low 44 per cent of the potential in contrast to an average 54 per cent of the total population...
...Perhaps more revealing, the trade union vote went 50-48 for McGovern...
...Henry "Scoop" Jackson, and George Wallace...
...But the new politics pundits saw the enfranchisement of the 18-year-olds as the virtual enthronement of their new coalition...
...For Nixon's triumph to be a GOP victory as well, however, the Republicans had to show strength in depth...
...Of the 13 seats lost by the Democrats in the House, more than half were due to gerrymanders...
...As President of the United States and not as candidate of a party, he preached the traditional virtues: the work ethic, restraint on permissiveness, peace with honor, fiscal responsibility, an updated puritanism...
...the Eagleton mishap put the final distortion on the cruel caricature...
...Those who looked to the midterm election of 1970 for an answer were disappointed by the inconclusive outcome...
...Why did the Democrats????who made up almost one half of Nixon's total????vote to reelect the President...
...They moved to embarrass then frontrunner Edmund Muskie and subsequently encumbered other candidates to McGov-ern's advantage...
...The labor effort turned around the trend among union members, despite the fact that a few national unions actively backed Nixon and the AFL-CIO as a national entity was neutral...
...Had all of labor backed McGovern, the union vote would have been at least as good as the youth vote????And much bigger in total...
...With McGovern nominated, Nixon simply made the election a referendum on anarchy versus authority...
...He had the best machine of any of the contenders: a corps of energetic, enthusiastic and imaginative workers, united tightly around the Vietnam issue...
...Scammon-Wattenberg saw the possibility of a Democratic win ????provided the party could defuse the explosive "social question," that violent mix of crime, chaos, kids, and kooks...
...A generation of Presidential elections has shown that while labor backing does not guarantee the election of a Democrat, no Democratic candidate can win without it...
...Richard Scammon and Ben Wattenberg's The Real Majority envisioned a continuing Democratic majority????A revived and revised New Deal coalition????running geographically from Michigan to Maine to the District of Columbia to the Mississippi, and including California...
...Having reversed our relations with Soviet Russia and China, he continued to cool the hot war issue by withdrawing more troops from Vietnam and timing the seemingly penultimate peace act for maximum effect on Election Day...
...Even before New Hampshire, the word was out that Nixon strategists were praying for George McGovern to win the Democratic nomination...
...The answer seems to be that the Democratic candidates for the House and the Senate were more representative of their constituencies than George McGovern was of his...
...These victories suggest that the Democrats, who outnumber the Republicans 2:1 by party preference, are not Democrats in name only...
...If the new voters were separated out from the total, the "adult" participation would be still higher...
...He carried every state except Massachusetts (the headland of the Eastern liberal elite) and Washington, D.C...
...Republican intervention alone, though, would not have won the nomination for McGovern...
...In The American Political Report issued the day before the election, Phillips stated ominously: "If President Nixon wins 56 per cent of the vote and the GOP picks up only 1-2 Senators and 15 Congressmen, that will be????And should be????regarded by party leaders as a bad showing all around, a real muffing of a once-in-a-generation opportunity...
...The remarkable strength of the Democratic party in the Congressional races confirms the belief of Scammon and Wattenberg that it still constitutes the "real majority" in the U.S...
...Indeed, many Democratic candidates may have been the beneficiaries of the "penance vote," cast by those who, after reluctantly pulling the lever for Nixon, hastened to atone by voting down the line for every Democrat on the ticket...
Vol. 55 • November 1972 • No. 23
