POLITICS, POLLS, AND THE PRESS

...Oh, I'd say along about the second ballot at Chicago," he replied with the quiet mirth that has become the distinctive music of his campaign...

...That McCarthy has transformed the landscape and language of American politics as no man has done since the first—and losing—campaign of Adlai Stevenson seems to me beyond challenge...

...California's June test will undoubtedly loom larger than any of the May affairs...

...He received 23,280 Democratic votes (forty-two per cent) and 5,511 Republican write-ins...

...If many had cared to notice, there had been strong intimations of this development...

...Whether McCarthy can go all the way is still contingent on events as well as accident...

...Johnson's deepening difficulties at home and abroad, Americans were told by air and by typewriter that the "dump-Johnson" movement begun late last summer by JAMES A. WECHSLER is editor of the editorial page of The New York Post and one of its featured columnists...

...Kenworthy wrote...

...In fact, while he attained only twenty-seven per cent of the vote, this was sufficient—given the diversionary presence of Governor Roger D. Branigin in the race and the absence of a Kennedy landslide—to evoke the belated suspicion that his campaign was something more than a side-show...

...Johnson had drifted, and the bitter national conflict created by his course...

...neither can one estimate how many potential adherents held back because he was branded a lost cause...

...Last autumn there emerged rumors that the Governor was becoming increasingly concerned about the social and economic cost of the war, but throughout the long winter he heeded the counsel of those advisers who urged him to shun such controversial foreign waters...

...Indeed, there were rather cruel reports suggesting that he might hang in there long after he had been effectively routed...

...In advance of the Indiana contest, there were renewed prejudgments among the allegedly informed sources that McCarthy was hovering on the brink of doom...

...Nothing that happens between now and convention time can alter the scope of his achievement...

...Fortunately, many of the young in heart were undismayed by what they read...

...Only his name appeared on the ballot and once again he seemed entrapped by the prevailing journalistic formula: If McCarthy did well, it would signify nothing...

...Outside the Connecticut press the clue was widely ignored and the impact of the final results received less than generous national recognition...

...That he has done so despite such widespread cynicism in the press fraternity raises serious questions about the responsibility and sensitivity of those who cover politics, and those who evaluate news...

...It is perhaps unfair to single out Weaver, and Evans and Novak...

...A notice of the event was buried in the last pages of one edition of the Sunday New York Times (I have never been able to obtain the clipping, which must be a collector's item...

...Regardless of the outcome, the country has received intriguing confirmation that neither the professional journalistic diagnosticians nor the pollsters and their computers have transformed the American voter into a fleshless abstraction...

...Meanwhile, on the Republican side, the pilgrimage of Governor George Romney attracted the largest initial attention...

...He began with no large financial resources of his own or any great array of affluent patrons...

...Truman could be validly likened to the awesome anguish of the dead-end Vietnam escalation into which Mr...

...But something else must be said about the persistent downgrading of his candidacy by those who should long ago have learned that American politics is a game of many chances...

...had agreed to seek the Democratic designation rather than await the Republican call four years later...

...Like Lyndon B. Johnson, if for somewhat different reasons, Harry Truman came upon troublesome times...

...Louis Post-Dispatch, one of the few staunch pro-McCarthy voices in the nation, was moved to comment editorially: "Senator McCarthy has won another election, and we suppose that again we shall be told by the political analysts that it doesn't mean a thing . . . political dopesters are like weather forecasters...

...Having questioned the fallibility of political commentary during most of these remarks, I am not disposed to offer any dogmatic projections of my own...

...The outcome of McCarthy's long, lonely adventure remains subject to hazardous imponderables that have already rendered this so chaotic a political year...

...Now, regardless of Nebraska or Oregon, McCarthy will not be readily disposed to take any death notice seriously...

...In fact, the analogy between 1968 and 1948 had fatal flaws, as a few of us tried to point out in this magazine and other scattered places...

...such stalwart spirits as Allard Lowen-stein (and fostered in important measure by student dissidents on many campuses) was an amateur exercise doomed to futility from the start...

...McCarthy can derive solace from the knowledge that, as far back as last January 21, E. W. Kenworthy of The New York Times was describing him as a failure on the West Coast...

...Nixon declined to fade away, and the Governor decided to deliver a series of speeches including, at last, one that dealt with Vietnam...

...But McCarthy, his banner carried largely by infant infantry mobilized from colleges and universities, confounded all prophesy...

...On January 13 a Concord dispatch from Warren Weaver, Jr...

...On the one hand it was widely conceded in Washington that belated reports of McCarthy's gains decisively influenced the timing of the Johnson withdrawal and his simultaneous partial cessation of the bombings...

...Eugene McCarthy's campaign is a disaster...

...On the morning after, Tom Wicker wrote in The New York Times: "Mark down the Indiana primary as the one in which Eugene J. McCarthy proved to be a serious contender for President of the United States...

...And too many who write about these matters accepted their judgment...

...I asked McCarthy—this was after Wisconsin and Pennsylvania—at what point he thought his effort might finally be taken seriously...

...he had raised only scattered enthusiasm and less money...

...not even the most spectacular error of prediction diminishes the confidence with which they make the same prediction over again...

...In the bailiwick of Democratic national chairman John Bailey, and in a state where the machine-rigged primary law had never been defied on a statewide basis, McCarthy's forces won 44.3 per cent of the 67,871 votes cast and virtually insured destruction of the "unit rule" for the Connecticut delegation...

...Admittedly his campaign seemed grounded...

...POLITICS, POLLS, and the PRESS by JAMES A. WECHSLER With the climactic primaries and national conventions still to come, 1968 has already achieved assurance of immortality in the political science textbooks...

...it is also what enhances the miracle of his survival...

...Suddenly the script changed anew, perhaps partly accelerated by Rockefeller's abrupt announcement that his own unavailability had been exaggerated...

...to The New York Times began: "Senator Eugene McCarthy's threat to President Johnson in the New Hampshire primary is regarded as modest indeed by leaders of all the political factions in the state . . . Pro-Johnson Democrats, anti-Johnson Democrats and Republicans are in agreement that the Minnesota Senator will probably get 6,000 or 7,500 votes...

...The names of Dwight D. Eisenhower and Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas were among those proposed as his replacement...

...But until and unless that occurs, let there at least be overdue acknowledgment that Eugene McCarthy has already shown that anything can happen, especially in 1968, and many Americans remain stubbornly responsive to the man who restored a sense of conscience to American politics...

...they have been as wrong in 1968 as they were in 1948, but this time they have been even more remote from actuality...

...It was still too early to measure the possible effects of Vice President Humphrey's emergence as a candidate...

...The writers suggested that McCarthy might be facing "a defeat close to annihilation" in that state...

...if he fared badly his preordained doom was finally at hand...

...They simply could not believe that McCarthy's youth brigades were capable of affecting the polling-booths, or that the universities could become a real center of political power, or that a perceptive candidate, lacking the guidance of backroom strategists, might have a sharper instinct for the mood of the country than those whose lives have been squandered in clubhouses...

...But Truman was unshaken by the "dump-Truman" movement and eventually moved on to renomination and then to re-election...

...Their forecasts of McCarthy's early doom were widely echoed...

...In any case, Mr...

...Curiously, it was 1948 that inspired one of the largest and most prevalent misjudgments of the political medicine men two decades later...

...Wisconsin, as Serwer notes, evoked the most absurd rationalizations...

...It is reasonable to assume that he would have continued to abstain if McCarthy had been "annihilated" in the Granite state...

...They captured such key cities as New Haven and Stamford...

...he seemed to be reestablishing a palship with the Goldwater wing...

...Incidentally, Newfield's funeral oration echoed the diagnosis being voiced by Robert Kennedy's entourage with which, as one of Kennedy's biographers, he is in almost daily seance...

...At once many wider analysts construed this as the signal for which Rockefeller had been waiting...

...There seems to be a consensus among them that Senator McCarthy just can't win, and once a consensus like this is reached it becomes very difficult for a pundit to accept facts that conflict with it...

...There were few precedents to dispute this dogma—none in our century —and so, despite Mr...

...the insurgent candidacy of Eugene McCarthy evoked mingled expressions of contempt and compassion for a well-intentioned soul who was apparently uninformed about the basic rules of the game...

...for it is in fact he who has shaped the dimension of the contest...

...the growing alienation between people and government appeared far more reminiscent of Herbert Hoover's plight in 1932...

...Their expectation, of course, was that his popularity figure in the polls would steadily increase as long as he managed to avoid any adversary positions, and that the specter of a Nixon candidacy would produce overwhelming pressures for the emergence of the man whom The New York Times, a long-time admirer, had begun to call "Nelson the Silent...

...Less than a fortnight after the Wisconsin contest, McCarthy's amateur legions in Connecticut staged another coup for which few citizens outside the state had been adequately prepared by the wire services or most of the professional analysts...

...He also decided that his demand for a "draft" was misunderstood...

...In Fairfield County a few weeks earlier, a dramatic blend of new suburbia and old Yankee had produced the largest political rally in the area's annals and McCarthy had received a tumultuous welcome...

...Twelve days later columnists Rowland Evans and Robert Novak reported from the same scene: "The real surprise in the campaign for the March 12 Democratic Presidential primary is not the disorganized nature of Senator Eugene McCarthy's campaign but how the much-maligned regular party organization is building a well-oiled machine to support President Johnson...

...Moreover, it was never fully established whether the "dump-Truman" drive would have failed if General Eisenhower (for better or worse...

...but most political observers were already transforming the national battle into a Kennedy-Humphrey (rather than a Kennedy-Johnson) struggle and continuing to treat McCarthy as the Third Man who could never reach the finish line, no matter how many times he refuses to falter...

...McCarthy may lose the final round, and his defeat may tragically reinforce the doubts of those who saw him as their last real hope within the traditional political framework...

...He had the blessing of Governor Nelson Rockefeller...

...He makes his appeals in low key, almost dispassionately, in a kind of a monotone, as if he were a college professor lecturing to a class...

...his gains in the first state were especially significant in view of the effort of Vice President Hubert Humphrey's backers to hold their lines for the Administration...

...Not many days after Wisconsin, McCarthy faced a trial in Pennsylvania...

...No one can measure how much the difficulty of raising funds was—and is— aggravated by the defeatist pronouncements of those whose business is the coverage of politics...

...In fact it had been generally agreed in advance that 200,000 ballots would be a creditable showing...

...Within a matter of days—even before the New Hampshire balloting began—the rugged Romney withdrew...

...By early spring it became apparent that the predicted "spontaneous" pro-Rockefeller upsurge was not erupting, despite quiet stimulus...

...Wrong again...

...As it became clear that Romney was evoking extensive spasms of ennui among those to whom he addressed his message, "informed" political speculation took a new turn...

...but everyone who knew him well knew that rugged George was a man who did not quit in the first round of any battle...

...Meanwhile McCarthy's forces had registered notable but little-heralded inroads in the precinct caucuses of both Minnesota and Iowa...

...In early February, Jack Newfield, the pundit of New York's avant-garde Village Voice, was writing: "Let the unhappy, brutal truth come out...

...The one thing that could be said confidently about his role as he faced the final primary rounds is that he had already made political history, reducing many political commentators to a level of absurdity unmatched since 1948...

...he might not have come nearly this far if there had been no Tet offensive when his drive was just getting under way...

...Yet by late April the California polls were showing a dramatic rise in McCarthy's strength, and the Kennedy camp was plainly afflicted by jitters...

...Johnson's prospective renomination was regarded by an overwhelming number of commentators as an inevitable, incontestable fact of life as this year began...

...In the aftermath thousands of words were written and spoken interpreting these events as new proof that any incumbent President could control his party's nominating convention in his own behalf if he so desired...

...when he more than doubled that amount— in an industrial state where he was supposed to be weakest—the episode was lightly brushed aside as a contest waged against phantom foes...

...Rockefeller needed time to think—and reappraise —perhaps an understandable reticence since he had been unable throughout the long course of the national debate on Vietnam to render any serious contributions beyond occasional cryptic expressions of support for the President, explanations that the pressures of state business wholly occupied his mind, and, intermittently, the excuse that only the White House had full access to the facts...

...The most extraordinary myths and fallacies of 1968, however, have been related to the remarkable voyage of Eugene McCarthy...

...For many tedious weeks, press and television promoted the build-up of the Mormon motors man who seemed so immune to any of the seven cardinal sins (McCarthy was later to describe such totality of virtue as a questionable quality in a Presidential nominee...

...Thus, when he did remarkably well, rolling up more than 400,000 votes (an overwhelming margin against the scattered write-ins for Kennedy and Humphrey), the event was not deemed page one news by most papers...

...Within twenty-four hours after the New Hampshire returns, Robert F. Kennedy was publicly announcing his own "reassessment" and declaring his candidacy by the end of the week...

...And now it was on to Wisconsin...

...My own view (documented significantly by Arnold Serwer's report) is that a crucial source of the miscalculations about McCarthy has been the apparently incurable tendency of many political journalists to rely on the judgments of the "pros" who do not really believe anything can violate their ancient axioms...

...he announced his candidacy...

...At each step along the way those who had written off McCarthy's candidacy from the start found new reason to deprecate his advances...

...he has read his own obituary too often to be depressed...

...his total exceeded President Johnson's...

...Not since 1948 has there been a comparable deflation of the experts, and the end is not yet in sight...

...The St...

...But these developments were quickly cited to minimize the meaning of the actual vote McCarthy amassed in Wisconsin two days later—despite all the evidence that his victory would have been even more sweeping if the President had not abdicated before the polls opened...

...None of the travail confronting Mr...

...One day in mid-spring a Washington dispatch reported that the Kennedy bloc still derided McCarthy as a rival and, with Johnson out, viewed Humphrey as its only serious opponent...

...there was, rather, one large, continuing miscalculation, vividly described in a recently published volume by Irwin Ross called The Loneliest Campaign...

...Not for a long time afterward were politicians likely to take the American voter for granted...

...Yet even that year of the Truman upset did not contain so long a succession of surprises involving so many men...

...The story of that surprise—and the miscalculations of the sideline observers—is described by Arnold Serwer elsewhere in this issue (Page 24...

...No figures are readily available on the consumption of whiskey at the Press Club bar in Washington, where prophets and pundits have traditionally traded their secret intelligence and intuitions...

...Their disdain did not destroy him, but it has surely compounded his difficulties...

...In fact, they are an obsolete breed...

...It is already possible to say that 1968 has rendered those propositions even more devastating...

...The McCarthy breakthrough in New Hampshire was authoritatively viewed as inconceivable in the early stages of his drive...

...Consultation with Providence and conscience having impelled him to enter the race, he would not (we were told) be disposed to flee the battlefield at the first unfavorable signs...

...But one must assume that many of the keener analysts have been driven to excessive escapism by repeated evidence that they have been out of touch with reality...

...McCarthy's entrance into the combat late last year set in motion a whole series of events that almost certainly would not have occurred if he had followed the counsels of caution —as so many others did—and accepted the proposition that Lyndon B. Johnson's occupancy of the White House made him politically invulnerable and invincible, at least as far as his own party was concerned...

...It has been run as if King Constantine was the manager...

...With the cause of moderation in peril, with Romney departed, with Richard Nixon indefatigably pushing onward if not upward, the great moment for Rockefeller's re-emergence appeared to be at hand...

...in 1947 there arose among an informal coalition of liberals and Democratic machine men the conviction that only Truman's retirement could save the Democratic Party—in Congressional and state races as well as in the Presidential contest...

...In essence that has been the McCarthy story...

...If that occurs, it may be useful to re-explore the trail and assemble the record of rejection and ridicule in respectable places against which he had to fight...

...The results have been equally shattering for those engaged in the processing and sale of political commodities...

...The most basic parallel can be found in the last paragraph of the Ross chronicle: "In the end the most salutary consequence of 1948 was probably a renewed awareness of the contingent quality of events, of the unpredictability of both leadership in a democracy and of the choices that voters make in the privacy of the polling booth...