POLITICS '72/McGOVERN'S ULTIMATE TEST

...It was part of his openness and candor to admit mistakes, and he professed to read in the public mood a willingness to have a candidate make mistakes, as long as he admitted them and acted on them...

...Time and again I saw him resort to this technique, often to the exasperation of those responsible for his schedule—in a New Hampshire shoe factory, where he would pause to enter a long dialogue with a single worker...

...Through the campaign, the possibility that the President might somehow negotiate a breakthrough with Hanoi has made it risky for McGovern to focus too heavily on Vietnam...

...McGovern did try to touch some of these bases after the Shriver-for-Eagleton replacement, but the exercise could not be carried out semi-privately...

...But now he seldom expresses his concerns in those rambling dialogues of earlier days with traveling reporters or with the small-town housewife who would linger at the meat counter to hear him out, and perhaps be moved to ask a question, and then another and another...

...This practice created a certain mystique about candidate McGovern that even some of his closest aides professed they could not penetrate...

...the time spent with one voter impressed the others of McGovern's "sincerity...

...He said he thought he might win, and what made him think so were the conversations he had with factory workers, which revealed to him an unexpected depth of disenchantment over unemployment, prices, and personal budget problems...

...It was, by all old political standards, a waste of time, but it was the McGovern style and it exuded an aura of concern that, unseen then, began to build a constituency...

...The demands of time and tactic do not permit it...

...That word was heard over and over again when onlookers were questioned about their snap impression of the man...

...But the candidate remained locked in the kind of campaign that was clearly not his dish...

...And the task has not been an easy one...

...aides allowed that a few selected political writers and perhaps a network television pool might be tipped off, assuring coverage in the major media outlets without the inhibiting mob scene of a full-fledged press contingent...

...En route, he remained isolated in the forward cabin of his plane...

...One who saw McGovern in the primaries and then in the mass-media fall campaign was likely to have the impression that if only the candidate could get the voters in his living room one at a time for long, quiet chats, he could fare much better...

...As a candidate who intended to make Richard Nixon's credibility a principal issue in the fall, this aftermath of the Eagleton episode was a most destructive one...

...Long before the July troubles, McGovern had hoped to use August as a pre-campaign listening time among the voters...

...But generally McGovern this fall has become a captive of the mechanics of mass-media campaigning, and those mechanics put a much greater premium on the appearance of campaigning than on its substance...

...he could no longer afford the more casual campaigning that earlier gave him a feedback of grass-roots opinion and the time to sell himself...

...McGovern on the stump can project a sincerity of conviction that survives the flat, nasal tone of his voice...

...When Eagleton reported from Hawaii enthusiastic public support for his continued Vice Presidential candidacy, McGovern dismissed it, observing it was Eagleton who was isolated from the overwhelming sentiment on the mainland that he leave the ticket...

...But it never worked out...

...In that effort, which probably will be the key to his chances for an upset, his ace card may be the one issue that he handles with equal effect at close or long range...

...Day after day, without the excessive encumbrances of mass media his later success brought, he could cultivate the electorate like a patient gardener...

...Polls have long reported overwhelming support for getting out of Vietnam but more recently found a majority favoring the Nixon-ordered bombings...

...His success, of course, had many architects beyond his instincts...

...In the multi-candidate primaries of last spring, in which capturing thirty per cent or less of the vote was sometimes enough to win, McGovern in most states was able to focus personally and directly on his own anti-war constituency, and, later, to begin to expand his appeal to discontented blue-collar workers as an alternative to George Wallace...

...McGovern held a press conference outside the factory and used it transparently as a backdrop for the resumption of his campaign, after weeks of drifting, patching, and defensiveness...

...In some areas the McGovern people, acting on their own, quickly established effective working relationships with Democratic Party organizations and pro-McGov-ern labor unions...

...Then, his life was a series of long, late-hour automobile rides, of bumpy hops aboard Dogpatch Airline relics from one small, darkened airport in the boondocks to another...

...If there was drift at the national campaign level, there was action at the local level in Wisconsin, Illinois, New York, and other states...

...It was the beginning of his awareness of the potential of the "fed-up" vote, and he pursued it with increasing determination thereafter...

...But there is public confusion on the Vietnam issue...

...in a Wisconsin supermarket, where he would discuss food prices with a young mother, deftly steering the rambling conversation into a simplified critique of Nixonomics...

...As the McGovern-Nixon race approaches election day, McGovern's showing may depend in considerable degree on how successfully he can bring to his mass-audience appearances the in-close quality of sincerity, integrity, and determination of the conversational McGovern...

...That issue is, of course, the war, and so strong are his convictions on it, so long held and so well-organized in his mind, that he seldom fails to generate great emotional response when he discusses it in any forum, large or small...

...in every primary, his workers reported that after a certain amount of McGovern plodding, the campaign would begin to move...

...What is incredible about these largely unsung volunteers—whose numbers fell off in August but rose rapidly in September—is that the polls do not daunt them nor does Nixon's $45 million campaign kitty awe them...

...His running debate on the war and amnesty with two Nixon supporters at a Western Electric plant in Columbus, Ohio, for example, generated sparks and ideas and won him front-page play across the country...

...The exercise, of course, would not have been without its share of hokum...

...In the final days of the campaign, McGovern no doubt will be using all avenues—large public rallies covered by network television and the press and direct talks into the nation's living rooms via television—to bring doubting Democrats back home and rally first voters to the polls for him...

...at an Ohio lunch counter, where he would ask a couple of laborers about local unemployment, while casually eating a dish of vanilla ice cream...

...They could be George McGovern's most valuable asset in a campaign in which he will be outspent...

...Concerned that McGovern the man was not being adequately perceived, the campaign strategists routed the traveling road show back to Washington in late September for the preparation of some thoughtful radio and television appearances, and to let the candidate do some reflecting...

...It took time and work, but when George McGovern got the voters' attention in these states, he held it...

...McGovern's grassroots leaders, independent and highly-motivated "cause" people, operate like guerrilla chieftains, on their own if need be...

...It cannot be otherwise...

...In New Hampshire and Wisconsin particularly, where he started a year in advance of the primaries and worked each state repeatedly, town to town, even living room to living room and factory to factory in the lean days, his approach worked...

...When something went wrong, they worried while McGovern remained unruffled, with an air of inevitability about him, like one who had early recognized that historical forces were at work and was confident they would carry him to victory...

...But the Dakota Queen II, the Boeing 727 named after McGovern's World War II bomber, could not be grounded for long...

...In addition, the exercise seemed to be a battery recharger for McGovern...

...From the formal kickoff of the fall campaign on Labor Day to the present, McGovern has been caught up in a jet pursuit of mass-audience America that has severely restricted the ability of the patient political gardener from South Dakota to plant and nurture the seed of his grass-roots candidacy...

...He expressed his belief that Americans would not become that cold-blooded...

...In the blur of his dashes from one television market to another, there have been some one-on-one confrontations of the kind that marked his early primary campaigning, and they have been effective...

...By primary time, though commentators continued to refer to him as the candidate nobody knew, he no longer had to tell the voters in those two states who he was...

...He revisited the Manchester, New Hampshire, shoe factory where, he said, he first sensed workers coming his way, and he talked again to some of them...

...In the dark summer of the McGovern campaign— the immeasurably destructive California delegation challenge, the Eagleton selection and purge, and all the resultant trauma that threw the candidate on the defensive—McGovern essentially was a man locked in a room with his troubles...

...Guest appearances by Senators Kennedy, Muskie, and Humphrey added some spark, but too often the emphasis was placed on motion, not on getting the message through, not selling George McGovern...

...This is not to say that he is a poor candidate before the crowds he has attracted in recent weeks...

...George McGovern, as his party's nominee, as a one-on-one candidate, no longer is as free as he was to do his own thing...

...In a sense, McGovern's candidacy—rooted above all in his pledge to end the war forthwith and Americans involvement in it—may come down to a test of his belief in the humanity of his countrymen, no matter what polls may say...

...Through the later primaries, McGovern continued to seek individual voter playback and he continued to make the right moves...

...But a campaign is not just a candidate and his personality...

...His books include "85 Days: The Last Campaign of Robert Kennedy," "The Resurrection of Richard Nixon," and, most recently, "White Knight: The Rise of Spiro Agnew...

...But that sincerity undoubtedly is conveyed more effectively at close range...

...more than most candidates, he seemed to feel the need to have some playback from campaigning...

...if there is temporary paralysis at the top command there are still local registration drives, canvassing, fund-raising, and all the other nuts-and-bolts activities that go on no matter what the candidate and his chief lieutenants do or don't do...

...he has become a disciplined stump speaker fully capable of displaying the usual passions of the indignant "out" candidate...

...Jules Witcover (Jules Witcover, a Washington correspondent for The Los Angeles Times, covered George McGovern's campaign from the period before the New Hampshire primary...

...He was forever trying out his ideas on voters—in factories, supermarkets, on college campuses —wherever he could find even one person to stand and talk about serious matters...

...Often, because these performances took place in full view of many other voters, the exercise had a ripple effect...

...In the first days, he flew from media market to media market to do "visuals"—a walk-through at an emergency food distribution center in Seattle, another at a senior citizen center in Gresham, Oregon, another at the Manned Space Center in Houston...

...Now, in the critical act of the McGovern drama, he is the centerpiece of a full-blown, media-oriented Presidential campaign, flying back and forth across the country in the front cabin of one of two remodeled Boeing 727 jets, leased for $70,700 a week for the pair from United Air Lines...

...The country is too big, and time was too short, for an underdog candidate to forego the visuals that put him on television, and the big-city rallies that got his message out...

...By this time the whole thing was more prop than pulse-taking...

...I remember riding in a car with him two days before the New Hampshire primary and asking him for his prediction...

...he is the nominee of his party and he is automatically locked into a system of mass media coverage that may represent his best chance to upset the polls and beat Richard Nixon on November 7. The same issues that spurred McGovern in 1970 and 1971, and some new ones, still motivate him...

...A problem was the mass media that now attached itself to the Democratic Party's nominee...

...McGovern let others take his readings for him, and the decision he made—indeed the whole affair, starting with Eagleton's selection—took its toll of his own credibility...

...It may come down to that, and to George McGovern's ability to touch the American conscience on Vietnam—not across some small-town lunch counter in a quiet one-on-one chat, but across the nation's television networks to the audience of millions he sought with such doggedness for so long...

...He started out in early 1971 informing each voter he met: "I'm George McGovern...

...Still, McGovern remained unrattled...

...In his arsenal of domestic issues—unemployment, inflation, tax loopholes, the Pentagon budget, the Watergate scandal, the Russian wheat deal abuses, Nixon's $10 million secret campaign fund—his common target is Nixon's credibility and integrity, and he can strike political paydirt with these issues only if voters—especially voters of his own party ready to believe the worst about Nixon but wary of McGovern—find him credible...

...It is no mystery why his television commercials have shown him talking, and listening, to small groups...

...Contrary to some reports, he was far from overshadowed by Kennedy when the charismatic Senator from Massachusetts joined his campaign team in mid-September...

...This style clearly did not suit him, and in a few days a more effective, comfortable mix of visuals and public rallies with substantive speeches was adopted...

...His staff had the fervor, the manpower, and the expertise to take full advantage of the McGovern party reforms in state after state...

...In fact, his principal aides had even talked about trying to have the nominee "slip away" to some of his old listening posts in New Hampshire and Wisconsin to take soundings among the voters whose moods he had read in the primaries...

...Accordingly, beyond all the other problems that have befallen his campaign, McGovern has had to struggle to adjust his style to a reality of television-era politics that is not at all to his advantage...

...The McGovern fall campaign started out, actually, like a facsimile of the 1968 Nixon campaign...

...On those odysseys, he was always good for a lengthy and earnest discussion of the war, of Democratic Party reform, of the mood of unrest and discontent in the country that persuaded him it was ready for him—ready at last for the uncharismatic candidate who talked straight and talked sense...

...Astoundingly, the uncharismatic candidate, the face in the crowd, eventually took on a kind of low-key celebrity status...

...In the Black Hills, he agonized over the Eagleton matter in unMcGovernlike isolation, using the telephone to gather opinion, and not so much public opinion as the private opinion of political leaders and friends...

...But the only swami behind George McGovern was McGov-ern's own inner man, always listening, always taking readings and synthesizing the data in his characteristically private way...

...they listened as he outlined his case for change and he touched their discontent, not with charm but with his talent for patient dinner-table persuasion...

...In a conversation more than a year ago, McGovern told me he did not believe Nixon's Vietnamization policy, even if it ended all American combat deaths, would satisfy the American electorate in November, 1972, as long as American aid continued to support and bear responsibility for a war in which innocent Vietnamese died by the thousands...

...Unlike the others, he did his own public-opinion polling along the way, and unlike others, he subjected the basic strategy of his campaign to the test of his personal instincts...

...In the absence of any such breakthrough, however, he may well become, in these final days, what he tried not to be for so long—a one-issue candidate, hammering away at a war he feels so passionately is senseless, criminal, immoral, and destructive of American society at home...