WE HAVE MUCH TO DO

...I guess," said a liberal journalist we know, "that we've all overestimated the American people...

...The old proprietorship of the Democratic Party read the returns the same way, and invoked them as a mandate to recapture their lost fief-dom...

...His urgently important proposals to reduce the bloated military budget received less and less emphasis...

...The first of these decisions and, in our judgment, the most important was his move toward detente with the Soviet Union and the People's Republic of China...

...It is true, of course, that no Democratic Presidential candidate in our time faced such staggering odds, or was left so beleaguered and abandoned as George McGovern—with the publishers of the country mobilized against him twenty to one, the top hierarchy of labor's hawks led by George Meany arrayed against him, the once solid South now enemy terrain, and the nationwide Wallace vote delivered to Mr...

...to candor rather than deception...

...Even as the air war intensified its rain of destruction and death, the v/ar faded as an "issue" in the United States...

...I ask all of you tonight to stand with your convictions," Senator McGovern said on election night...

...He succeeded, to a greater extent than most of us anticipated, in depo-liticizing the Indochina war by bringing home American ground forces and curtailing the draft...

...When the election returns are as lopsided as they were in the Presidential balloting on November 7, the temptation becomes almost irresistible...

...I ask you not to despair at the political process of this country, because that process has yielded much valuable improvement in these past two years...

...He raised no issues, proposed no programs, made no promises—except to pledge himself vaguely to a "generation of peace" and mendaciously to an eased burden of taxes...

...And he exploited the built-in advantages of an incumbent President with considerable skill...

...The Democratic Party will be a better party because of the reforms that we have carried out...

...It was not a vote to make us give up our hopes for America...

...Nixon's triumph, or to deprive him of the credit for it...

...It may well be that no one but this veteran Cold Warrior would have—could have—undertaken his journeys to Peking and Moscow...

...Over the years The Progressive has experienced more election defeats than we care to remember...

...However unjustly, in the end it was his credibility, not Mr...

...It was hardly an answer calculated to inspire confidence...

...It requires no great leap of the imagination to imagine the Republican uproar that would have attended a Democratic President's travels to the capitals of godless Communism...

...It was a statement worthy of the best days of his campaign...

...Nixon and his supporters have interpreted the election outcome, quite understandably, as a ringing endorsement for his policies and programs...

...It would be foolish to dismiss the magnitude of Mr...

...Nixon had no help from Senator McGovern...

...Still, George McGovern was not without considerable assets acquired in his long quest for his party's nomination...

...Still, thirty-eight per cent of those who voted, voted for McGovern— voted for a candidate who had been widely smeared as an advocate of pot-smoking and surrender, of abortion and amnesty...

...Though the war was, properly, the central issue of his campaign, he traveled to the LBJ ranch to hobnob with the principal architect of the war —and later called the pilgrimage "one of the most treasured moments of my life...

...to compassion rather than contempt...

...It was George Mc-Govern's great strength, as we observed more than once in these pages, that he came to the American people as a different kind of Presidential candidate—one committed to principle rather than expediency...

...He embraced the racist State's Attorney of Cook County, Illinois, Edward V. Hanrahan, and the racist Congresswoman from Boston, Louise Day Hicks—both of whom were, fortunately, retired on Election Day...

...It's us...

...Among some of Senator McGov-ern's most dedicated supporters there has been a natural tendency, in their post-election depression, to doubt the possibility of political change and to denounce the electorate as a mindless mass...

...He won the election by arriving at a series of astute political decisions long before the election—and by translating them into action, even when doing so meant abandoning principles to which he had adhered throughout his long political career and embracing policies he had long denounced as dangerous when they were advocated by progressives...

...It continued with his efforts to appease the discredited politicians who had opposed not only his nomination but his valuable reforms of the Democratic Party...

...And for those who were still concerned he produced, in the final weeks of the campaign, the promise that peace was at hand...

...His downfall began, we believe, with his less than admirable handling of the tragic Eagleton affair, although much blame rests on the Missouri Senator...

...He swallowed his profound distaste for price and wage controls to institute the most stringent regulations ever imposed by an American government in peacetime...

...As the Reverend Jesse Jackson told his black followers in Chicago, "The real issue is not the bus...

...We recall one sad TV interview in which McGovern, pressed to explain his changes in position, replied that, after all, President Nixon had changed his mind, too...

...And an almost unprecedented forty-five per cent of the potential electorate—many of them young people who had initially been inspired by McGovern and his cause— stayed home on Election Day because, rightly or wrongly, they felt disenchanted with Senator McGovern and they could not bring themselves to vote for Mr...

...Senator McGovern helped draw up an agenda for the nation...

...Nixon realized that he was neither admired nor loved by most of his countrymen, and so he became an invisible candidate—one who sent out a squad of Cabinet members and other "surrogates" to do his campaigning and who transformed the election, as best he could, into a referendum on the Presidency rather than on the incumbent President...

...The voters decided he was too indecisive to be President...

...He took refuge in total silence and a sort of injured innocence as one scandal after another broke around his Administration...

...And the sixty per cent who voted for the President denied him control of the House and Senate...

...And while he failed to check either inflation or unemployment, he restored the economy at least to a level that many "you shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free" found tolerable...

...Nixon's as we had all supposed it would be, that became a dominant consideration in the campaign...

...Yet he spent much of his campaign attempting to demonstrate that he was not very different at all, that he was not so progressive as he had first appeared to be...

...Nixon...

...We have much to do in the next four years to begin to bring that agenda into being...

...It was, at best, a vote of only limited confidence in Mr...

...In our time, Winston Churchill, surveying the wreckage of an electoral defeat, seemed to be answering Lincoln's rhetorical question when he observed: "Democracy is the worst system in the world—except all the others...

...And to the extent that they may have the effect of diminishing the energies and efforts of the forces of decency and progress in America, they are downright dangerous...

...A New York Times study showed that race was a dominant if not a decisive issue although "it never really came out into the open...

...Nixon and his Presidency...

...We believe that the people of this country, led astray as they were in this election, will find their way home again and get on with the creation of a better society in a peaceful world...

...Nixon, we suspect, won his second term at the Great Wall of China and in the Great Hall of the Kremlin...

...But in three months of campaigning for the Presidency he managed to dissipate much of that momentum...

...Nixon shrewdly sensed how weary Americans were of a generation of hysterical Cold War...

...The nation will be better because we never once gave up the long battle to renew its oldest ideals and to redirect its current energies along more humane and hopeful paths...

...One of candidate Nixon's most productive maneuvers—done deftly, without the abrasive methods of the old Nixon—was to identify himself with the irrational racial apprehensions and antagonisms that still pervade American society...

...It would be nonsense to pretend that Mr...

...In our darkest moments we have been sustained by our awareness that there was no alternative to Lincoln's "patient confidence in the ultimate justice of the people...

...On some substantive issues, too, where his initial instincts had been sound, Senator McGovern did not especially distinguish himself...

...And, The Times survey showed, "the beneficiary, hands down, [was] Richard Nixon...

...He made his peace with "Keynes-ian" economics when he recognized that traditional Republican economics had no relation to the realities of the American economy...

...In our judgment, these conclusions are, in varying degrees, premature, overdrawn, or just plain wrong...

...The PROGRESSIVE We Have Much to Do There is a powerful temptation after every national election to draw bold and sweeping conclusions about the "mood" of the American people and about the course they wish their government to pursue for at least the next four years...

...As the Great Emancipator asked, "Is there any better or equal hope in the world...

...When the arithmetic of his guaranteed-income program came under attack, he abandoned not only the arithmetic but the program...

...Nixon by a would-be assassin's bullets...