Fear and Loathing at Rolling Stone(44)
As for mine ... well, my doctor says it swole up and busted about ten years ago. The only thing I ever saw that came close to Objective Journalism was the closed-circuit TV that watched shoplifters in the General Store at Woody Creek, Colorado. I always admired that machine, but I noticed that nobody paid much attention to it until one of those known, heavy, out-front shoplifters came into the place ... but when that happened, everybody got so excited that the thief had to do something quick, like buy a green popsicle or a can of Coors and get out of the place immediately.
So much for objective journalism. Don’t bother to look for it here—not under any byline of mine; or anyone else I can think of. With the possible exception of things like box scores, race results, and stock market tabulations, there is no such thing as Objective Journalism. The phrase itself is a gross contradiction in terms.
And so much for all that, too. There was at least one more thing I wanted to get into here, before trying to wind this down and get into something human. Like sleep, or that 550-watt Humm Box they have up there in the Ree-Lax Parlor at Silver Spring. Some people say they should outlaw the Humm Box, but I disagree.
Meanwhile, all that venomous speculation about what McCarthy is up to these days left a crucial question hanging: the odd truth that almost everybody in Washington who is paid to analyze & predict the behavior of Vote Blocs seems to feel that the much-publicized “Youth Vote” will not be a Major Factor in the ’72 presidential campaign would be a hell of a lot easier to accept if it weren’t for the actual figures.
What the experts appear to be saying is that the sudden addition of twenty-five million new voters between the ages of eighteen and twenty-five will not make much difference in the power-structure of American politics. No candidate will say this, of course. For the record, they are all very solicitous of the “youth vote.” In a close election, even 10 percent of that bloc would mean two and a half million votes—a very serious figure when you stack it up against Nixon’s thin margin over Humphrey in 1968.
Think of it: only 10 percent! Two and a half million. Enough—even according to Nixon’s own wizards—to swing almost any election. It is a general assumption, in the terms of contemporary presidential elections, that it would take something genuinely vile and terrifying to cause either one of the major party candidates to come away with less than 40 percent of the vote. Goldwater managed to do this in ’64, but not by much. Even after allowing Johnson’s TV sappers to cast him as a stupid, bloodthirsty ghoul who had every intention of blowing the whole world off its axis the moment he got his hands on “the button,” Goldwater still got 27,178,188 votes, or 38.5 percent.
The prevailing wisdom today is that any candidate in a standard-brand, two-party election will get about 40 percent of the vote. The basic assumption here is that neither party would nominate a man more than 20 percent different from the type of person most Americans consider basically right and acceptable. Which almost always happens. There is no potentially serious candidate in either major party this year who couldn’t pass for the executive vice president for mortgage loans in any hometown bank from Bangor to San Diego.
We are talking about a purely physical/image gig here, but even if you let the buggers jabber like magpies about anything that comes to their minds, not even a dangerous dingbat like Sam Yorty would be likely to alienate more than 45 or 50 percent of the electorate.
And even that far-left radical bastard, George McGovern—babbling a maddening litany of his most Far Out ideas—would be hard pressed to crank up any more than a 30 percent animosity quotient.
On balance, they are a pretty bland lot. Even Spiro Agnew—if you catch him between screeds—is not more than 20 percent different from Humphrey or Lindsay or Scoop Jackson. Four years ago, in fact, John Lindsay dug Agnew so much that he seconded his nomination for the vice-presidency. There are a lot of people who say we should forget about that this year “because John has already said he made a mistake about Agnew,” but there are a lot of others who take Lindsay’s “Agnew Mistake” very seriously—because they assume he would do the same thing again next week or next month, if he thought it would do him any good.
Nobody seems very worried about Lindsay right now; they are waiting to see what kind of action he can generate in Florida, a state full of transient and old/transplanted New Yorkers. If he can’t make it there, he’s done for. Which is just as well. But if he scores big in Florida, we will probably have to start taking him seriously—particularly if Muskie looks convincing in New Hampshire.