“Between the Idea and the Reality . . . Falls the Shadow.”
The Shadow? I could almost smell the bastard behind me when I made the last turn into Manchester. It was late Tuesday night, and tomorrow’s schedule was calm. All the candidates had zipped off to Florida—except for Sam Yorty, and I didn’t feel ready for that.
The next day, around noon, I drove down to Boston. The only hitchhiker I saw was an eighteen-year-old kid with long black hair who was going to Reading—or “Redding,” as he said it—but when I asked him who he planned to vote for in November, he looked at me like I’d said something crazy.
“What election?” he asked.
“Never mind,” I said. “I was only kidding.”
One of the favorite parlor games in Left/Liberal circles from Beverly Hills to Chevy Chase to the Upper East Side and Cambridge has been—for more than a year now—a sort of guilty, half-public breast-beating whenever George McGovern’s name is mentioned. He has become the Willy Loman of the Left; he is liked but not well-liked, and his failure to make the big charismatic breakthrough has made him the despair of his friends. They can’t figure it out.
A few weeks ago I drove over to Chevy Chase—to the “White side” of Rock Creek Park—to have dinner with McGovern and a few of his heavier friends. The idea was to have a small, loose-talking dinner and let George relax after a week on the stump in New Hampshire. He arrived looking tired and depressed. Somebody handed him a drink and he slumped down on the couch, not saying much but listening intently as the talk quickly turned to “the McGovern problem.”
For more than a year now, he’s been saying all the right things. He has been publicly opposed to the war in Vietnam since 1963; he’s for amnesty now; his alternative military spending budget would cut Pentagon money back to less than half of what Nixon proposes for 1972. Beyond that, McGovern has had the balls to go into Florida and say that if he gets elected he will probably pull the plug on the $5 billion Space Shuttle program, thereby croaking thousands of new jobs in the depressed Cape Kennedy–Central Florida area.
He has refused to modify his stand on the school busing issue, which Nixon-Wallace strategists say will be the number one campaign argument by midsummer—one of those wild-eyed fire-and-brimstone issues that scares the piss out of politicians because there is no way to dodge it . . . but McGovern went out of his way to make sure people understood he was for busing. Not because it’s desirable, but it’s “among the prices we are paying for a century of segregation in our housing patterns.”
This is not the kind of thing people want to hear in a general election year—especially not if you happen to be an unemployed anti-gravity systems engineer with a deadhead mortgage on a house near Orlando . . . or a Polish millworker in Milwaukee with three kids the government wants to haul across town every morning to a school full of Niggers.
McGovern is the only major candidate—including Lindsay and Muskie—who invariably gives a straight answer when people raise these questions. He lines out the painful truth, and his reward has been just about the same as that of any other politician who insists on telling the truth: he is mocked, vilified, ignored, and abandoned as a hopeless loser by even his good old buddies like Harold Hughes.
On the face of it, the “McGovern problem” looks like the ultimate proof-positive for the liberal cynics’ conviction that there is no room in American politics for an honest man. Which is probably true: if you take it for granted—along with McGovern and most of his backers—that “American politics” is synonymous with the traditional Two Party system: the Democrats and the Republicans, the Ins and the Outs, the Party in Power and the Loyal Opposition.
That’s the term National Democratic Party chairman Larry O’Brien has decided to go with this year—and he says he can’t for the life of him understand why Demo Party headquarters from coast to coast aren’t bursting at the seams with dewy-eyed young voters completely stoned on the latest Party Message.
Getting It On in D.C.
The most recent Gallup poll says Nixon & Muskie are running Head to Head, but on closer examination the figures had Muskie trailing by a bare 1 percent—so he quickly resigned his membership in the “Caucasians Only” Congressional Country Club in the horsey suburbs near Cabin John, Maryland. He made this painful move in late January, about the same time he began hammering Nixon’s “end the war” proposal.
Watching Muskie on TV that week, I remembered the words of ex-senator Ernest Gruening (D-Alaska) when he appeared at the Massachusetts Rad/Lib Caucus in his role as the official spokesman for McGovern. Gruening was one of the two senators who voted against the Gulf of Tonkin resolution in 1964—the resolution that gave LBJ carte blanche to do Everything Necessary to win the war in Vietnam. (Wayne Morse of Oregon was the only other “nay” vote: . . . and both Gruening and Morse were defeated when they ran for reelection in 1966.)