Fear and Loathing at Rolling Stone(61)

Which is at least half true, but it doesn’t have much to do with why Muskie got beaten like a gong in Florida. The real reason is that the Man from Maine, who got the nod many months ago as the choice of the Democratic Party’s ruling establishment, is running one of the stupidest and most incompetent political campaigns since Tom Dewey took his dive and elected Truman in 1948.

If I had any vested interest in the Democratic Party, I would do everything possible to have Muskie committed at once. Another disaster at the polls might put him around the bend. And unless all the other Democratic candidates are killed in a stone-blizzard between now and April 4, Muskie is going to absorb another serious beating in Wisconsin.

I am probably not the only person who has already decided to be almost anywhere except in Ed Muskie’s headquarters when the polls close on election night. The place will probably be dead empty, and all the windows taped . . . TV crews hunkered down behind overturned ping-pong tables, hoping to film the ex-front-runner from a safe distance when he comes crashing into the place to blame his sixth-place finish on some kind of unholy alliance between Ti-Grace Atkinson and Judge Crater. Nor is there any reason to believe he will forbear physical violence at that time. With his dream finished and his nerves completely shot, he might start laying hands on people . . .

Hopefully, some of his friends will be there to restrain the wiggy bastard. All we can be sure of, however, is the list of those who will not be there, under any pretense at all . . . Senator Harold Hughes will not be there, for instance, and neither will Senator John Tunney . . . Nor will any of the other senators, governors, mayors, congressmen, labor leaders, liberal pundits, fascist lawyers, fixers from ITT, and extremely powerful Democratic National committeewomen who are already on the record as full-bore committed to stand behind Big Ed.

None of those people will be there when Muskie sees the first returns from Wisconsin and feels the first rush of pus into his brain. At that point he will have to depend on his friends, because that suitcase full of endorsements he’s been dragging around won’t be worth the price of checking it into a bus station locker.

Except perhaps for Birch Bayh. There is something that doesn’t quite meet the eye connected with this one. It makes no sense at all, on its face. Why would one of Ted Kennedy’s closest friends and allies in the Senate suddenly decide to jump on the Muskie bandwagon when everybody else is struggling to get off gracefully?

Maybe Birch is just basically a nice guy—one of those down-home, warm-hearted Hoosiers you hear so much about. Well . . . why not? Maybe he and Big Ed are lifelong buddies. But if that were so, you’d think Bayh might have offered to fix Muskie up with some high-life political talent back then when it might have made a difference.

But times are tricky now, and you never know when even one of your best friends might slap a ruinous lawsuit on you for some twisted reason that nobody understands. Almost everybody you meet these days is nervous about the nasty drift of things.

It is becoming increasingly possible, for instance, that Hubert Humphrey will be the Democratic presidential nominee this year—which would cause another Nixon-Humphrey campaign. And a thing like that would probably have a serious effect on my nerves. I’d prefer no election at all to another Humphrey nightmare. Six months ago it seemed out of the question. But no longer.

Frank Mankiewicz was right. For months he’s been telling anybody who asked him that the Democratic race would boil down, after the first few primaries, to a Humphrey-McGovern battle. But nobody took him seriously. We all assumed he was just talking up Humphrey’s chances in order to slow Muskie down and thus keep McGovern viable.

But apparently he was serious all along. Humphrey is the bookies’ choice in Wisconsin, which would finish Muskie and make Hubert the high rider all the way to the Oregon and California primaries in early June.

The “other race” in Wisconsin is between McGovern and Lindsay, which might strike a lot more sparks than it has so far if anybody really believed the boneheads who run the Democratic Party would conceivably nominate either one of them. But there is a definite possibility that the Democratic Convention this year might erupt into something beyond the control of anybody; the new delegate-selection rules make it virtually impossible for old-style bosses like Mayor Daley to treat delegates like sheep hauled in to be dipped.

A candidate like Lindsay or McGovern might be able to raise serious hell in a deadlocked convention, but the odds are better than even that Hubert will peddle his ass to almost anybody who wants a chunk of it, then arrive in Miami with the nomination sewed up and Nixon waiting to pounce on him the instant he comes out of his scumbag.