The Washington Post, by David S. Broder

MANCHESTER, N. H.—If Sen. Edmund S. Muskie’s campaign is in as much trouble in New Hampshire as it appears to be, the reason may be that the Maine Democrat has failed—in the words of one shrewd observer of the state’s politics—"to solve the problem of how a rational man should behave in an irrational situation."

Muskie’s prime asset throughout his political career has been his reasonableness, and the sense of calm good judgment that he conveys. Yet, the frustrations of this New Hampshire primary have unnerved him to the point that he stood in the snow here Saturday morning, choked and weeping, all his years of self-discipline shattered, barely able to voice his outrage at what is happening to him.

Immediate cause of his discomfiture was William Loeb, whose relentlessly petty and personal attacks on politicians have made his Manchester Union-Leader the scourge of responsible public officials of both parties here for years. But publisher Loeb is just the symbol of this maddening situation for Muskie—who feels very much now like a Gulliver trussed up by the Lilliputians, or, as the late Ed Lahey used to say, a man being nibbled to death by ducks.

Here he is—the overwhelming choice of his party’s leaders for the nomination and an even bet to defeat President Nixon in the general election—and he finds himself struggling somewhat desperately to protect his home base against the likes of George McGovern, Vance Hartke. Sam Yorty and Wilbur Mills.

McGovern is a serious, capable opponent, who has waged an excellent campaign here, but he has no natural base in New Hampshire, as Muskie does, and he has only the dimmest chance of being the Democratic presidential nominee. The others—Hartke, Yorty and Mills—can be considered presidential candidates only by the most generous of definitions.

Yet Muskie has been backed into the position—after first resisting—of debating these men next Sunday, as if they were his real opponents for the nomination. And now he is engaged in a nasty exchange with Loeb, who is not his opponent either.

The effect of the Union-Leader on the New Hampshire primary is calamitous, not because the newspaper is conservative but because it is narrow-minded and niggling. Every issue and every personality is dealt with at the level of pettiness. The President’s China trip is discussed as an extravagant expense, as if the United States should determine its foreign policy by the cost of air travel for the White House. Muskie becomes the object of an absurd front-page charge of anti-French-Canadian bias on the basis of a barely literate letter from an unknown supposed witness to a vaguely described Florida incident.

In the foreshortened perspective of the Union-Leader, the state's dominant opinion maker, Muskie is robbed of his national stature and becomes just another of Mr. Loeb’s "hypocritical" politicians—undistinguishable from the lot. To dozens of voters interviewed in recent days he is no different from—and may be a little worse than—Vance Hartke or Sam Yorty or Wilbur Mills.

It is easy to sympathize with Muskie’s rage at being trapped in this situation. It is even possible to understand why he allowed himself to weep in frustration at Loeb’s picking up and reprinting as an editorial a nasty old Newsweek item on Mrs. Muskie, even though Muskie must have known that it is doubtful that most television viewers seeing a grown man standing in a snow storm and unable to speak, would automatically say to themselves, "that’s my kind of president."

What is harder to understand is why Muskie has not so far done the things that might restore a sense of perspective and even sanity to this New Hampshire contest.

He is vehement in his denials that he is taking the New Hampshire voters for granted while concentrating his campaign time on the March 14 Florida primary. But he can perhaps be accused of taking it for granted that the New Hampshire voters understand the realities of the political world as he does.

Despite the fact that most of the 60.000 or 70.000 voters in the primary have to have a fierce party loyalty to enroll as Democrats in what has been a heavily Republican state, Muskie has not yet even fully exploited the argument that he is, by every reckoning the man who is likeliest to unite the party and return the White House to Democratic control.

(Courtesy of The Washington Post.)

MANCHESTER, N. H.—Call me a curmudgeon and a middle-aged grouch, but I think it’s time the Nixon campaign packed up the pompons and the pretty girls and got back to politics. The thought of another presidential campaign year featuring Art Linkletter’s jokes and George M. Cohan medleys by the local drum-and-bugle corps is almost too much to bear.

These gloomy mutterings are occasioned by the aftereffects of the first Nixon rally of the year—a two-hour vaudeville show here last Friday night, designed to bring the President’s New Hampshire primary campaign to a fever pitch of excitement.

There are those, I suppose, who would say that any rally that gives Lainie Kazan’s décolletage more exposure than it does Nelson Rockefeller’s praise of Richard Nixon can’t be all bad. There may well be voters who prefer a troupe of tap dancers to the words of two Cabinet secretaries.

But If that’s what the Nixon campaign is going to be from now until the San Diego convention next August, they ought to assign the saloon editor to the story and let the political writers work on something else.

Personally, I have no objections to President Nixon staying far above the tawdry partisanship of the primaries and using his time to better purpose, discussing The Big Picture with Bebe Rebozo. I think it was smart politics for him to send the vaudeville show to Manchester in his place. Hell, if Lyndon Johnson had cared enough to send Joey Bishop and Ella Fitzgerald to New Hampshire in 1968, he might still be President today.

But candor compels me to report that the Dick Nixon variety hour, otherwise known as "Presidential Appreciation Day," was something of a bomb. Manchester, N.H., on a Friday night is not exactly Fun City, U S.A., and the fact that this particular Friday featured a blizzard did nothing to improve things.

Only a few of the faithful made their way to the National Guard Armory, where they sat on wooden folding chairs in total darkness for two hours, the auditorium lights being shut off to prevent photographers from getting any shots of the empty seats.

But it was not the gloom of the building or the night that got me. It was all those pompon girls. They are so pretty and so enthusiastic and so very, very nubile in their white sweaters and short blue skirts that it almost made me weep.

There are probably girls like that all over America; picture-pretty, oh-so-enthusiastic girls, with white teeth and wavy hair, but I swear the only place I ever see them is at Nixon rallies. I don't know where they are kept from one election year to the next, but the thought did strike me Friday night—and it did nothing to lift the gloom, I assure you—that the ones I was watching must have been the daughters of the Nixonettes who were around when I first started covering Mr. Nixon.

At that time, however, the pompon girls and the drum-and-bugle corps and the tap dancers and the Hollywood master of ceremonies (Ronald Reagan played the part of Art Linkletter in those days) were all part of the scenery, the sideshow.

Mr. Nixon was the main event, and he could be counted on to talk for 20 minutes, 30 minutes, 40 minutes, sometimes, and if a lot of what he said was the "basic speech" we could all recite by heart, there was always some smidgen of news.

But gradually, over the years, the Nixon bit has gotten smaller and smaller, and the show biz elements have enlarged.

Judging from what happened here Friday night, we may see and hear even less of Mr. Nixon in the 1972 campaign. They had about two-dozen Republican bigwigs on hand to praise the President, but they whisked them on and offstage so fast, they just became a blur.

There’s this nightmare I’ve been having since the rally: Mr. Nixon comes on stage to accept re-nomination in San Diego. The Nixonettes surge forward and the President disappears from view under a waving sea of pompons.

Months pass, the pompons wave, the drum-and-bugle corps wail, the tap dancers beat a tattoo and Lainie Kazan holds the high C of her "Johnny One-Note" number. The whole country retreats into the cellar to escape the noise, the color and the din.

Then, on Jan. 20, the pompons part and Richard Milhous Nixon reappears on the Inaugural Stand in Washington. D.C.

Won't someone, please stop the music and bring politics back to the President’s campaign?

(Courtesy of The Washington Post.)

An election—when all la said and done—cornea down to the question of power, and the 1972 election is as much a test of the voters’ attitudes toward political power as it is a referendum on Richard Nixon, George McGovern, Vietnam, corruption or any other issue.

My guess is that the results are going to be ambiguous because the public attitude toward governmental power is equivocal and contradictory.

That’s been the condition in the United States for many years now, as the voters have shown repeatedly that they are both attracted and frightened by the exercise of power by their leaders.

More than any other single factor, that ambivalence explains why for 20 years we have had divided government in Washington and many states, why strong executives at every level of government have been ousted or put on short rein.

In the 1950s, the voters said they liked Ike—but saddled him with a Democratic Congress. In 1960 and 1968, they elected Presidents by the narrowest of margins and denied them effective majorities in the legislative branch.

Only once in the last 20 years have they delivered a clear mandate. In 1964, they ignored Barry Goldwater’s warning that Lyndon Johnson was "so powerful, you plug him in and the whole country lights up," and they gave Johnson both a personal landslide and a compliant congressional majority.

Two years later—when Johnson used that power to pass a massive legislative program, to escalate the Vietnam War and to trigger inflation—they cut back his congressional majority and curbed his authority.

This year the voters seem both to crave strong leadership and to cringe from it.

McGovern has been badly hurt by a reputation for weakness, stemming from the Eagleton incident and the shifts of position on some policy questions. Time after time, voters have told interviewers, “He says one thing one day, and something else the next."

Conversely, it’s become clear that Mr. Nixon substantially strengthened his prospects for reelection by three bold uses of executive power: the wage-price freeze; the diplomatic opening with China; and (hard as it is for some of us critics to admit) the bombing-blockade of North Vietnam.

Those three actions converted him, in the minds of many voters, from the hapless, passive President of his first two years in office into a leader who is, as so many voters say, "trying his best" to shape a satisfactory outcome in an inherently imperfect world.

But even as he is applauded for using his power, Mr. Nixon is feared and distrusted. A significant minority of the voters suspect him of maneuvering the peace talks for his own advantage. Even more clearly, an important bloc of voters now says that Watergate, the wheat deal and the assorted other "scandals" of the Nixon administration fit a pattern of the misuse of power for selfish interests.

It would be incorrect, I think, to view this suspicion as a personal problem of this particular President’s. It has, I’m afraid, become generic—a distrust of government and of government’s essence, the exercise of power.

It shows most clearly in a question Washington Post reporters have been asking voters all year about whether they think the country is better off if the presidency and Congress are controlled by the same party.

Overwhelmingly, the answer is negative. "It’s better," the typical voter says, "if it’s evenly balanced."

This "equilibrium model," to give it a fancy name, is something new in our political thinking; it is the doctrine of checks-and-balances carried to a point at which immobility becomes the most desirable characteristic of government.

This is a step beyond the ticket-splitting that became so pervasive in the 1950s and 1960s. It is a subtle inclination, on the part of many voters, to employ the ballot box to paralyze the government—so as to minimize the risk of harm from governmental actions.

It is this attitude, I think, that will deprive the Republicans of most of the coattail benefits of the likely Nixon victory. In a deeper sense, it is this ambivalence about power that makes it so difficult for any government to move strongly and forcefully to address the nation’s problems in the years ahead.

(Courtesy of The Washington Post.)

The man of the year, says Time magazine, is that strange hybrid, a Nixinger. There are several million magazine covers showing the heads of the President of the United States and national security adviser Henry Kissinger, carved from a single slab of marble, or something, to attest that this is the official choice.

I hate to say it, but I think that even with their double nomination, the editors of Time have blown it. As the Chief Executive or First Fan himself would say, they "did the easy thing" and thereby did a disservice to history. It took no great courage to pick the men who rediscovered China, ended the arms race with Russia, announced peace in Vietnam and, in their spare time, carried Spiro Agnew to victory in 49 of the 50 states.

The gutsy choice would have been to put George Wallace on the cover, and It's a choice that could have been defended. If you want the man who best symbolizes America in the year 1972, Wallace has far better qualifications than Kissinger or Nixon.

The latter two are the preeminent insiders—perhaps the only two Americans who have known every one of the last 366 days what the hell was happening in the matters that affected our fate. But this was the year of the outsider, the year when most Americans felt shut off from access to the things they really wanted to know, to see, to influence or control.

It was the year of the gripe—of saying to hell with the big shots who wage wars, raise taxes, pass laws, hand down court orders, blackout football games and lie to you that they’re doing it for your own good. And George Wallace was the spokesman and symbol of the teed-off, frustrated, fed up American who senses that he's been made an outsider at the party he’s paying for.

"Send Them a Message," Wallace said last winter when he was beginning his campaign, and if Richard Nixon said anything all year that sums up the American mood any better than that, it doesn’t come to mind.

Wallace unleashed the slogan in the Florida primary and his victory there gave the Democrats a shaking from which they never recovered. Ed Muskie and Hubert Humphrey, who embodied what was left of the old tradition of Democratic liberalism, were trounced by a force neither comprehended. Only George McGovern felt the current of national frustration Wallace had tapped and in Wisconsin he immediately reshaped his own faltering campaign to exploit it.

Ironically, Wallace himself was unclear what to do with his opportunity. Like a lot of the frustrated citizens for whom he spoke, he had not bothered to read the fine print on the papers he had been shown. He did not understand the chance he had to pick up delegates in non-primary states under the new party rules. His confidence also wavered at this crucial point, and he delayed bringing his campaign north to Wisconsin—a delay just long enough to give McGovern a crucial victory and himself only a fast-closing second. By the time he grasped the strength of the tide he was riding, Wallace was being stalked by a would-be assassin. Before his major victories came, he had been cut down by gunfire.

As a victim of violence, too, he symbolizes America—a nation crippled by the weapons it cannot seem to stop using on itself or on others. Our national delusion is that release from frustration—be it an unsuccessful international negotiation or a thwarted personal desire—can be found by squeezing the trigger or pressing the bomb-release button. And Wallace is a symbol of the price we pay for that delusion.

Crippled, he left the campaign—left it to McGovern and to Nixon. Of the two, the President proved far more skillful in evoking the fears and playing to the frustrations Wallace had identified—the war, big government, school busing, job quotas, higher taxes, tolerance of politically or personally deviant behavior. And, thanks to Wallace’s absence, Mr. Nixon won a handsome victory, running up his biggest margins, by no coincidence, in the states Wallace had carried as an independent candidate in 1968.

So, it is Nixon who will ride in triumph down Pennsylvania Avenue on Jan. 20, back to the White House, where he and Henry Kissinger will continue to read the cables and make the decisions that shape our lives, telling us only as much as they think it wise for us to know.

And George Wallace will wait there in that wheelchair, knowing where the power is, knowing now that at one moment of history, it might have been within his grasp, had he but realized it. He will sit there, better cared for but with no more hope of complete recovery than the hundreds of thousands of other victims of violence last year in Vietnam, in Ulster, or in the gun-ridden society of America. He will think of what might have been, and, like most of the frustrated citizens for whom he spoke, he will know that the power to shape his own life to his own ends is one he will never regain. He began by saying, "Send them a message," and now even his own legs do not respond.

To me, he is the man of the year.

MIAMI BEACH—Richard M. Nixon has achieved something rather remarkable in the last four years. He has managed to shift the program and policies of the Republican Party vast distances in both the foreign and domestic fields, while reducing the challenge from the GOP’s liberal and conservative wings to a series of feeble and futile squawks.

He has managed this feat by being progressive in his policies and conservative in his politics—which is rather a neat trick even for one as nimble as Mr. Nixon.

The gathering of the Republican tribes here has shown unmistakably where Mr. Nixon stands in relationship to the leadership of his party. In the platform committee, where policy was at issue, the complaints and protests hove come from the conservatives. In the rules committee, where the politics of the 1976 convention makeup have been fought out, the displeasure with the While House has come from the liberal flank.

Except on the busing issue, the Republican progressives have been well-satisfied with the platform decisions of the White House. The only serious challenge to the document came from the Right, when conservatives tried without success to gain at least a mention of that old warhorse, the right-to-work issue, in the remarkably chummy labor plank the Nixonites wrote to woo the union vote.

On the other hand, in the rules fight, the Nixon operatives were encouraging the Southern stale chairmen and the conservatives in their battle with the more progressive industrial state governors for a bigger share of the 1976 convention votes, thus demonstrating again that on political questions. Mr. Nixon will almost always position himself somewhat to the right of center.

The reasons why he has chosen this particular technique of dealing with his party's competing wings ore also becoming clear, I think.

Whatever he may have said in his campaign, a President on taking office discovers he must assemble his program from the ideas of those who have some notion about what government is. The conservatives on the original White House staff and in the Nixon Cabinet essentially failed to meet this test, and the content of the Nixon program was shaped by Daniel Patrick Moynihan, a Democrat, on the domestic side; and Henry Kissinger, a Rockefeller Republican, on the foreign side.

In the end, the conservative challenge to the Nixon policies was left to a lightweight like John Ashbrook, and the President moved ahead with Republican revisionism, unhampered by fear of the critiques from the Right.

Why, then, has he been conservative in his politics? Because he has believed that the liberals in his party were impotent politically, while the Right could always pose a potentially serious threat at the polls.

He knew that while the conservatives would never embrace him as their own, he must find, ways of blunting their potential challenge.

He has done this by constantly cloaking progressive policies in conservative rhetoric—as with the welfare reform plan and the Nixon Doctrine. He has often enlisted conservative figures to manage essentially progressive enterprises—as he did in getting Rep. John Rhodes or Arizona, Barry Goldwater’s congressman, to run this convention’s platform committee.

He has lavished great personal attention on the symbolic leaders of the conservatives, Goldwater, Reagan, John Tower and Strom Thurmond, whose support of Mr. Nixon these days is a source of bitter disappointment to younger ideological conservatives.

Most of all, he has constantly dangled before the conservatives hints of his support In. the coming contest for the control of the party, giving them an option, as it were, on the Republican future.

He has done this by siding with them on the organizational fights, by putting conservatives in control of the party’s money and most of its manpower. And, of course, he has put Spiro Agnew in an advantageous position to claim the 1976 nomination.

Indeed, Agnew shows the Nixon strategy in its essence. The Vice President exercises next to no influence on the policies of the Nixon administration, so far as one can determine, but he exactly symbolizes the conservative side of the President’s politics.

In this manner, Mr. Nixon has co-opted the Republican Left with his programs, and the Republican Right with his politics, to the extent that this convention has become a demonstration of his total political dominance.

(Courtesy of The Washington Post.)

A little quiet, please, while I unleash the Insight of the Day. (Trumpet flourish.)

Richard Nixon is the Milt Pappas of American politics.

That’s it. You got it. Now savor it. For those of you who skip the sports page, it will help to know that Pappas is a journeyman pitcher, now working for my favorite team, the Chicago Cubs.

For those of you who skip the front page, Richard Nixon is President of the United States.

The other day Pappas broke into the news in one of the damndest ways imaginable. He beat the Mets for the 190th victory of his career. And, as the wire service stories noted, he moved to the brink of becoming "the first pitcher in major league history to win 200 games without having a 20-game season."

Remarkable. Remarkable, first, that anyone would know that. Baseball statistics are so far superior to political statistics that it makes me weep for envy. For example, I suspect that John Connally is on the verge of becoming the first Texan in history to feed the President twice at his ranch in the same calendar year without switching parties. But try to find the proof. Records-wise, ours is an underdeveloped field.

But more remarkable than the record keeping is the care and foresight that brought Pappas to the edge of distinction. Imagine young Milton, preparing for his first major league season back in 1957. He is a young man of 18, talented and ambitious. What goal does he set for himself?

To become the strikeout king of the majors? To win more games than any other man in baseball history? No way. Our Milt is a canny one. He knows his abilities, but he also knows his limitations. He’s looked up the records, and he knows those are beyond him. But he’s got his eye on the one record everyone else has overlooked: He’ll win 200 games without ever having a 20-game season.

You think it’s easy? It’s not. It takes tremendous endurance—going out there twice a week, year after year, throwing the ball, losing almost as often as you win, but piling up those victories.

It also takes stern self-discipline in the good years, when you’ve got 14 or 13 wins in August, you've got to be mighty careful not to overreach yourself and pitch so well you win 20 games by October, and blow the whole thing.

Discipline and endurance. Talent and a touch of mediocrity. Failing but not quitting. Those are the qualities that have brought Milt Pappas to his moment of glory—and so they have for Richard Nixon.

Both men have bounced around their leagues. Pappas has pitched for Baltimore, Cincinnati, Atlanta and the Cubs; Nixon has pitched in Washington, California and New York.

Nixon, too, has lost almost as often as he’s won. People remember his losses. They remember that his wins were squeakers, or came when he was on the team with some heavy-hitter like Ike. They don’t think of him as a natural winner.

Nixon, like Pappas, has outlasted most of the guys who were around when, he broke in. And, like Pappas, he’s always shaded his achievements carefully enough so the fans never judged him by the standards they apply to the greats.

This year, the hitters in the National League and the voters across the country, are saying of both men: "He’s better than I remember him being. He ain’t great, but compared to that lefty on the other club."

Pappas, the pitcher nobody fears, is going into the record books, and Nixon, the President few people love, is on the verge of a landslide victory.

You don’t believe it? This year, Milt Pappas, after 15 years in the majors, pitched his first no-hitter and almost had a perfect game. With that for inspiration, Nixon, the 25-year man, should have no trouble carrying 45 states.

It’s that kind of year. Journeymen are triumphant. Pappas gets No. 200, and Nixon wins in a breeze. How about that, sports fans!

(Courtesy of The Washington Post.)

Unless all signs and portents are wrong, today may mark the end of Hubert H. Humphrey’s hopes for the Presidency. The quest began a quarter-century ago, in his own mind, and has been actively pursued for 12 years, but it is hard to see how he can survive the predicted defeats in California and New Jersey.

If a man finds himself beaten by such diverse personalities as John Kennedy, Richard Nixon and George McGovern, maybe the conclusion is that he was never meant to be President. Considering the chronic difficulty Humphrey has had in organizing all his campaigns for the White House, it may be that he was foredoomed to failure by his own shortcomings.

But looking back at the Humphrey career, the fateful moment appears to have come that August afternoon in 1964 when Lyndon Johnson summoned him down from Atlantic City and offered him the Vice Presidential nomination.

Humphrey accepted, of course, just as any Democratic senator (except for Mike Mansfield) would have, had the prize been offered him. It’s forgotten now, but Gene McCarthy and Bob Kennedy were eager to be Johnson’s running mate in that year of Democratic destiny, and George McGovern would have jumped at the chance, too, had the President’s eye chanced to fall on the then obscure freshman senator from South Dakota.

If Johnson had passed over Humphrey and picked, say, the other passenger on the plane from Atlantic City, Tom Dodd, then the history of the last two Presidential campaigns might have been different.

Humphrey then would have been another senator from 1965 to 1968, free to make his own judgments about the Vietnam War and to join McCarthy, Kennedy and McGovern, if he wished, in their gradual shift to a position of vocal criticism of the President’s policies.

Instead, as Vice President, he embraced those policies with the unbounded enthusiasm he brings to any cause in which he is involved. They carried him down to defeat in 1968 and the memory of the 1968 travail dogged his campaign this year.

One can argue, as McCarthy did in 1968, that even as Vice President, Humphrey could have dissented by silence when Johnson attempted to sell the American public on the escalation of the war. But Humphrey has never found a way to be silent or half-hearted about any enterprise on which he embarks.

That enthusiasm betrayed him as Vice President, as it sometimes betrayed him in this campaign—in speeches that exhausted his listeners and rhetoric that promised far more than he could ever fulfill.

Humphrey can be faulted for his excesses, but they are the excesses of a generous spirit, not an angry or embittered heart. His exaggerations are like a lover’s lies—and at 61, Humphrey is still engaged in a reckless love affair with his country and, indeed, all of life.

Even in these last days of adversity, knowing as well as anyone what likely awaits him, his energy and spirit have been irrepressible. Helen Bentley, a San Francisco television interviewer, got him talking the other morning about what he’d like to do if he got a day off.

The answer, in typical Humphrey fashion, was that he’d like to see a baseball game, attend an opera, talk to a prizefighter and a scientist, and watch an actor at work.

"I enjoy life," Humphrey told the stunned interviewer. "It’s a delight. You only live a short time. You ought to enjoy every fleeting moment."

He means it, too.

Humphrey’s political life seems fated to end in disappointment, but it’s still been a remarkable career. He’s left his mark on this land he loves, and made it a better place for millions. Not even Humphrey has found a way to exaggerate his own contributions, from Medicare to civil rights to disarmament to education.

Fortunately, neither his service nor his enthusiasm is ended. He has more energy than most men half his age, and the voters of Minnesota, who long ago accepted Hubert Humphrey for the man he is, with all the faults and all the strengths of his free spirit, have the good sense to keep him working.

(Courtesy of The Washington Post.)

At the Michigan Democratic convention last weekend, a reporter attempting to interview a challenged "Wallace delegate," who was actually the woman leader of her district’s liberal caucus, caught an elbow in the stomach from a burly, bearded McGovern backer who objected to the line of questioning.

Several hundred miles away in Roanoke, Va., the young McGovern backers in charge of a congressional district caucus rammed through a rule—based on an Orwellian interpretation of democracy—requiring the convention delegates in that district to sign their ballots on every vote that came before the caucus.

And up in Minneapolis, that same weekend, the McGovern-dominated liberal coalition overrode warnings from the Democratic governor that they were playing into the Republicans’ hands and pushed through a resolution sanctioning homosexual "marriage."

As word of these and similar incidents in recent weeks has filtered back to Washington, a shudder of apprehension has gone through Democratic ranks. For the first time, there is beginning to be widespread concern that the Miami Beach convention hall may prove to be the disaster for the Democrats that the San Francisco Cow Palace was for the GOP in 1964.

At the Cow Palace, the television cameras showed the most rabid of Goldwater’s delegates—the true believers who could not control their emotions in the hour of their triumph—drowning out opposition speakers with their boos, waving their fists at reporters and shouting obscenities at the Scranton and Rockefeller delegates. What the nation saw doomed Goldwater’s candidacy even before it was launched.

George McGovern, like Barry Goldwater, is a decent, attractive human being, far too experienced in politics ever to sanction hoodlum tactics in a convention hall.

But like Goldwater, his nomination will be achieved—if it happens—by the organized invasion of the delegate-selection process by hundreds of fired-up (some would say fanatic) political amateurs, whose moods and actions McGovern himself may no longer be able to control.

The prospect of this poses more of a clear and present danger to his candidacy against President Nixon than the coolness of many elected Democratic officials or the leaders of organized labor.

In their usual methodical fashion, McGovern’s managers are moving to minimize the danger. Even as he scrounges for the last hundred votes needed to nominate McGovern delegate-hunter Rick Stearns has outlined a "command and control" system for the convention floor.

A member of McGovern’s national political team will be assigned as liaison man to each delegation. He will work side-by-side on the convention floor with the chairman of the McGovern caucus in that state (who will, in many cases, be the delegation chairman). Both of them will be linked by phone or walkie-talkie to the McGovern convention command post, where regional directors will relay advice from McGovern’s top command.

Within each state, the plan is for one McGovern "floor leader" to be designated for each eight or ten delegates—hopefully assuring a steady, unbroken line of communication from the squad level right up to the commanding generals of the McGovern movement.

The planning is a tribute to the McGovern men’s foresight, and an earnest of their desire to keep the convention from turning ugly. But one recalls that Goldwater’s political chief. F. Clifton White, had a similar communications network in the Cow Palace, and it did not stem the hysteria.

Convention halls are political hothouses—where every motion is heightened. Even disciplined pros often lose their perspective in the closed environment of the convention; under pressure, engulfed in rumor, desperate to avert defeat or fired by the prospect of victory, they forget the watching outside world and do things they themselves would consider ridiculous in any other setting.

A convention is a disorienting experience even for professionals, and, as Stearns points out, 90 percent of the Miami Beach delegates will be newcomers to this environment. There will be few old pros, governors or party officials, to impose discipline.

Two planeloads of thoroughly frustrated people flew back from Los Angeles to Washington last week. On one plane was Sen. George McGovern and his campaign staff; on the other, the press corps covering President Nixon.

The two groups are different in makeup and motive but they share a common frustration. Neither one has figured out how to penetrate the tough plastic shield that's been thrown up around the Republican candidate for President.

McGovern is unhappy because he’s been unable to engage his opponent in direct debate on the issues. The press is unhappy because it doesn't have much of a campaign to cover, and worried that it's being manipulated into one-sided coverage.

As one who made the California swing with McGovern and. then retraced the route with Mr. Nixon, it's my impression that few reporters are bleeding for the Democratic nominee. There’s less personal partisanship in the press for either of the 1972 candidates than I've seen in any of the previous presidential campaigns I’ve covered.

But there is a growing worry that the rules of the game on the two campaigns are so dissimilar that the press is not doing the even-handed, probing kind of job the public has a right to expect at election time.

The distance between George McGovern and the reporters covering him is about ten steps on the chartered 727 Jet, and the trail is walked several times each day by the candidate making a point to reporters or reporters seeking his response to their questions. Little is secret and nothing sacred on the McGovern plane.

But there is a wall a mile high between Mr. Nixon and the press. Mr. Nixon travels in isolation—in his private compartment on Air Force One, in his helicopter or his limousine.

His major speeches on the trip—to Republican fund-raising dinners—were watched by reporters from separate rooms, via closed-circuit television. In Los Angeles, it took personal intercession by a White House press aide for a few reporters to gain access to the banquet hall—the same room in the same hotel where reporters had freely interviewed guests at a McGovern fund-raiser the night before.

The only sound television cameras in the room when Mr. Nixon spoke were the closed-circuit cameras controlled by the White House itself. The scenes of the dinner you saw on television—and that most of the reporters saw—were exactly what the White House wanted you to see, and nothing more.

Under these circumstances, the press functions more as a propaganda tool for the President than as an independent reporting group. The difference between a journalist and a propagandist is that a Journalist can make his own observations and ask his own questions.

On the Nixon campaign, unlike the McGovern campaign, there is no candidate to question, and, really, no one authorized to speak for him.

I know of no precedent for this. Between Labor Day and Election Day of 1956, President Eisenhower held five news conferences. In the same period of 1964, the last time an incumbent was involved in a presidential contest, Lyndon B. Johnson had five press conferences and innumerable informal sessions with reporters aboard his plane.

By contrast, Mr. Nixon has held one press conference in the month since his re-nomination, and his press secretary, Ronald Ziegler, says there is a "50/50 chance" he’ll have another before Election Day.

Unlike 1969, when all the Nixon advisors were available daily to reporters covering his campaign (as McGovern aides are now), there was not a single policy or political staff member from the White House, the Republican National Committee or the Committee for, the Re-election of the President aboard the Nixon press plane. When Ziegler mingled with the reporters en route back to Washington, he specified at the beginning of the conversation that any political discussion would be off-the-record.

In every way possible, then, the Nixon entourage seems to be systematically stifling the kind of dialogue that has in the past been thought to be the heart of a presidential campaign.

That is the source of McGovern’s unhappiness, but it’s a problem the press must address—directly, even at the thought of being partisan.

The press was accused—and I think, rightly so—of being derelict in 1968 in not pressing Mr. Nixon to expound his strategy for ending the Vietnam War.

How does the press justify itself this year, if the man who is likely to remain President is allowed to go through the whole campaign without answering questions on his plans for taxes, for wage price controls, for future policy in Vietnam and a dozen other topics?

An election is supposed to be the time a politician—even a President—submits himself to the jury of the American voters. As a lawyer, Richard Nixon knows that if he were as high-handed with a jury as he’s being in in this campaign, he’d risk being cited for contempt of court.

The press of the country ought to be calling Mr. Nixon on this—not for George McGovern’s sake but for the sake of its own tattered reputation and for the public which it presumes to serve.

The editors of the country and the television news chiefs ought to tell Mr. Nixon in plain terms, that before they spend another nickel to send their reporters and camera crews around the country with him, they want a system set up in which journalists can be journalists again, and a President campaigns as a candidate, not a touring emperor.

(Courtesy of The Washington Post.)