Alternate Democratic Visions

WISCONSIN, 54 ... Massachusetts, 102 ... Nebraska, 18 ... Oregon, 34 ... New Jersey, 71 ... California, 271 ... Last week, in the final phase of the spring primary season, George McGovern's sleek and improbable juggernaut rolled through New York. As the votes were counted, McGovern stood amid his euphoric supporters in Manhattan's Biltmore Hotel, his thin hair flecked with confetti, his tanned face creased with a wide, white grin. "SOUTH DAKOTA wow," proclaimed one cardboard sign. In his flat, prairie tones, McGovern said calmly; "I'm convinced we will now win the nomination in Miami Beach."

So it seemed. With his sixth straight primary victory, McGovern had acquired 226 of the 278 New York delegates. The spring's relentless arithmetic had now pushed his delegate total over 1,300, putting him fewer than 200 votes from the 1,509 he will need for a first-ballot victory at the Democratic Convention. By this week, McGovern's men claimed, he would have raised the total to just over 1,400--including pledges he expected to pick up from uncommitted delegates in half a dozen states. McGovern was also hoping to pry loose some 40 to 50 black delegates, even though they were reluctant for the moment to desert Congresswoman Shirley Chisholm before she had a chance at least to be nominated. If McGovern "nickeled and dimed" his way to Miami Beach, picking up delegates anxious to join a winner's bandwagon, he could turn the convention balloting into a mere ratification ceremony.

Hints. The entire McGovern phenomenon--his progress from near-obscurity to something like a fait accompli--has left the Democratic Party in a state bordering on stupefaction. Only now, perhaps too late, are the party's regulars beginning to shake off their astonishment and think of ways to avert what many of them regard as the disaster of a McGovern candidacy. But thus far no one has produced a candidate, an organization or a plausible scenario to stop McGovern.

After dropping some hints that he might be available, Edward Kennedy last week issued a Shermanesque statement (see following story). Edmund Muskie remained in the race, hoping dimly that if McGovern fetched up short of a first-ballot victory, the convention might deadlock and turn to him. Hubert Humphrey, behaving with all the scrambling ebullience of a fresh contender, says he remains convinced that in the end organized labor and the party's regular leaders will reject McGovern and leave him 100-150 votes short of a first-ballot nomination. Humphrey says he expects to control 672 first-ballot votes out of the total of 1,700 non-McGovern delegates, thinks that by the third ballot he can pick up enough support from delegates pledged to Muskie, George Wallace, Henry Jackson, Wilbur Mills and others to take the nomination. At the moment, says Humphrey, "my chances are 1 in 4."

The key to Humphrey's scenario is a challenge to the California delegation. Under that state's winner-take-all primary rules, the delegation must give all its 271 votes to McGovern, who won the primary with 44% of the vote. Humphrey and others are arguing that this unit rule violates the spirit of the party's reform, denying representation, for example, to the 39% of the Democrats who voted for Humphrey. Last week a California federal district court judge rejected a legal challenge of the unit rule, but Humphrey plans to take the case to the convention floor, where he may have the support of other candidates who see the challenge as the best hope to stop McGovern. In the unlikely event that the maneuver should succeed, Humphrey would pick up about 110 California delegates out of McGovern's total. Then, reasons Humphrey, if the non-McGovern delegates hold fast, the convention might turn around.

It is a somewhat wistful projection. Indeed, there are many Democrats neutral or even unsympathetic toward McGovern who believe that if the party denied the nomination to a man who had legally amassed 1,300 or more delegates through the primaries and caucuses, then the party would be in ruins, the nomination scarcely worth having. Perhaps naturally, Humphrey dismisses that idea: "The party is weary of temper tantrums of juveniles who, if they don't get their way, are going to bolt." But Indiana's Senator Birch Bayh, himself an early presidential contender, shares a foreboding that a convention defeat for McGovern would mean a disastrous fracturing of the Democratic Party--"It'd make 1968 look like Little League ball compared to the Baltimore Orioles."

But the McGovern candidacy has already split the Democrats so badly that they are now in some ways two different parties--the McGovernites and the regulars. The McGovern forces --the young, the suburbanites, the intellectuals, an admixture of some blacks and blue-collar workers--are parvenus to the old party, a new political wave bred in complicated ways by Viet Nam, the assassinations, all the dislocations of the '60s. The others--labor, organization Democrats like Chicago Mayor Richard Daley, elected politicians --tend to have older and firmer roots in the party's traditional structure.

The McGovernites, superbly organized under the new party rules, have swept to control in state after state, leaving the regular party workers stunned and sometimes apoplectic. In a sense, the McGovernites are, abruptly, the party's establishment now, and some of them, more intransigent and radical than their candidate, have grown abrasive in dealing with the regulars. At Minnesota's Democratic Farmer-Labor Party convention, McGovern zealots pushed through platform planks calling for legalized marijuana, unconditional amnesty and homosexual marriage. Idaho Democrats suddenly found their platform calling for abortion, abolition of the death penalty, amnesty and withdrawal from Viet Nam within 90 days.

Inventory. In most sections of the country, a bleak and occasionally despairing mood has settled over party regulars contemplating a McGovern nomination. Their disconsolate argument is that McGovern, besides losing the presidency to Richard Nixon in November, may drag other Democrats down to defeat with him, possibly costing the party control of state legislatures, courthouses, the U.S. Senate and even the House.

Most Democrats agree that McGovern will have to write off the South, so bitter is the sentiment against him there. But nowhere are the party's regulars sanguine about the prospects for November if McGovern runs. A prominent Jewish fund-raiser predicts that "most of my friends would vote for Nixon and give their money to Nixon." Although McGovern was at pains in New York to proclaim himself a firm supporter of Israel, some Jews still mistrust him; some also feel that McGovern's political aura is too radical. San Francisco's Mayor Joseph Alioto, a Humphrey supporter, fears that the Italian community, finding McGovern "too permissive," would drift into the Republican column. Says an Illinois delegate: "McGovern has to get in tune with the realities of the middle class. If he doesn't, he's headed for disaster."

A leading Democrat took this unhappy inventory last week: No one can block McGovern's nomination, and if McGovern is nominated, he cannot win in November. His only chance would be to abandon the South and Border states, shift his positions to regain the moderate, middle-ground Democrats and hope somehow for a sweep through the Eastern industrial states--Massachusetts, Connecticut, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania--plus Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, Minnesota, Wisconsin and California.

One of the unhappiest Democrats these days is Lyndon Johnson, who sits on his Texas ranch recovering from his heart attack, seething in frustration at the turn his party has taken, and perhaps feeling a bit like King Lear. He would love to attend the convention, but refused Democratic National Committee Chairman Lawrence O'Brien's personal invitation. Johnson knows that his presence there would only open the old party wounds, reminding everyone that he represented what McGovern wants to repudiate. "Lyndon just doesn't carry any weight in the party," says a longtime political associate, "and he knows it. It's a miserable fate for a man who only four years ago was President of the U.S., but it is a fact nevertheless."

Part of the professionals' disgruntlement may, of course, be only temporary. Observes Nelson Rising, a young Los Angeles attorney and McGovern supporter: "It's natural when power is shifting hands that there is going to be some distress and disenchantment." The realities of power may reconcile many. McGovern's primary triumphs were not merely legerdemain but solid electoral victories as well. Last week, for the first time, a Gallup poll showed McGovern as the first presidential choice among rank-and-file Democrats--with 46% v. 43% for Humphrey. Where the pros fear a Nixon landslide, McGovern's legions are planning a massive youth registration drive, aimed at signing up some 18 million of the 25 million newly enfranchised young. That drive, if pursued with the same efficiency as McGovern's primary campaign, might offset the anticipated defections to Nixon. Connecticut Senator Abraham Ribicoff describes McGovern's organization as already "better than any of the Kennedys ever had."

Virtuous. Nor will McGovern necessarily be perceived as the radical that his image and some of his own supporters have made him seem. Says one Democratic Senator: "Some of the pros are worried about losing the old American Virtue vote. But after all, he's the son of a Methodist minister, a decorated bomber pilot from as middle American a state as South Dakota. I can't see why that fellow can't be a pretty virtuous soul." Adds Illinois Senator Adlai Stevenson III: "The contest could just become a contest of character, and to many Richard Nixon is a caricature of a politician."

With the primaries behind him, McGovern last week was laying plans to try to calm his party, to reassure those who are trumpeting disaster. It will be an intricate job, for McGovern must accommodate himself to the rest of the party without abusing his own zealous followers. For the moment, McGovern left the delegate-hunting to his aides and drove to his rambling white frame farmhouse on Maryland's Eastern Shore. There, after more than a year on the campaign, he relaxed with his wife Eleanor and his house guests, Actress Julie Christie and Actor Warren Beatty, walking on the beach by Chesapeake Bay in the rainy aftermath of tropical storm Agnes, playing records and reading The Brothers Karamazov.

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