After the Landslide: Nixon's Mandate

THE rumble of the landslide was heard early. Even as the polls were closing down in the East, the first projections --68% for the President in Tennessee, 61% in Kentucky--began to delineate the proportions of Richard Nixon's political and personal triumph. By the end of the comparatively brief Election Night a few hours later, the President had all but 17 of the nation's 538 electoral votes, taking 49 states with 60.7% of the vote, v. 37.7% for George Mc-Govern. It was the greatest popular vote for a President in the nation's history (see box, opposite).

In the predawn speech with which he accepted the Democratic nomination last July, George McGovern quoted from a Woody Guthrie song: "This land is your land./This land is my land./ From California to the New York island." The words might come back to him now with a bitter ring. The land, "from the redwood forest to the Gulfstream waters," pretty much belonged to Richard Nixon. Hawaii, which had never gone Republican, wound up in the President's column. For the first time in a hundred years, Arkansas went

Republican. The G.O.P. took Pennsylvania for the first time since 1956. Only Massachusetts and the District of Columbia saved McGovern from the humiliation of suffering the first electoral shutout in modern American history.

It was a stunning culmination of a strange political year. The Republicans might claim a massive mandate from the people, the endorsement of a "new Republican majority" in the nation, but it was not exactly that. With widespread ticket splitting, for example, the G.O.P. fell far short of its goal of gaining control of Congress. In the House, the Republicans picked up only 12 seats. In the Senate, where they needed five to claim a majority, the G.O.P. lost two seats. The Democrats made a net gain of one governorship.

Something more complicated was occurring than the presidential land- slide indicated. In one sense, America had clearly swung toward conservatism and Nixon may take the vote as an essentially conservative mandate. According to Political Analyst Daniel Yankelovich, commissioned by TIME to conduct in-depth surveys of the American voters' moods, some 40% of Americans now see themselves as "conservative," and they are divided about equally between the Democrats and Republicans. Last year at this time, only a quarter described themselves thus, while the rest saw themselves as either middle-of-the-roaders (about half) or liberals (about one-quarter). But this does not mean, as Yankelovich sees it, that America has shifted toward an oldfashioned, doctrinaire conservatism. The conservative trend was emotional: not, by any means, against all change, but against change seen as too rash, too irresponsible. Race was a hidden but related issue; many voters associated the economic pinch not with the war or massive defense spending but with welfare, with social programs that they felt were excessive in their concern for blacks and other minorities. Nixon played on this with his continued attacks on the "welfare ethic," which in a sense was to the '72 drive what "law-and-order" was to the '68 campaign. The nation's mood coming out of the '60s was predominantly one of truculent complacency, rediscovered material comfort, a weariness with those who criticized the U.S., a continued fondness for the old values and much of the old politics. Last spring and summer, with the rise of the McGovern movement, some journalists and politicians believed that somehow the center had fallen out of American politics, that a new and crucial mood of alienation had taken hold far beyond the young and the minorities. But as the election proved, the center remains very much alive.

Confidence. It may be that Nixon would have won no matter whom the Democrats had nominated. Last May, well before the Democratic Convention, the President was riding a 61% vote of confidence in a Gallup poll --and the figure virtually matched his Election Day mandate. No incumbent President since Hoover, guillotined by the Depression, has ever been defeated. Moreover, Yankelovich believes that the critical moment of the 1972 campaign occurred when the Russians decided to go ahead with the Moscow summit conference even after the President had announced the mining of Haiphong harbor and escalated the bombing. Many Americans then concluded that the danger from Viet Nam was over. If the as yet unfulfilled promise of an imminent peace settlement was beginning to raise doubts in the electorate in the last days of the campaign, that anxiety was still too vague and inchoate to make any difference for McGovern.

Still, almost any other big-league Democrat-- Hubert Humphrey or Edmund Muskie or Edward Kennedy --would probably have come closer than McGovern. For against all earlier theories that the famously unloved President might be beaten in a personality contest, it was McGovern himself who became the issue of 1972. Not Nixon, or the economy, or Watergate and ITT or any other political "dirty tricks" that swirled malodorously on the fringes of the campaign. If, as Henry Adams said, "man as a force must be measured by motion from a fixed point," McGovern had come a very long and forceful way in the 22 months since he began his once quixotic crusade. But after his primary triumphs, his masterfully engineered victory in Miami Beach, the shadows of confusion and mistrust descended. He never succeeded in shaking his image of indecisive radicalism. Many voters obviously cast their ballots not primarily because they admired Nixon but because they feared McGovern. This was perhaps reflected in the turnout: only 56% of the potential electorate, the lowest percentage since 1948. As the inevitable seemed to close in, the South Dakota preacher's son rose up with brittle, moralizing sermons and an almost Manichaean message of light against darkness. He seemed, at last, to be the wrong candidate at the wrong time, in part the invention of liberal chic, a man who seemed disastrously out of his political league.

Always the McGovernites cherished a forlorn hope that they could somehow draw the President out into open combat where, they believed, the abrasive old Nixon would betray himself. But given the reassurance of the polls, given his sense of being in tune with the national mood, the President had no reason to climb down from his posture of statesmanship. Nixon's personal appearances amounted to the most insubstantial noncampaign of modern times--except for F.D.R.'s third and fourth campaigns--a ritual of token radio addresses, a scattering of actual campaign trips. His highly effective re-election staff, his ubiquitous surrogates, carried the play.

By 10:40 on Election Night, after watching the returns in a suite at a Holiday Inn, McGovern, his wife Eleanor and four daughters were driven to the Sioux Falls Coliseum. The disconsolate crowd aroused itself for some last choruses of "We want George." Smiling and self-possessed, McGovern delivered a gracious concession. Said he in a telegram to the President: "I hope that in the next four years you will lead us to a time of peace abroad and justice at home. You have my full support in such efforts."

Minutes later, speaking from the Oval Office, Nixon reflected on his triumph. "We are united Americans," he declared. "North, East, West and South..." It was just ten years to the day that he had stalked angrily out of a Los Angeles press conference after his defeat in the California gubernatorial race, telling reporters, "You won't have Richard Nixon to kick around any more." In Henry Adams' terms, Nixon had come very far indeed; and Election Night of 1972, the end of his last campaign after 26 years in politics, was his sweetest victory.

Driving to Washington's Shoreham Hotel, he found the ballroom awash with the faithful whose cheers of "Four more years" blended with the band's Hail to the Chief. Looking as relaxed as he ever has on a public occasion, Nixon observed contentedly: "I've never known a national election when I could go to bed earlier."

Anomaly. The question of a mandate will persist. Will the election of 1972 be remembered as an extravagant anomaly, an essentially reluctant landslide? McGovern, who had profoundly misread the temper of the American people, seized what is still the majority party and drove millions of Democrats, many of them unwillingly, to Nixon. But many are uneasy there as well, and it is not likely that they will find a permanent home there. Thus Nixon's mandate is indeed major, but, like all democratic mandates, conditional. He has temporarily taken the center away from the Democrats, and it remains to be seen how long he can hold it: after the Viet Nam War, the test should be those bread-and-butter, pragmatic issues that the post-McGovern Democrats will undoubtedly try to reassert. In a curious way the President may find that the very fact of his landslide may make Americans doubly watchful and critical of his performance in the next four years--something that should be reinforced by the Democratic Congress. It is, for Nixon, an only slightly mitigated triumph and a momentous opportunity.

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