Muskie: The Democrats7 New Underdog

With the Florida defeat behind, Maine's Senator Edmund Muskie flew over the flat, snow-covered fields of Illinois last week and told TIME Correspondent Dean Fischer how that jarring loss has affected his mood as he approaches this week's primary in Illinois:

For two years I felt the pressure of being the front runner, worried about stumbling or taking a fatal step. There were terrible pressures and tensions. Now we've had a major setback, but it hasn't been fatal. It's like a boil has been lanced. I feel a sense of relief and relaxation. I'm not worried any longer about making a mistake. I don't have to try to carefully thread the needle. When you're not trying to do that, you can do your best. It's the only way to win. I've always done better as an underdog. I'm not sure I'm an underdog now, but I know I've got an uphill fight.

"None of us believed we would do as badly in Florida as we did. Neither did we expect George Wallace to do as well as he did. He emerged as a force to be reckoned with. But it also gives us an issue: all the things he stands for --they're the real issues. In that sense, it gives us a cutting edge that will be very useful. Nobody else won in Florida. If we'd spent as much time in Florida as Hubert did, we would have done as well. We could have played the numbers game.

"I still don't know what to do about the problem of spreading ourselves so thin. We have six primaries coming up in six weeks. All of them are key, and we're going to give them all equal treatment. What do you do? You can't ignore them, yet we're spread so damned thin. I suppose if we had it to do over again we might not have gone into Florida.

"We haven't been specific enough. We haven't been sharp, clear, simple and hard-hitting. Take the radio spots. What I need is my voice speaking directly, crisply, precisely. My own preference for television is headon, me talking. To hell with the production business. Now the quality of the campaign has emerged in a clear-cut way. Before it was fuzzy. Now there's a feeling of relief that the fight is out in the open. There's a nice, clean feeling of being in a fight. In New Hampshire, the percentage game deprived us of any feeling of victory. We came out of it with nothing in terms of morale. But after Florida, strangely enough, we feel more life.

"There was a feeling of depression for a couple of hours after the vote started coming in in Florida. I felt we had to review a fundamental decision: whether to stay in or get out. Some of my staff was there. We had it out. I asked if this was the end of the world, a disaster. I meant what I said, but I also was playing devil's advocate. None of them had any disposition to quit. But they weren't really sure what I'd say on television until I got up to say it. The next day I still couldn't get unwound. I played the worst golf of my life."

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