A New Majority for Four More Years?

FOUR more years! Four more years!" Shouted at rally after rally and in the convention hall, the Republican slogan was one that Democrats could handily turn into an ironic question: "Four more years?" Yet it neatly symbolized the certainty with which the Republican Party expects Richard Nixon, holding a commanding lead in voter preference over George McGovern, to win reelection. The margin is so great that the Republicans--especially the President--could well have treated their opponent with silence, as though he did not exist as a serious challenger.

But as the Republicans renominated Richard Nixon in a precisely scripted convention and opened their re-election campaign, they paid McGovern the compliment of repeatedly blasting his policies as radical, naive or dangerous. This curious aggressive-defensiveness amid otherwise overwhelming confidence was the week's one surprise--and it suggested that the campaign may yet prove exciting, if not edifying.

Certainly a convention that lacked inherent drama needed some theatrics. The professional actors reading polished lines on cue, the smoothly edited film tributes to Pat and Dick, the youth-led demonstrations timed to the minute, the taped endorsement of a teary Mamie Eisenhower--all provided tidier television fare than had the tedious early-morning roll calls of the Democratic Convention. The tardiest opening gavel was only 15 minutes late; with Missouri's vote, Nixon's renomination came only eight minutes late.

However contrived and unspontaneous most of the time, the convention showed signs of genuine affection for the President, who had good reason to grin and enjoy one of his happier hours in a career of many political vicissitudes. Nixon shared some of the lighter moments with an ebullient Sammy Davis Jr. Davis playfully hugged Nixon at a youth rally, they snapped each other's photos, and Nixon noted that the support of a star like Sammy could not be bought with a dinner at the White House. Also acting it up for the President were John Wayne, James Stewart, Pat Boone and Charlton Heston. Although an incumbent President can readily command a surface loyalty, it was no small achievement for Nixon to hear himself praised from the rostrum in strikingly similar terms by Barry Goldwater and Nelson Rockefeller, Ronald Reagan and Ed Brooke. The smiling faces of such onetime villains as China's Chou En-lai and Russia's Leonid Brezhnev flashed on the convention screen in happy toasts with Nixon, and there was not a hiss in the hall.

Only Vote. The convention convincingly demonstrated that Nixon had effectively silenced most of his critics on the left by co-opting many of their ideas, such as improved relations with Communist countries, arms limitation, a guaranteed income, health insurance --although he has not really pushed the domestic programs hard in the Congress. He has appeased his critics on the right by his highly political treatment of the busing and Supreme Court issues. His flanks skillfully protected, he was in supreme control of his party.

While the only vote against the renomination was cast for California's Paul McCloskey, the convention managers kept him far from any microphone that would broadcast his dissent on Nixon's Viet Nam policies. The platform, carefully crafted in the White House to avoid controversy, was adopted by the committee with little discussion. Read to a bored convention, it was so innocuous that Reagan, presiding at the time, pleaded for attention to "one of the most important parts of the convention"--and confessed later that he had not read the document.

The Doral Hotel, housing the President's political advisers, though neither Nixon nor Vice President Spiro Agnew, was turned into a security fortress. It was closed to the public, and its occupants were told where to find paper shredders and red trash bags for documents they wished to have burned. The one floor fight, over convention rules (see following story), satisfied the President's desire that there ought to be at least one floor fight to provide some sense of an open convention, but Nixon safely refrained from taking sides and thus could not be affected. Moments before Nixon proclaimed that the nation's Viet Nam veterans should be given "the honor and respect they deserve and that they've earned," three such veterans in wheelchairs shouted "Stop the bombing!"--and were summarily escorted from the hall by convention security personnel.

If closed against dissent from within, the convention flung its gates wide open to anyone who wished to join the campaign against McGovern. Apostate Democrats were admitted to the rostrum to confess their past political sins and to make their vows to Nixon. The President used his acceptance speech to "ask everyone listening to me tonight --Democrats, Republicans and independents--to join our new majority, not on the basis of the party label you wear in your lapel but on the basis of what you believe in your hearts."

The speech was honed personally by the President throughout eight days of near solitude (he used twelve yellow pads, one each devoted to such subjects as peace, crime, etc.). The result was commendably free of grandiose statements, but curiously flat--a pastiche of earlier Nixon efforts. In his earnest, final appeal for world peace, he even once again evoked the little Russian girl Tanya, whose family had been killed by the invading Nazis. He had spoken of her in his televised Moscow speech last May, a portion of which had been shown to the convention only the night before. He offered nothing new of substance toward remedying the nation's domestic ills or ending the Viet Nam War. He got one of his loudest cheers with an oft-repeated pledge: "We will never abandon our prisoners of war," even though McGovern has never proposed doing that. Another applauded promise was equally familiar: "I shall continue to appoint judges who share my philosophy that we must strengthen the peace forces as against the criminal forces." He said he hoped to ease the "unfair and heavy burden" of local property taxes, but did not say how.

The speech hit McGovern hard without ever naming him. It did so by either overstating McGovern's already fairly far-out positions or tying him by implication to policies he has not actually advocated. Nixon urged Americans to "reject the policies of those who whine and whimper about our frustrations and call on us to turn inward." He suggested that McGovern was bent on making the U.S. "the second strongest nation in the world" through cuts in the defense budget. He claimed that McGovern welfare reforms would add 82 million people to the welfare rolls--a gross exaggeration. At the same time, Nixon assailed McGovern's guaranteed-income proposals with the claim that "every politician's promise has a price--the American taxpayer pays the bill."

Oddly, it was Spiro Agnew who seemed to be taking the higher rhetorical road. He accepted his uncontested renomination with a speech he wrote himself that was admirably devoid of bombast and his normal partisan narrowness. To be sure, he attacked McGovern's policies as "piecemeal, inconsistent and illusory" and claimed that the Democratic candidate would "retreat into isolationism, abandon our allies, and concentrate wholly on our internal affairs at the great expense of our national security." Yet he also called for an end to policies that would "divide this nation into partisan blocs, each fighting only for its own self-centered and limited ends." He deplored the practice of fastening "group labels on people" and thus turning "American against American." It was a laudable sentiment but ironic coming from a man whose past oratory has tended to do precisely what he now deplores.

The Republican assault on McGovern and the attempt to isolate him from the rest of the Democratic Party continued as Nixon headed westward from Miami Beach on his opening campaign trip. Addressing the annual convention of the American Legion in Chicago, he invoked the names of such Democratic Presidents as Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson as having spoken often "in eloquent terms of the need for a strong national defense." On the other hand, again without naming McGovern, Nixon warned against those who "gamble with the safety of the American people under a false banner of economy." Legionnaires rose, cheering, when he attacked those who try to make "moral heroes of the few hundred who have deserted their country" instead of honoring "the real heroes who have served their country in Viet Nam."

Quiet Talk. Nixon flew on to a high school dedication in Utica, Mich., where he talked about what he had learned from his football coach at Whittier College when he felt like quitting the team. "What is wrong is when you lose, not getting up off that floor and coming back and fighting again," the coach had said. Urged Nixon: "Don't quit, don't ever quit. This country needs the very best that you, the young generation of Americans, can give to it." One way to play the game, he suggested, was to get out and vote. From Utica, Nixon flew on to San Diego and San Clemente.

The visions of a G.O.P. landslide even embrace muted hopes of a Republican takeover of the Congress, although experienced Republicans on Capitol Hill doubt that it will happen. They see some chance to gain the five seats in the Senate needed to control that chamber. But leaders of the House in both parties agree that the Republicans are likely to gain about 20 seats at most. They need 39 to take over. There was, however, quiet talk of a deal between deeply conservative Southern Democrats to switch parties if the House becomes closely contested--and if their seniority on committees is protected. Republicans would willingly strike such a bargain. But past elections belie the presidential coattails theory. Democrats gained only two Senate seats when Johnson swamped Goldwater in 1964; Republicans actually lost congressional strength when Eisenhower crushed Adlai Stevenson in 1956.

The week's events may have moved Richard Nixon closer to enlisting the "new majority," cited so often in Miami Beach, at least in his own re-election cause, although little was done to give the party a broader, more lasting base. The President must successfully isolate McGovern from the mainstream of the challenger's own party (which McGovern has already done to a great extent himself). Nixon also must resist the temptation to assail his opponent emotionally rather than logically. If he can do those things, it is very likely that he will win "four more years." The U.S. electorate may just decide that having done an outstanding job in international affairs during his first term, he deserves a chance to show what he can do domestically in his second.

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