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Only too late did the A.B.M.ers realize what the McGovern team was doing. They scrambled to adjust their votes to hit the twilight zone, but lacked the skill and muscle to bring it off. The women's South Carolina challenge lost by 1,555.75 (a majority of the delegates to the convention) to 1,429.05. Thus the anti-McGovernites could not raise their point of order; they had won a battle but lost the war. There was now no way to stop McGovern on California. Said Hart: "It was one of those times when politics is really fun. We played South Carolina like a pipe organ."
Later, Kampelman told TIME'S Neil MacNeil: "We were tempted to juggle the Ohio vote, but it was too risky. South Carolina felt very strongly about it. Governor West felt very strongly. We'd have risked victory on it." Interestingly, the new politicians were much more pragmatic. Although some women, including New York's Bella Abzug, objected angrily to the sacrifice of principle involved in the women's issue, McGovern's men had no qualms about taking the expedient loss. Shirley MacLaine did her best to argue that surely there was no real choice between adding a few women to the South Carolina delegation and nominating McGovern.
McGovern would probably have won anyway; enough delegates had defected to McGovern to give him a startling margin on California even without the parliamentary maneuvering. When the California debate opened just after midnight. California Co-Chairman Willie Brown Jr. shouted: "Give me back my delegation!" Chants of "Give it back! Give it back!" were answered by cries of "No! No! No!" The brief outburst, one of the convention's few emotional displays, was hardly nec essary. It was the last gasp of the stop-McGovern forces. In the final tally, 1,618.28 votes favored giving McGovern back all of his 271 California delegates v. 1,238.22 against. With that, George McGovern's nomination was assured, even though the formal balloting was still two days away.
Vengeance. The McGovern delegates, however, still had unfinished business. At 3 a.m., the convention took up the question of Chicago Mayor Richard Daley's 59-delegate bloc, which had been challenged by insurgent Chicago Alderman William Singer, 31, for supposed violations of the reform rules. McGovern, knowing how badly he would need Daley's support to carry Illinois in November, had been pushing for a compromise that would seat both Daley's and Singer's delegates with i vote for each. But when Daley rejected that, McGovern's delegates were free to wield their newly confirmed power and, it may be, have their vengeance for Chicago, 1968. Daley and his slate were excluded—by 1,486.45 to 1,371.55. Daley was too prescient to give anyone the pleasure of seeing him thrown off the floor; he never came to Miami. The unseating of Daley raised again a fundamental question about the democracy of the party's new guidelines. At what point does the laudable idea of opening the party to women and minorities turn into a rigid and potentially tyrannical quota system? If a delegate slate, even one contrived by an old-line party boss, wins a majority at the