(10 of 10)
Robert Coles, a psychiatrist who has written sympathetically of Middle America, suggests that the electorate as a whole is very much like the individual voter. "In every person," he says, "there are various contradictions and ambiguities. These shift, and in an election it is as if magnets were pulling them one way or the other." Desires for peace or better education or tax justice or income redistribution are balanced against anxieties about change, about losing what one already has.
In Coles' view, the dissatisfaction with the war, inflation, unemployment, the cost of living, political espionage and the like—all these strands could have been seized by a Democratic candidate and woven into a decisive electoral majority. In some ways, Nixon himself made this possible by his dealings with Russia and China, removing in Coles' phrase "the connection between social changes and some sinister foreign force." Coles and many other observers believe that McGovern has been trapped on the left and is in the nearly impossible position of having to move convincingly toward the center. Some other candidates, such as F.D.R. and Robert Kennedy, started in the center and moved progressively left, drawing their constituencies with them.
"There is no section of the country," says Coles, "where complaints and difficulties and a yearning for something better doesn't exist. Most people still want to vote for the Democratic Party, but they are afraid that the party is not what they want it to be, that some odd sector of the party has seized control."
Weary. So for the moment, the Nixonian star is ascendant—not so much because the President has captured and guided the nation's imagination but almost by default. Indeed, there are those who suspect that this election has as much to do with 1976 as 1972: an enormous Nixon victory might enhance the party's post-Nixon chances four years hence.
For this year, neither candidate so far has been much of a national inspiration. In fact, it may be that the American people themselves are far ahead of both Nixon and McGovern—more conservative perhaps than they used to be but weary of simplicities on both sides. Within the two Americas, one common denominator is a sophistication in the people that neither candidate has been respecting very much, and beyond that, there is a desire for one America rather than two—something that neither candidate seems capable of meeting.