THE CAMPAIGN: The Confrontation of the Two Americas

(5 of 10)

achievement, with toughness and endurance, assumes finally that almost every American has had the same open field before him as he has had. Classic competitive liberalism too often leaves little room for compassion. His best friends are self-made millionaires. His inner sense of America harbors no place for failure and limited room for mistakes. Work is all. "Because I believe in human dignity," Nixon has said, "I am against a guaranteed annual wage. If we were to underwrite everybody's income, we would be undermining everybody's character." Yet he himself has proposed a guaranteed annual income. He admires strength, both moral and physical, and equates negotiating strength with military power.

Privacy. Nixon calls them "the old values"—parental authority, a stand against permissiveness, law-and-order before civil rights. In the process he has presided over increasing surveillance and broader arrest patterns. Despite his praise for traditional values, the question of privacy has been submerged in the fight against crime and subversion. He too often lacks compassion and equates conformity with conscience. He is apt to ignore basic changes occurring in the U.S. by simply conjuring up an image of national wellbeing, perhaps a sentimentalized vision emanating from the America of his young manhood.

McGovern's America, by contrast, is tinged with Utopia—a land of peace and prosperity. The rich would still be rich, but a lot less so. The poor would be poor no more. The hungry would be fed, the unemployed would have work, crime would be curbed, schools and hospitals built and the drug pushers jailed. There would be no war, but the nation's defenses would remain strong. Aid for Israel, but none for Viet Nam. The environment would be cleansed. Inflation would end.

It is a glowing vision, but is it realistically attainable? And if so, how much would it cost to sustain it? Most of his life, McGovern has been an influencer, a talker, a thinker. He has the visionary sense, but his campaign thus far reflects his distaste for details, for organization—a quality that has disturbed many American voters, even among his own followers.

Each candidate has a resonance to his own America. Within each constituency, voters repeat their candidate's themes and even rhetoric with a precision that is sometimes eerie. A one-word common denominator prevails in the Nixonian America: the sense of "system." The free enterprise system, the law-and-order system, even the "family unit" system—they are the recurring images among Nixon supporters. Their antonym is "chaos," not Utopia. They are apprehensive of the disorders that the late '60s adumbrated to them, the turmoils that they suspect a McGovern accession might bring.

In two weeks spent in interviewing Nixon supporters across the nation, TIME Correspondent Champ Clark found that "Nixonians are not against change. I have yet to meet one who wants the U.S. to stay exactly the way it is. But they have in kindred spirit a sense of orderliness, of tidiness. They are fond of saying that their political stance is 'evolutionary, not revolutionary.' It was in this meaning that Richard Frank, vice president of Schenley Distillers, Inc., rolled his eyes heavenward and summed up his political desires: 'Please don't rain on