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> Michael O'Neil, 43, emigrated from Ireland 20 years ago, now works as a carpenter in Manhattan's Rockefeller Center. He voted for John Kennedy in 1960, but this year is going for Nixon. "This ultraliberal bit is just too much," he says. "You know, promising people the sun and the moon when you know you can't give it to them. My nephew lost his life in Viet Nam. He believed in being over there, in living up to the responsibility of large countries to help little ones. It's like living in the neighborhood around here in Flushing. When a neighbor has trouble, you help out where you can."
> Sanford Fray, 58, a black optometrist in Harlem, disputes the Democrats' complete hold on black Americans. "Our country needs a strong President if we are to survive," he says, explaining why he favors Nixon. "There is no doubt in my mind that McGovern will get a lot of votes in Harlem, it being a heavy welfare area. But America didn't become great by the inhabitants sitting down and stretching their hands out to the Federal Government. You know, I can't get an errand boy. It's more profitable to be on welfare."
If in Nixon's America the language tends to be angular and mechanical, to speak of systems and order, in McGovern's nation it is a more humanistic vocabulary of "decency," "compassion" and "integrity." The idea of "a restoration of faith in government" recurs, a vaguely spiritual impulse focusing on confidence and trust. If Nixonians talk of what is "right with the country," McGovernites almost by definition are impelled by a sense of what is wrong with it and what could be better. They express a sense of the U.S. gone awry, of government wrested from the people to serve unholy ends—a war the people did not want, or corporate privilege.
In two weeks of interviews in McGovern's America, TIME'S Gregory Wierzynski found that the operative word is almost always "tone"—to change the tone of government, of the country. A young McGovern pollster, Pat Caddell, explained his feelings: "It is more a question of moral leadership than of program. It is the goal of reconciliation and salvation, of the spirit he gives the country more than the bills he proposes or programs he initiates." Yet if McGovern's America is a reflection of his personality, the man himself evokes none of the adulation that characterized, say, the John and Robert Kennedy campaigns, or even the Eugene McCarthy campaign. Even among his own faithful, he comes across as a cool and somewhat distant figure, perhaps a touch pedestrian. No waves of shrieking teen-agers engulf him; his cuff links are always in place when he emerges from a crowd.
> David Benway, 37, of Excelsior, Minn., a salesman for a mail-order printing house, voted for Barry Goldwater in 1964. But in 1968, he explains, "I was in Chicago during the Democratic Convention. I took three days off and wandered around the riot zones and listened to McCarthy. I became very despondent about the machine, the whole state of affairs. I started listening to the kids and to McCarthy,