Republicans: Nixon's Dream

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Common Guru. Nixon's New Hampshire weekend was a preview of the tactics he will use vis-a-vis Johnson. He attacked the implementation of the Administration's Viet Nam policy, but not its broad goals. He promised to spell out later his own "ways and means" of bringing the war "to a quicker conclusion." In Concord, where Nixon gave his first major speech of the campaign, he held L.B.J. to account not only for failure to end the war, but for crime, racial tensions and economic problems as well. "I don't think America can afford four more years of Lyndon Johnson in the White House," he said.

Both in repartee and rhetoric, Nixon's pitch to New Hampshiremen was generally more incisive than Romney's cloudy oratory, but occasionally it seemed that they had a common guru. "The real crisis of America today," Nixon declared at one point, "is a crisis of the spirit. What America needs most today is what it once had, but has lost: the lift of a driving dream." Richard Nixon's personal dream is driving him from a $200,000-a-year New York law practice into what he referred to last week as "the snows of New Hampshire and Wisconsin, the roses of Portland, and what have you." How long the dream will give him any lift is now up to the voters.

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