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Support. One difficult problem in the heavily Jewish district was persuading voters that McGovern was not, as rumored, opposed to aid for Israel. When the votes were counted, the McGovern slate had swept the district, Elstein running third with 23,591 votes. The top candidate of Brooklyn Democratic Leader Meade Esposito received only 11,890.
For all the McGovern delegates' reputation for intransigence, Elstein is no ideologue. "We want to win in November," he says. "All of our effort becomes useless if Nixon wins, so we've got to go to all possible sources of support—the labor unions, the regular organization." But he adds: "The thing that really gets us is that when we were elected, the regulars all over the country say they should get to go to Miami because they've served the party all these years. That's the problem. They haven't served the party. They spend all their energies fighting us."
Like many McGovern workers, Elstein got into the campaign as a means not only of expressing himself against the war but also in hopes of revitalizing the political process. "Everything is rotting away, and we've got to do something about it," he says. "You have 200 million people in this country and an incredible sense among them that they don't really count, that they don't have any influence."
Service. Elstein was born in 1948 —the year that Harry Truman, amid predictions of Democratic ruin, defeated Thomas E. Dewey. He hopes there will be parallels this year. The son of a retired high school history and economics teacher, Ken grew up politically aware, listening to dinner-table conversation in his parents' two-family house in the Sheepshead Bay section of Brooklyn. He played stickball, batted an even .000 (no hits in 14 at-bats) in his first year in the Little League. In 1968 he graduated from Harpur College, part of the State University of New York at Binghamton, where he majored in mathematics. Partly to avoid the draft, he decided to become a teacher, working as a trainee in an all-black school in Bedford-Stuyvesant. Today he is on a leave of absence to work on his Ph.D., writing a doctoral thesis on algebraic topology, dealing with the property of geometric figures that, like rubber bands, do not change under bending or stretching. "What good is topology?" he says. "It's a pure field of learning. What good is Beethoven?"
His interest in politics is entirely practical. Recalling that his forebears emigrated from Poland, Elstein observes, "When they came in from Ellis Island, they needed jobs and homes. Often the first person to help them was the local Democratic politician. The party provided a bridge between the ordinary citizen and his government. But as time went by, the Democratic organization grew remote." In this analysis, the practitioners of the new politics are arguing in effect that the old politics really is not old enough, having lost the traditional function of service to people. Elstein believes that would change with McGovern.
Elstein's story is duplicated, with variations, in hundreds of other McGovern delegates and workers: