"Winning Isn't Everything. It Is the Only Thing."

Winning isn't everything. It is the only thing.

—The late Vince Lombard!,

often quoted by Richard Nixon

IN politics, as in history, the past is prologue. On the morning after the midterm election, the party professionals —the men whose prime concern is how to fashion a presidential victory in 1972 rather than how to put the best public face on the instant returns—had no illusions about the outcome. An exuberant Democratic National Chairman Larry O'Brien declared: "We're back in business." Understandably reticent about being identified, an official of the Republican National Committee was bitter and angry. Said he: "I have never seen so much money, time and energy misspent in all my time in politics."

Despite White House claims that Republicans had scored "a tremendous success," G.O.P. defeats lay all about. Democratic leaders brandished numerous trophies of their victory. They had increased their control of the House of Representatives by nine votes. They had wrested at least twelve states out of the hands of Republican Governors while yielding only two, in the process turning back strong Republican challenges in the South and sealing the Midwest, the traditional Republican heartland. They had captured legislative chambers in at least eight states, while Republicans had lost ground in another 29. Only in the U.S. Senate could Republicans claim a gain—three seats at best, two if the undecided Indiana race goes against them. Yet even that gain was diminished by G.O.P. early assertions that the party's goal was nothing less than seven seats and the takeover of the Senate.

Vulnerable Retinue. Publicly, however, Richard Nixon maintained a pose of pleasure at the results (see box, following page). He certainly could take satisfaction in the defeat of liberal Democratic Senators Albert Gore in Tennessee and Joseph Tydings in Maryland, and the election of Republicans Robert Taft Jr. in Ohio and Lowell Weicker Jr. in Connecticut. Most spectacularly, Nixon had read New York's liberal Republican Charles Goodell out of the G.O.P. and helped conservatism triumph in the person of James Buckley. Republican Governors Nelson Rockefeller and Ronald Reagan had won handily in the nation's two largest states.

Yet the only basis for the Republicans' claims of overall success in the election was a negative one: they had held their losses below what a President's party normally loses in an off-year election. That historical pattern of mid-term defeats does exist, but it usually results after a President has won his own office so strongly two years previously that he has brought in marginal candidates; these then become vulnerable when they run on their own. Nixon had no such vulnerable retinue: he was the first incoming President since Zachary Taylor in 1848 to fail to bring with him a majority in either chamber.