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

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Muskie Ahead. Before the election, the Democratic Party was $9.3 million in debt, leaderless and dispirited. Many Democrats wondered how they could put up any real resistance to the unprecedented off-year blitz undertaken by Nixon and Vice President Spiro Agnew. Now the party has a host of new stars that can attract crowds at fund-raising affairs. It has important patronage and organizational springboards in such key statehouses as those in Ohio, Pennsylvania, Florida, Wisconsin and Minnesota. Moreover, all the new Governors and the Democratic legislatures will have a voice in redrawing congressional district lines by 1972, thus influencing national politics for a decade.

Suddenly the Democratic presidential aspirants were looking at the 1972 nomination as an opportunity rather than a sacrifice. Working hardest was Maine Senator Edmund Muskie, whose selection as his party's TV spokesman on election eve, as well as his effective performance in that telecast, put him ahead of the pack. He hired a staff to send telegrams to Democratic candidates throughout the country, even some obscure losers, congratulating them on their campaign efforts.

Styling himself a "harmonizer," Freshman Senator-elect Hubert Humphrey nevertheless conceded that if the nomination were offered, "I'd take it." Re-elected impressively in Massachusetts, Senator Edward Kennedy said that he would serve a full term—but he vowed to oppose Nixon on the war, the economy and minority problems. South Dakota Senator George McGovern is expected to announce his candidacy first, possibly next month, while Indiana's Birch Bayh and Iowa's Harold Hughes are eager for the nomination.

All this optimism was premature. Hinging as it does on countless local issues and personalities, a mid-term election need not be considered a reflection of presidential strength. Yet Nixon, to an unusual degree, had shaped a national Republican strategy in this election, then gone out with Agnew to push it in a most personal and partisan way. Their plan was to exploit what they sensed as a conservative drift in the nation, caused by rising impatience with student unrest, crime, pornography and the bombs and bullets of revolutionaries. But Nixon has often before displayed a dangerous tendency to overdo and overstate what he considers a good thing, and he evidently did so again. The shrill pitch did not work. Democrats found it necessary to me-too the Republicans on the law-and-order issue, and millions of voters evidently did not believe that most Democratic candidates favored violence or rock throwers. Many voters seemed far more concerned about the state of the economy than about vaguely defined "permissivists" and "radic-libs" in government. Rising unemployment was the one issue that Democrats used effectively and sometimes unfairly against the White House.