Dispirited band
AMERICA MURRAY KEMPTON
Los Angeles—The polls show Mr Johnson win- ning California. Why then do the senses keep insisting that this isn't going to happen?
For one thing, there is the condition of the Democrats and the condition of the Republi- cans. The Republicans meet to rally, the Demo- crats to debate. The Republicans have a gover- nor, a lieutenant-governor and a State Comp- troller; the fact that, after a year in office, they seem comparative strangers to one another is irrelevant; they are friendly strangers. Governor Reagan has raised $2 million for the party treas- ury; he is the perfect instrument for party unity, since he goes on saying all the things the right enjoys and doing very few of the things the centre fears.
The condition of the Democrats was described by Senator Eugene McCarthy with that detach- ment from his own fortunes which is his endur- ing charm. McCarthy spent five days in Cali- fornia the week before last, trying to stir sup- port for his Democratic primary contest with Mr Johnson. 'I meet them,' McCarthy said afterwards, 'and it's always a little embarrassing. Here I am standing out there holding up the flag and they've got it in their inside pockets.'
'Who is free?,' the Senator wonders. 'The artists are free and they weren't ten years ago. . But. .. the only free men are the ones with money to lend. All the rest of them will say is that they are glad someone is standing up. But they've just built a house or have to think of their law partners. Or there's that invitation to the White House. You put it under plexiglas and then it's like Faust; you can't cash it or burn it or break it. It just sits there.'
A man deserted is not always the best witness to the motives of those who hang back from his company. Still, resigned embarrassment does seem to be the mood of most California Demo- crats these days. A majority of the party's activists have lost all faith in Mr Johnson on Vietnam; they will only argue, if pushed, that his domestic policy deserves support. 'You know,' McCarthy says, 'my wife's a whore, but she's a hell of a cook.'
It is clearly a time to seek excuses. Senator McCarthy is something of an excuse himself; it is easy to avoid the risk of following a man whose perorations urge his audiences 'to join me in this revaluation.' The Senator's campaign style is oddly more a demonstration of honour than of ambition; 'I didn't,' he explains, 'want to end up where Adlai Stevenson did.'
Then there is Senator Kennedy, who, power- ful California Democrats keep saying, may him- self run against Mr Johnson and who thus serves, in his withdrawn silence, as the cause of excuses in others. He looks like being remem- bered from this season as the silken pillow upon which the Democratic rebellion sleeps. He is held back from moving by two calcula- tions, one as dubious as the other is sound: Mr Johnson cannot be denied the nomination and Mr Johnson is unlikely to lose the election. The first proposition cannot be rebutted; any incum- bent President can command the renomination of his party. But the second depends at once on an overestimation of Mr Johnson's skills and an underestimation of his scruples.
It is widely assumed, for example, that the President is a brilliant politician who can mani- pulate the Vietnam war any way he wishes. But by all visible evidence Mr Johnson is a very poor politician indeed; he did after all succeed in two short years in eroding his 1964 majority—the largest ever given a president— to the point where he was unable to carry his party in the mid-term elections. He has shown no ability to manipulate the Vietnam war to his own advantage; it has, in fact, divided his party and thoroughly depressed his country.
In a country where the peace party always wins, Mr Johnson has got himself identified as a hawk by a higher percentage of the last Gallup poll sample than any other possible candidate. That can hardly be what he wanted, and it will be an image difficult to soften, especially when you grant that Mr Johnson's posture in Vietnam seems plainly dictated not by calculation of his own political advantage but rather by his con- ception of the national necessities.
He has been led to a place from which most suggestions for rescuing himself and the country look dangerous if not immoral. To him the world has not changed since President Truman's day; and, as time goes on he falls back more and more on Mr Truman's advisers. The war, by all the signs, is sacred, and to tamper with it for electoral purposes would be profane.
It is curious that a man so inflexible in state- craft should still be thought of as daring and sinuous in politics. And yet Mr Johnson, against all the evidence that he is not smart enough to control events in Vietnam, goes on being uni- versally regarded as smart enough to manipulate his own election. He may be elected, but the result will hardly be his doing. A man cannot be much of a politician when he enters an election year with the public unable to think of him except as a politician.
Mr Johnson's party, in every large state, is divided and depressed. There is little chance that he can reinvigorate it; perhaps Mr Nixon, as an opponent, could : he seldom makes a mis- take in another Republican's cause, or avoids one in his own. But, the old Mr Nixon aside, there is nothing visible that could unite the Democrats or divide the Republicans. The polls rise and fall; but the morale of the Democrats • is not improved, and the unity of the Republi- cans is not diminished. You feel that it will be a very close election. Such affairs, most often, belong to the party which thinks itself worthy to govern.
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