1968 - Mark Kurlansky [213]
George Wallace was the wild card. Would he draw away enough southern voters to deny Nixon states, thus ruining his southern strategy? Or was he, like the old States’ Rights Party, going to draw away traditional southern Democrats still loyal to the old party? Wallace told southern crowds that both Nixon and Humphrey were unfit for office because they supported civil rights legislation, which to cheering crowds he termed “the destruction of the adage that a man’s home is his castle.” Nixon had called Wallace “unfit” for the presidency. Wallace responded by saying that Nixon “is one of those Eastern moneyed boys that looks down his nose at every Southerner and every Alabamian and calls us rednecks, woolhats, peapickers and peckerwoods.” Ironically, Nixon himself always thought he was up against “Eastern moneyed boys” himself.
Out of despair came frivolity. Yetta Brownstein of the Bronx ran as an independent, saying, “I figure we need a Jewish mother in the White House who will take care of things.” There was a large bloc of people whose feelings about the election were best expressed by the candidacy of comedian Pat Paulsen, who said with his sad face and droning voice, “I think I’m a pretty good candidate because first I lied about my intention to run. I’ve been consistently vague on all the issues and I’m continuing to make promises that I’ll be unable to fulfill.” Paulsen deadpanned, “A good many people feel that our present draft laws are unjust. These people are called soldiers. . . .” His campaign began as a routine on The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour, a popular television show. With Tom Smothers as his official campaign manager, Paulsen on the eve of the election was predicted by pollsters to attract millions of write-in votes.
In the last two weeks of the campaign, polls started to show that Nixon was losing that mystical mandate known in political races and baseball series as “momentum.” The fact that Nixon’s numbers were stagnant and Humphrey’s continuing to grow implied a trend that could propel Humphrey.
The campaigns for the House of Representatives were gaining attention, becoming better financed and more contentious than they had been in many years. The reason was that there was a possibility, if Humphrey and Nixon ended up very close in electoral votes, with Wallace taking a few southern states, that no one would have a majority of state electoral votes, in which case the winner would be picked by the House. The voting public did not find this a very satisfying outcome. In fact, a Gallup poll showed that 81 percent of Americans favored dropping the electoral college and having the president elected by popular vote.
But on election day, Wallace was not an important factor. He took five states, denying them to Nixon, and Nixon swept the rest of the South except Texas. While the popular vote was one of the closest in American history—Nixon’s margin of victory was about .7 percent—he had a comfortable margin in the electoral college. The Democrats kept control of both the House and Senate. Only 60 percent of eligible voters bothered to cast votes at all. Two hundred thousand voters wrote in for Pat Paulsen.
The Czechs saw the victory of Nixon, the old-time cold warrior, as a confirmation of U.S. opposition to Soviet occupation. Most Western Europeans worried that the change in the White House would slow down Paris peace talks. Developing nations saw it as a reduction in U.S. aid. Arab states were indifferent because Nixon and Humphrey were equally friendly to Israel.
Shirley Chisholm was elected the first black woman member of the House. Blacks gained seventy offices in the South, including the first black legislators in the twentieth century in Florida