William F. Buckley Jr.

Mood Over

Miami Lasts

+

2015

NEW YORK-It is a very good feeling, coming home. The mood in Miami, at the McGovern convention, was elated. These are the happy people, and it is obvious why. Jimmy the

Greek, who is the actuarial Delphos in America, was brought down and interviewed on network teevee, and he said that he had put the odds against George McGovern's nomination, as recently as last December, at 50-1.

เ

BUCKLEY

Now McGovern is nominated, and Jimmy the Greek shifts gears and puts the odds against McGovern's election at 4-1. Jimmy has travelled a long distance, and the McGovernites at Miami, a harmonic arrangement of kids, intellectuals and ethnics, are as confident as the early Christians. Chiliasm is in the air, and He is George McGovern, whose incarnation will be affected by the voters in November. Then, to quote from the peroration in McGovern's acceptance speech, America will have "come home."

***

I DO NOT KNOW whether McGovern will be elected president. I do know that the McGovern convention was an ideological joyride. And no matter what happens in November-even if Richard Nixon wins again, this time by a landslide the moment of rapture will not turn to bitterness. McGovern, in an incauticus public flirtation with megalomania, spoke of his nomination as a "sweet harvest."

Thus it will remain in the memory, win or lose. However, the legions intend to win. They hope to reify McGovern's dream. They are the political alchemists, who will transform hatred into love, poverty into plenty, the Soviet Union into Switzerland.

One finds oneself hoping, less that Nixon will win because it is important for the safety of the Republic that he should do so, than that he should win in order to spare the young McGovernites a direct experience with power.

WHEN JOHN LINDSAY made his viċtory speech, back in 1965, he told his followers that he would transform New York into the empire city, and he might as well have shot them all with a double jolt of morphine. so transported were they by the vision of it all. Now, seven years later. the cameras did not trouble to focus on John Lindsay, sitting there unnoticed in the shadows that closed down at that ragtag end of his boulevard of broken dreams. Eugene McCarthy, the bard of spiritual restoration only four years ago, came into Miami unnoticed except by those whose practice it is to notice the unnoticed. So it will be, not necessarily for McGovern himself-but for McGovern's dreams, surely; ineluctably. It is necessarily so for anyone who seeks to do what only God can do.

Speaking of which. the rhetoric of the last hours of the convention was exalted beyond even conventional idealism. Sen. Edward M. Kennedy said he had been "humbled" by the invitation to run for vice president. If that is true, surely it will prove to be the most significant achievement of the McGovern convention.

Later, Sen. Kennedy addressed the convention and said that it had returned to the ideal of "John Kennedy, who said ask not what the country can do for you. but what you can do for your country." A breathtaking announcement. uttered before a convention that sometimes seemed to be saying that the most you can do for your country is evade the draft, smoke pot. abort your babies. have a homosexual affair, and receive in return for nothing at all, $1.000 a year from your fellow citizens.

SEN. THOMAS F. EAGLETON emerged as testimony to Sen. McGovern's genius for discovering what nobody else had discovered. and he quickly. and amusingly, recounted the single trauma of his adult life, namely that, having mislaid his credentials upon presenting himself to the Senate after resigning his state job, he found himself. for a period of 16 minutes during his adult life-off the public payroll

If McGovernism triumphs, nobody will ever be off the public payroll. not even for a dreadful, reactionary 16 minutes. Notunless the people's tribunal should happen to toll the dread words: "The great state of Idaho. home of the greatest potatoes in the peace-loving world, casts its 22 votes for taking John Doe off the public payroll." Cheers? When it happens. it will be John Doe vs. the McGovern Convention.

Washington Star Syndicate