Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72

A lot of people bought this – particularly the ‘youth leader’ types who saw themselves playing key roles in a high-powered, issue-oriented Muskie campaign that would not only dump Nixon but put a certified ‘good guy’ in the White House.

In retrospect, the ‘Sunshine Special’ looks far more like an ill-conceived disaster than it did at the time, when Rubin and the Boohoo made such a shambles of Muskie’s arrival in Miami that the local news media devoted almost as much time and space to the Senator’s clash with ‘anti-war hecklers’ at the train station as it did to the whole four-hundred-mile, thirty-six-hour Whistlestop Tour that covered the length of the state and produced what the candidate’s headquarters said were ‘five major statements in five cities.’

It probably cost the Muskie campaign almost $40,000 – almost $7,500 of that for rental of the five car train from Amtrak. Staff salaries and special expenses for the trip (thirty advance men spending two weeks each in towns along the route to make sure Big Ed would draw crowds for the TV cameras; payment to musicians, Rosey Grier, etc.) … a list of all expenses would probably drive the cost of the spectacle up closer to $50,000.

For all this money, time, and effort, Muskie’s combined whistle-stop crowds totaled less than three thousand, including the disastrous climax that not only botched news coverage in Miami, the state, and the whole country – but also came close to shattering the Senator’s nerves. In addition to all that, his ‘major statements’ along the way were contemptuously dismissed as ‘oatmeal’ by most of the press and the network TV news editors in New York & Washington.

In a word, the ‘Sunshine Special’ bombed. The Miami Herald reported – in the same article dominated by the Rubin/Boohoo incident – that Muskie’s trip into ‘the politics of the past’ was considered a failure even by the Senator’s own staff.

Meanwhile, in that same issue of the Herald, right next to the ugly saga of the ‘Sunshine Special,’ was a photograph of a grinning George Wallace chatting with national champion stock car racer Richard Petty at the Daytona 500, where 98,600 racing fans were treated to ‘a few informal remarks’ by The Governor, who said he had only come to watch the races and check up on his old friend, Dick Petty – who enjoys the same kind of superhero status in the South that Jean-Claude Killy has in ski country.

That appearance at the Daytona 500 didn’t cost Wallace a dime, and the AP wire-photo of him and Petty that went to every daily and Sunday newspaper in Florida was worth more to Wallace than his own weight in pure gold … and there was also the weight of the 98,600 racing fans, who figure that any friend of Richard Petty’s must sit on both shoulders of God in his spare time …

The Florida primary is over now. George Wallace stomped everybody, with 42 percent of the vote in a field of eleven. Ed Muskie, the erstwhile National Front-runner, finished a sick fourth, with only 9 percent … and then he went on all the TV networks to snarl about how this horrible thing would never have happened except that Wallace is a Beast and a Bigot.

Which is at least half true, but it doesn’t have much to do with why Muskie got beaten like a gong in Florida. The real reason is that The Man From Maine, who got the nod many months ago as the choice of the Democratic Party’s ruling establishment, is running one of the stupidest and most incompetent political campaigns since Tom Dewey took his dive and elected Truman in 1948.

If I had any vested interest in the Democratic Party I would do everything possible to have Muskie committed at once. Another disaster at the polls might put him around the bend. And unless all the other Democratic candidates are killed in a stone-blizzard between now and April 4, Muskie is going to absorb another serious beating in Wisconsin.

I am probably not the only person who has already decided to be almost anywhere except in Big Ed’s Milwaukee headquarters when the polls close on election night. The place will probably be dead empty, and all the windows taped … TV crews hunkered down behind overturned ping-pong tables, hoping to film the ex-Front-runner from a safe distance when he comes crashing into the place to blame his sixth-place finish on some kind of unholy alliance between Ti-Grace Atkinson and Judge Crater. Nor is there any reason to believe he will refrain from physical violence at that time. With his dream and his nerves completely shot, he might start laying hands on people.

Hopefully, some of his friends will be there to restrain the wiggy bastard. All we can be sure of, however, is the list of those who will not

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