Nation: A CHANCE TO LEAD

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His critics might reply that Nixon's "good people" really have little cause to protest in the streets. But more to the political point is that the whites, the mature, the securely employed and the affluent combine to form a voting majority. This massive bloc belongs permanently to neither party. It follows no one ideology. Nixon seeks to attract enough of it to form an electoral majority. To do it, he must capture the imaginations of many Democrats and independents who are largely reconciled to the Big Government he likes to berate and have been cool toward Nixon in the past. At the same time, he must reckon with the disinherited, principally Negroes, who in some states can hold the balance in a tight election.

Tasteless Opulence. Nixon seems to be giving considerable weight to the kind of argument expressed by one Southern lady on the convention floor. She declared: "This is a protest year. We've got to get that protest." She did not mean Negroes or fractious students. The protesters that concern her are people "who are sick and tired of their money going out of their pockets to keep people sitting in front of TV sets all day."

A great many Americans quite understandably feel this way, and there may be political wisdom in paying heed to such feeling—especially at a time when George Wallace can he found soaring on gusts of middle-class discontent. Nixon adopted the old-style Southern strategy in the convention, extending it to put together a coalition of Southern, Border and Midwestern states; indications are that he may use a similar strategy to try to win the general election. This makes sense particularly if one bets that conservative sentiment will run wide and deep between now and Election Day, and by no means only in the South. This formula might lose Northeastern states—but it might also attract significant numbers of disgruntled voters in the North. This plan is reinforced by the echoes of riots past and prospective. A bloody battle was raging in a Negro area just across Biscayne Bay from Convention Hall. Each ghetto upheaval will make things tougher for the Democrats this year.

Compared with the Miami riot, the scene in Convention Hall seemed a little unreal at times. All political conventions, of course, convey a certain air of fantasy. But last week's assembly went somewhat further than usual in this respect because of the lack of real contention over men or issues. The very idea of nominating a self-proclaimed "unknown quantity" such as Agnew hardly helped. Neither did the tasteless opulence of Miami Beach or the well-coiffured, well-dressed appearance of the delegates. "They're nice people," said one big-city Northern Senator, "but they've just never ridden a subway." The comment was not altogether fair. It is such people who work long and hard for their political parties; affluence, or the lack of it, is not necessarily an index of social conscience. Still, the contrast between the people in the Convention Hall and the nation's grubbier problems could not be ignored.