POLITICS: Labor Decides to Mugwump It

UNTIL George McGovern won the nomination, no Democratic presidential candidate would have dared face the Republicans without near-solid labor support. With McGovern, times have changed. Not only does he profess to be undaunted at the prospect of massive labor desertions; he sounds positively defiant. When he learned that the executive council of the AFL-CIO had voted to stay neutral in the election, he retorted: "Now either that's a calamity or it's a signal that a new day is here in which we're going to test whether the union power brokers are alive...