THE CAMPAIGN
THE battle for the summit of American political power this year has been a long and strange nonengagement. Yet on the democracy's lesser plateaus—in Senate and House races, in gubernatorial campaigns—the two parties have been engaged in furious and more traditional partisan warfare. At stake are 18 statehouses, all 435 House seats and 33 chairs in the Senate—the nation's balance of political power outside the Oval Office.
It is one of the anomalies of this campaign that Richard Nixon, with an almost Lyndonesque thirst for "consensus," seems to have slighted those...