“Richard Nixon,” he said, “represents the dark side of the American spirit.”

I don't remember what else he said that day. I guess I could look it up in the New York Times speech morgue, but why bother? That one line says it all.

The mood at McGovern's grim headquarters building at 1910 K Street, NW, in Washington is oddly schizoid these days: a jangled mix of defiance and despair -- tempered, now and then, by quick flashes of a lingering conviction that George can still win.

McGovern's young staffers, after all, have never lost an election they expected to win, at the outset -- and they definitely expected to win this one. They are accustomed to being far behind in the public opinion polls. McGovern has almost always been the underdog, and -- except for California -- he has usually been able to close the gap with a last-minute stretch run.

Even in the primaries he lost -- New Hampshire, Ohio, Pennsylvania -- he did well enough to embarrass the pollsters, humiliate the pols, and crank up his staff morale another few notches.

But that boundless blind faith is beginning to fade now. The Curse of Eagleton is beginning to make itself felt in the ranks. And not even Frank Mankiewicz, the Wizard of Chevy Chase, can properly explain why McGovern is now being sneered at from coast to coast as “just another politician.” Mankiewicz is still the main drivewheel in this hamstrung campaign; he has been the central intelligence from the very beginning -- which was fine all around, while it worked, but there is not a hell of a lot of evidence to suggest that it's working real well these days, and it is hard to avoid the idea that Frank is just as responsible for whatever is happening now as he was six months ago, when McGovern came wheeling out of New Hampshire like the Abominable Snowman on a speed trip.

If George gets stomped in November, it will not be because of anything Richard Nixon did to him. The blame will trace straight back to his brain-trust, to whoever had his ear tight enough to convince him that all that bullshit about “new politics” was fine for the primaries, but it would never work again against Nixon -- so he would have to abandon his original power base, after Miami, and swiftly move to consolidate the one he'd just shattered: the Meany/Daley/Humphrey/Muskie axis, the senile remnants of the Democratic Party's once-powerful “Roosevelt coalition.”

McGovern agreed. He went to Texas and praised LBJ; he revised his economic program to make it more palatable on Wall Street; he went to Chicago and endorsed the whole Daley/Democratic ticket, including State's Attorney Ed Hanrahan, who is still under indictment on felony/conspiracy (Obstruction of Justice) charges for his role in a police raid on local Black Panther headquarters three years ago that resulted in the murder of Fred Hampton.