One canned martini. No beer. A purple TV screen. Both elevators jammed in the basement; fifteen empty bathrooms. Seventy-five cents an hour to park in the lot next door. Chaos and madness in the telephone switchboard. Fear in the back rooms, confusion up front, and a spooky vacuum on top -- the eighth floor -- where Larry O'Brian is supposed to be holding the gig together. . . what is he doing up there? Nobody knows. They never see him.

“Larry travels a lot,” one of the speech writers told me. “He's Number One, you know -- and when you're Number One you don't have to try so hard, right?”

The McGovern campaign appears to be fucked at this time. A spectacular Come From Behind win is still possible -- on paper and given the right circumstances -- but the underlying realities of the campaign itself would seem to preclude this. A cohesive, determined campaign with the same kind of multi-level morale that characterized the McGovern effort in the months preceding the Wisconsin primary might be a good bet to close a twenty-point gap on Nixon in the last month of this grim presidential campaign.

As usual, Nixon has peaked too early -- and now he is locked into what is essentially a Holding Action. Which would be disastrous in a close race, but -- even by Pat Caddell's partisan estimate -- Nixon could blow twenty points off his lead in the next six weeks and still win. (Caddell's figures seem in general agreement with those of the most recent Gallup Poll, ten days ago, which showed that Nixon could blow thirty points off his lead and still win.)

My own rude estimate is that McGovern will steadily close the gap between now and November 7th, but not enough. If I had to make book right now, I would try to get McGovern with seven or eight points, but I'd probably go with five or six, if necessary. In other words, my guess at the moment is that McGovern will lose by a popular vote margin of 5.5 percent -- and probably far worse in the electoral college.*

* I was somewhat off on this prediction. The final margin was almost 23%. At this point in the campaign I was no longer functioning with my usual ruthless objectivity. Back in May and June, when my head was still clear, I won vast amounts of money with a consistency that baffled the experts. David Broder still owes me $500 as a result of his ill-advised bet on Hubert Humphrey in the California primary. But he still refuses to pay on the grounds that I lost the 500 back to him as a result of a forfeited foot-race between Jim Naughton and Jack Germond in Miami Beach.