TV Football, Anyone? Electoral Residue

THE POSTERS are beginning to peel off the walls and the buttons are finding their way into trash cans or collectors' closets. Candidates and their wives are spread from Bermuda to Tahiti in post-campaign vacations. Victory has been claimed by both sides.

The aftermath of an off-year election in the United States is always a letdown. There is no new President to announce cabinet appointments or fill the front pages with family news. For the most part, politics drops off the page about a week after the votes are in.

The 1970 elections were an exception only in that the public was more tired than ever of reading and hearing about politics. Heaving a loud sigh of relief, the American public went back to televised football games after November 4, secure in the knowledge that the instant replays would not be preempted by the pudgy faces of candidates seeking "the honor of office" in "these troubled times."

Looking at the results in the smoky hours of early Wednesday morning, it was easy for liberals to see the Apocalpyse arrived. Goodell, Duffey, Hoff, Tydings, and Gore all met defeat at the hands of Nixon men. Yet as the morning wore on and the cameras began to focus on the Western boards, the results were different. In Indiana, Utah, Nevada, North Dakota, and Wyoming, where Conservatives of the true mold had given their votes to the Republicans in 1968, the Administration bootlickers met ignominious defeat. And in California, a topsy-turvy state where currents and trends are so many and so strong, where San Jose had whipped the reactionary conservatives into their rabid finest, John Tunney beat George Murphy and Ronald Reagan won a far less than landslide victory.

Nixon and Agnew, of course, claimed victory for the Republicans, O'Brien and Muskie said the Democrats had gained. What really happened was that different races and widely separated local issues combined to produce a mish-mash of confusion which can only be called a draw.

Mr. Nixon may choose to see the light and recognize that his smear tactics and early '50s political style are no longer viable in the '70s. He may take a more restrained course in preparing for the 1972 race. He may indeed end the war, stop the repression and, most important, do something for the lower middle class which has been hardest hit by the inflation/recession economy.

UNFORTUNATELY, Mr. Nixon is not one to admit readily his own shortcomings. He will sit back and pout for a while, decide he was right all along, and blame any Republican setbacks on failure to present the message strongly enough. Such a typical five-year-old's reaction to setbacks is not out of the realm of possibility for our President. The man who tearfully blamed his 1962 defeat on the media can be expected to do the same in 1970. From him, we can expect increased attacks on the media, more attempts at Administration-imposed censorship, and tighter government secrecy. The next invasion of Cambodia, for example, will most likely not be announced on television, but rather carried out as a clandestine mission with newsmen barred from observation of it.

If Nixon decides his law and order message wasn't brought home strongly enough we can anticipate more provocation of the San Jose "This is what they really hate" style. The tactic is really an old one: tempt the opposition into some exceptionally sensational and yet fruitless act and then use it as an excuse to quash them. Hitler, for example, did it with the Reichstag fire.

Such an incident, if dramatic enough, could be used to excuse almost any measure of repression, such as the rounding up of all suspected subversives and radicals now on the massive F.B.I. lists.

These are all possibilities to be foreseen and dealt with. Nixon, when crossed, is a very dangerous man. He can be defeated at the polls if liberals stick together and remain calm. Fortunately it appears that the Democrats will have the kind of men who can effectively counter the Nixon Mania.

Edmund Muskie's speech the night before the election was one of the most moving political events since the death of Robert Kennedy. More important, it shows that Muskie recognizes the value of television, which Nixon used so well in 1968 but seemed to have forgotten in 1970. Nixon's victory in 1968 can be attributed to a low-key campaign which convinced people that he could "bring us together." On the night of November 3 he showed that this was a lie.

The contrast between the quiet, concerned, and righteously angered Muskie, and the screaming, maniacal Nixon could have been the most important foretaste of the 1972 election. Nixon had always been deeply mistrustful of his media advisers. In the closing weeks of the 1968 campaign, as the polls indicated a Humphrey surge, Nixon panicked, abandoned his advisers, and returned to the old style. He is panicked now and if the liberals can keep him that way he will be defeated in 1972. In the meantime it will be a long two years.