Fear & Loathing in Miami: Old Bulls Meet the Butcher
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage! Rage! Against the dying of the light.
– Dylan Thomas
Sunday is not a good day for traveling in the South. Most public places are closed – especially the bars and taverns – in order that the denizens of this steamy, atavistic region will not be distracted from church. Sunday is the Lord’s day, and in the South he still has clout – or enough, at least, so that most folks won’t cross him in public. And those few who can’t make it to church will likely stay home by the fan, with iced tea, and worship Him in their own way.
This explains why the cocktail lounge in the Atlanta airport is not open on Sunday night. The Lord wouldn’t dig it. Not even in Atlanta, which the local chamber of commerce describes as the Enlightened, Commercial Capital of the “New South.” Atlanta is an alarmingly liberal city, by Southern standards – known for its “progressive” politicians, non-violent race relations and a tax structure agressively favorable to New Business. It is also known for moonshine whiskey, a bad biker/doper community, and a booming new porno-film industry.
Fallen pom-pom girls and ex-cheerleaders from Auburn, ‘Bama and even Ole Miss come to Atlanta to “get into show business,” and those who take the wrong fork wind up being fucked, chewed and beaten for $100 a day in front of hand-held movie cameras. Donkeys and wolves are $30 extra, and the going rate for gangbangs is $10 a head, plus “the rate.” Connoiseurs of porno-films say you can tell at a glance which ones were made in Atlanta, because of the beautiful girls. There is nowhere else in America, they say, where a fuck-flick producer can hire last year’s Sweetheart of Sigma Chi to take on 12 Georgia-style Hell’s Angels for $220 & lunch.
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So I was not especially surprised when I got off the plane from Miami around midnight and wandered into the airport to find the booze locked up. What the hell? I thought: This is only the public bar. At this time of night – in the heart of the Bible belt and especially on Sunday – you want to look around for something private.
Every airport has a “VIP Lounge.” The one in Atlanta is an elegant, neoprivate spa behind a huge wooden door near Gate 11. Eastern Airlines maintains it for the use of traveling celebrities, politicians and other conspicuous persons who would rather not be seen drinking in public with the Rabble.
I had been there before, back in February, sipping a midday beer with John Lindsay while we waited for the flight to L.A. He had addressed the Florida state legislature in Tallahassee that morning; the Florida primary was still two weeks away, Muskie was still the front-runner, McGovern was campaigning desperately up in New Hampshire and Lindsay’s managers felt he was doing well enough in Florida that he could afford to take a few days off and zip out to California. They had already circled June 6th on the Mayor’s campaign calendar. It was obvious, even then, that the California primary was going to be The Big One: Winner-take-all for 271 delegate votes, more than any other state, and the winner in California would almost certainly be the Democratic candidate for President of the United States in 1972.
Nobody argued that. The big problem in February was knowing which two of the 12 candidates would survive until then. If California was going to be the showdown, it was also three months and 23 primaries away – a long and grueling struggle before the field would narrow down to only two.
Ed Muskie, of course, would be one of them. In late February – and even in early March – he was such an overwhelming favorite that every press wizard in Washington had already conceded him the nomination. At that point in the campaign, the smart-money scenario had Big Ed winning comfortably in New Hampshire, finishing a strong second to Wallace a week later in Florida, then nailing it in Wisconsin on April 4th.
New Hampshire would finish McGovern, they said, and Hubert’s ill-advised Comeback would die on the vine in Florida. Jackson and Chisholm were fools, McCarthy and Wilbur Mills were doomed tokens…and that left only Lindsay, a maverick Republican who had only recently switched parties. But he had already caused a mild shock wave on the Democratic side by beating McGovern badly – and holding Muskie to a stand-off – with an 11th hour, “Kennedy-style” campaign in non-primary Arizona, the first state to elect delegates.
Lindsay’s lieutenants saw that success in Arizona as the first spark for what would soon be a firestorm. Their blueprint had Lindsay compounding his momentum by finishing a strong third or even second in Florida, then polarizing the party by almost beating Muskie in Wisconsin – which would set the stage for an early Right/Left showdown in Massachusetts, a crucial primary state with 102 delegates and a traditionally liberal electorate.
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The key to that strategy was the idea that Muskie could not hold the Center, because he was basically a candidate of the Democratic Right, like Scoop Jackson, and that he would move instinctively in that direction at the first sign of challenge from his Left – which would force him into a position so close to Nixon’s that eventually not even the Democratic “centrists” would tolerate him.
There was high ground to be seized on The Left, Lindsay felt, and whoever seized it would fall heir to that far-flung, leaderless army of Kennedy/McCarthy zealots from 1968…along with 25 million new voters who would naturally go 3-1 against Nixon – unless the Democratic candidate turned out to be Hubert Humphrey or a Moray Eel – which meant that almost anybody who could strike sparks with the “new voters” would be working off a huge and potentially explosive new power base that was worth – on paper, at least – anywhere between five percent and 15 percent of the total vote. It was a built-in secret weapon for any charismatic Left-bent underdog who could make the November election even reasonably close.
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