Old Coalition, New Coalition

Post-election wisdom is about as good as pre-election wisdom. Still, here goes: The old coalition is dead, long live the new! This seems to me the main point of the election results. True, in the last hours of the election, the old coalition—labor, Negroes, liberals, etc.— drew briefly together once more in an effort to put over Humphrey. But who can believe this was anything but a final flickering of an exhausted coalition? Like others, I cast a lastminute vote for Humphrey, justifying this reversal of an abstentionist position held in September by the halting of the Vietnam bombing plus a growing alarm at the prospect of Nixon. Certainly Humphrey himself had done little to earn my vote or anyone’s for that matter: he ended his campaign as he had begun, in the seedy embrace of Mayor Daley (how ironic that precisely Illinois guaranteed loss of the election: Mayor Daley delivered not).

The new coalition–exactly what does that mean? The ingredients are there, but t...