Nowhere is it more apparent that the 1960s have ended than in the offices of the Committee to Re-Elect the President. For it was Nixon himself, a boring heavy-handed politician--a man who conveys all the warmth and personality of an armadillo--who ended the 1960s fling with charismatic politics. His election symbolized the revenge of the unbeautiful. Richard Nixon, bless his heart, was a loser too.

In their brilliant 1968 campaign, the Nixon staff--recruited largely from advertising agencies--developed a new advertising concept: Ugly is beautiful. It worked, and they are at it again this year.

How do you re-elect an armadillo? First, you always refer to him as "The President." It helps if you send him off to China to give him a little glamour, so that people will say, "He may be an armadillo, but look at what he's managed to do." But most important, you never apologize for anything, and you assume that since most voters secretly believe that they are dull, they will welcome a candidate who is dull and proud of it.

You can also re-elect an armadillo by convincing people that it is less dangerous to have around than a sidewinding snake. And this is just what the Nixon campaign merchandisers have tried to do this year. A Republican background paper outlining tactics in New York promotes Nixon's most boring qualities--his "purposeful, sensible national leadership." Boring Nixon is then contrasted with the pimply weirdos of what the backgrounder describes as the "McGovern Crowd," who sound like a gang of ultraviolence freaks out of A Clockwork Orange. The backgrounder notes that it was the "McGovern Crowd" who "humiliated the party leaders at Miami Beach and rubbed their noses in the sawdust of that political circus;" and who "boasted, with adolescent arrogance, that they were the 'new politics.'"

In trying to give their candidate as flat an image as possible, the Nixon campaign staffers have even tried to emulate the special inarticulateness of his prose style. One campaign pamphlet, "Economic Leadership," defends Nixon's wage and price program by noting that "while there was criticism from various sources--as there will always be--the point is that the President courageously took REAL action..."

The pamphlet closes with another bit of unshaven, heavy-jowelled rhetoric: "Even as much remains to be done, much has already been accomplished by President Nixon. Contrasting the state of the economy as a whole in 1968 with what it is today it can be said that the corner has been turned... That this is so is due to the economic leadership of the President, who has not always taken the most popular course, striving to make certain that the steps he did take were REAL steps that would result in REAL economic progress." (emphasis added)

By his continual references to the hard unpopular courses he has taken, Nixon prods the voter to assume that his course has also been the right one, since nobody would be so stupid as to advocate something that was hard, unpopular, and also wrong. By such sleights of hand, Nixon has managed to avoid any discussion of the issues with his opponent.

Nothing is too corny or too dirty for Nixon. He is a lawyer-businessman, and for him, the willingness to try any marketing strategy that will sell the goods is a point of professional pride--no matter how ridiculous or under handed he may appear to his detractors. When Nixon needs to defend his failure to move toward national health insurance he makes a whimsical "Health Care" pamphlet promise that he will "keep American as well as can be today-and even better than that tomorrow."

When Nixon's campaign advisors decide that it would make good business sense to throw some confusion into the primary campaigns of his potential Democratic rivals, the President pulls out his bulging wallet and hires the necessary undercover operatives. Even in the White House businessmen don't think about ethics, and they don't have very much to say to people who do. They think about how to generate the maximum output from the minimum input. And they like to operate at minimum risk, by removing any ambiguous or threatening variables from their marketing equations.

TRAVELLING WITH THE PRESIDENT in a Veterans Day motorcade through Westchester county is not as exciting as it sounds. For reporters do not really accompany the President. They follow him at a great distance; the closest I got to Nixon was 75 yards when he was met at the Westchester County airport by Governor Nelson Rockefeller, Senator Javitts and other dignitaries. I never saw him again during the rest of the day.

I spent the rest of the day in press bus seven, looking out the window and listening to the walky-talky play-by-play account of the action up front from the pool reporters, who had been selected to observe the motorcade from within spitting range of the Presidential limousine. Although I did not actually see the events with my own eyes, I know that Nixon left his limousine to autograph a football for a Midget Football team in Mamaroneck; to greet a drum majorette just outside White Plains; to place a wreath at a cemetary in Eastchester; to receive a gold key to the Village of Tuckahoe. I know that the President's motorcade covered a 50 mile route in three-and-a-half hours; that Captain William Keith of the New York State Police estimated the number of people who had turned out to see the President and Mrs. Nixon at 364,000, a figure that was later revised upward to the chagrin of veteran reporters; and that the President and Mrs. Nixon stood waving in their open-topped limousine at most points along the route where there enough people to wave to.

What I did see with my own eyes were the faces of people who had just watched the President pass by. Press bus seven was at the tail end of the motorcade, yet people in the crowd who had taken off the afternoon to see Nixon remained standing in their places, holding signs or waving for TV cameras. Many of them looked dazed, staring off into space, perhaps wondering how to spend the rest of the day now that the President had come and gone.

Most of the reporters on Press Bus seven agreed that the most newsworthy item we could report first-hand was the enormous number of McGovern supporters in the crowd. Many thousands had been supplied with posters and slogans by the local McGovern headquarters, whose advance work for the Nixon motorcade rivalled that of the Republicans. But along the route there were also hundreds of hand lettered posters and these were the clearest expression of the mood of those who had turned out to say what they thought of Four More Years Among the anti Nixon posters were Robots for Nixon People For McGovern. Nixon Government By the Corrupt For the Corrupt. "Nixon '72, 1984" and "Nixon's Peace Plan-He Voting For McGovern."

Nixon supporters had done some lettering of their own. "Hanon We Have the GUTS to Win with Nixon." "Nixon the Great," and "America: None Better." The City of Eastchester had placed a huge banner across its main street declaring: "We Love Our City We Love Our Country, We Love Our President and First Lady."

IT'S ABSOLUTELY absurd isn't it," muttered Malcolm Deane, a British reporter from the Manchester Guardian who was sitting next to me on press bus seven. "I mean there are sensitive peace negotiations going on, and this idiot is driving all over the place in his foolish motorcade. We don't have anything like this in Britain," Dean continued, growing more indignant as the pool reporter announced the latest revised body count from Captain Keith over the walky-talky. "We do have something we call motor-tours," Deane observed, "but they are designed to allow the candidates to debate on the issues in as many places as possible. In London, they have a special tour route which allows the candidate to make 30 stops in one day, so that he can field questions from voters all over the city." Deane sighed wistfully and went back to making notations in his reporter's notebook.