Vance Hartke did make it to the firehouse. He was preceeded by about five minutes worth of sound truck jibber. "Vance Hartke, author of such-and-such Vance Hartke, champion of civil rights. Vance Hartke, friend of the veteran," and so on. The name is strange to begin with, and upon repetition it starts to sound like a call to arms: vance hartkee' The senator arrived with his chesterfield coat, one wife and three of ten kids, two of whom seemed absorbed in a 7-up. The Hartke people all wore styrofoam skimmers and balloons, but the Senator seemed annoyed when one of the nats was put on his own head.
"How's the recount going Senator?"
"Fine, we just want to get it over with to show I have an even bigger margin."
The candidate never refers to himself as I, and he never says anything is doubtful So "we" went to talk to the boys in the backroom of the firehouse, and meanwhile Shirley MacLame stole his audience outside. She is quite beautiful, more so than on the screen and even her alootness was more appealing than a candidate's underwhelming warmth. A man who is running for President is something natural, a common man. A movie star is something entirely different. She smiled dutifully at my camera and signed an autograph for the green-eyed girl, and was off without ever leaving her car. Then Vance came back out, but everyone was gone.
"I wish those other guys would get here." It was cold and the boy with the Mills pencils was suffering.
"This politics has no action. I'm only doing this because they pay me and my old man says Mills is a strong fella." He was about 17 and had no front teeth. "If you want action you should come down to the Guard Armory on Saturday and see the roller derby. There's action for you. They beat each other up, kicking with skates, they got women doing it, everything. And they do real fancy ballroom type stuff too. Roller skating is a real sport for you."
We gave up on any more candidates, about half an hour before the polls closed, and walked back down to the McGovern headquarters. The green-eyed girl and I got recruited to paint a sign that was supposed to say something inspiring like "ON TO WISCONSIN," not something humorous like "MUSKIE SUCKS," the man told us. We succeeded in hiding it from the press, but it never did make national TV.
That night McGovern came into a crowded ballroom at the Howard Johnsons after two hours of sweaty waiting and told the nation what all thus meant. He left quickly, and hardly anyone stayed around to count the votes. The man in front of me had two sixes of Schlitz, and after he gave them away he had won my support for any elective office he might seek.
Earlier in the day I stood with the student coordinator of the McGovern campaign and looked at one of the small, white, neat neighborhoods of Manchester.
"It's kind of frightening all the power they have today, you know?" he said.
"I don't know. It's kind of frightening all the power they don't have."