This One's Nixon

THE COUNTRY has yielded the Presidency to Richard M. Nixon. The decision came hesitantly, uncertainly, with a painful reluctance that reflects the great divisions which President Nixon will soon have to face. It could still be possible for the new President to "bring us together," but the job may take a lot more than Nixon has to offer.

The vote for George Wallace turned out to be a little smaller than had been expected a few weeks ago, but it is obvious that the Wallace movement has not died. Wallace's 13 per cent may not look like much now, but when one considers the phenomenal growth of anti-war voting strength in the last two years, it becomes clear that events can change the impossible to the possible in very short order. There is little reason to expect that President Nixon will be successful in combating the sources of the new and little-understood alienation of the American blue collar worker. Thus there is every possibility that Wallace's strength will increase during the Nixon administration.

This growing threat from the Right is part of the challenge facing the Democratic Party during the next four years. If the Democrats can again become the party of the people, based on an alliance of the blacks, the poor, the blue-collar workers and the intellectuals, then something of value will have come from their defeat. Such a rebirth will require work and imagination, but it is not impossible.

THE MOST STRIKING thing about this election is not what the voters chose, but the poverty of their alternatives. They were not offered any candidate who opposed the war in Vietnam, or even one willing to discuss it openly and without subterfuge. The candidates battled one another over the issues of race, the cities and the revolt of the students, but in a way so removed from the realities of thses issues that the people who should have had the most interest in this election--the young, the poor, and the blakcs--remained uninvolved.

And so the results of Tuesday seem like an incidental off-shoot of real conflicts that the political system has not faced this year. President elect Nixon should read the vote not as a mandate so much as a warning. He will enter the White House with little personal prestige or popoular support, and without the Congressional support that he had expected. Therefore, if he is going to be able to govern, he will have to end the war quickly and not necessarily "honorably." And he will have to redirect this country's resources to its own disintergrating cities, and not necessarily with that respect for the social beneficience of free enterprise that both major candidates have been extolling this fall. To meet these critical priorities. President Nixon will have to abandon the vague and simplistic formulas of his campaign, and face honestly at last the difficult situation in which this nation finds itself.