0 for 8.

THEY CAME to the Dartmouth campus, the lot of them--one former Vice President, one former governor, five once or present senators, and a man of the cloth--to put forward their qualifications for the Presidency. the little town of Hanover, New Hampshire, was overrun with green-badged reporters and grave, clean-cut young men with wires running out of their ears. At least two lunatics paraded in front of the Hanover Inn, advertising their availability. Pro-lifers raillied for two hours on the snowy, sub-freezing green, singing and beseeching from afar. Tickets were as rare as silver quarters. The candidates showed some wit, and considerable stamina. The moderators, Ted Koppel and Phil Donahue, were both trenchant and fair. The clear winner was Ronald Reagan.

It is hard to remember what the Democratic Party was like, as recently as eight years ago. In March 1976, Jeffrey Hart wrote in NR that the party contained "two distinct and irreconcilable parties--what might be called a 'Wallace Party' and a 'Udall Party.'" George Wallace had made a powerful bid for the 1972 nomination, winning, the day he was shot, the Maryland and the Michigan primaries. He looked to make another strong showing in 1976. Also on the relative right was Henry Jackson, who would win the Massachusetts and Pennsylvania primaries. Jimmy Carter won the nomination (and the election) by seducing right-wing voters (his initial breakthrough, in the Iowa caucus, came with the support of anti-abortionists).

The Democratic Right these days has been reduced to two pale Southern moderate liberals, Ernest Hollings and Reubin Askew. Essentially vice presidential candidates, they are debarred from saying anything radically different, and neither of them was particularly effective in Hanover. Whenever they tried to put some distance between themselves and the Left they introduced so many qualifications as to be almost meaningless. Thus Hollings made great play of an across-the-band budget freeze, but later said he would switch money saved on the MX missile to federal day-care centers. Askew did not support a nuclear freeze, on the grounds that it would prevent us from modernizing, but came out instead for a "cap." Pointy-headed intellectuals need not tremble.

The party as a whole has in fact become the McGovern Party. Appropriately enough, there sat George McGovern, the man who swept Massachusetts, as one of the eight hopefuls. He did get off the second-best line of the afternoon: "I don't know who my running-mate will be. This time I'll be careful."

The McGovernite spirit was most purely articulated by Alan Cranston, who emphasized that he has only two issues: removing nuclear weapons "from God's earth," and full employment. No fooling around for him. He urged his fellow candidates to agree with him that nuclear war was the most important issue of our times, and they all did. Senator Cranston further noted that he had been instructed in the evils of the bomb by Albert Einstein himself. That's going right to the top; didn't even have to read "Hiroshima" in The New Yorker.

Yet if McGovernism is the wave of the future, why hasn't it won any elections? If the formula is a given, there must be some deviation from it that will yield political results. This problem preoccupieD, in their different ways, Gary Hart and John Glenn. Hart has made a minor reputation as a serious student of military reform, and he spoke with dignity and force. His entire pitch is that America needs new ways of thinking; his entire problem is that he cannot say what they are, or, if he does, they don't seem very new or very thoughtful. In the helter-skelter format of the debate, Hart couldn't even mention "new industrial policy"--probably just as well, since he has so far been incapable of explaining it.

The Yankee cabby who drove NR's reporter away after the fracas remarked appreciatively of John Glenn that he was "in the wrong party." This is a perception akin to the one fostered by Jimmy Carter in 1976, and one that Glenn's handlers want to fortify. Building on his war and space record, Glenn over the last few months has tried to cultivate an image of fiscal prudence. The headline exchange of the whole three hours was Glenn's collision with Mondale, wherein he attacked some of Mondale's budgetary talk as "the same vague gobledygook we've heard throughout this campaign . . . If we're going to balance this budget [we can't go out] promising everything to everybody." It brought Mondale out of his chair like a Roman candle, and yet Glenn's own solutions were nothing if not gobbledy. He propose a "pay as you go" spending policy, which completely punts the question of what would be paid for--an attempt to drain the politics out of politics that was also eerily reminiscent of Carter. He also plugged higher taxes: a direct 10 per cent surcharge, and a delay of indexing. Some prudence.

And there was Walter Mondale, the Silver Swan. ("The Silver Swan," according to the anonymous Elizabethan lyric, "who living had no note, / When death approached, unlocked her silent throat.") He at least had the virtue of consistency. If, as Hart and Glenn seemed to demonstrate, there are no side doors from late twentieth-century liberalism, then the only logical thing to do is to push on. And so when Gary Hart took up Glenn's theme, that "you cannot lead this country if you've promised everybody everything," Mondale delivered this apologia: "I haven't promised everything. I have promised to put people back to work . . . to protect the environment . . . to pass ERA . . . to seek a safer world . . . [Earlier promises included standing up for American workers, i.e., tariffs, and spending more on education.] America is nothing if it isn't promises. That's what America is about." Thomas Jefferson, call your answering machine.

The best line of the affair came from Jesse Jackson. In the midst of the Glenn-Mondale shouting match, this tropical fish gravely advised that "we must approach this in a vein of seriousness." Jackson, despite this trip to Damascus, has no serious chance, which, along with his race, accounts for the free media ride he has been getting. Practically every other Jackson statement is a gaffe, and if Ronald Reagan may seem "simplistic" at times, at least he never tries to talk in rhymed couplets. Jackson's marginality, however, allowed him to make one point in a way more forthright than any other candidate. Republican or Democrat, can. Three times he said that Western Europe and Japan have "grown up" and ought to pay for their own defense. It will be interesting to see how, if at all, that resonates.

For the next three months the Democrats will have all the action, and all the copy. If Hanover was an indication, there will be moments of drama, and personalities capable of exploiting them. But so far, politically and ideologically, the man the eight want to unseat has nothing to fear.