Word: agnew
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What had kept him from the major, decisive victory that had been so widely (and perhaps too optimistically) expected by many of his followers? In addition to his choice of Maryland's inept Governor Spiro Agnew as his running mate, it was probably his closed, negative campaign. That, and a personality that has simply never come close to captivating the U.S. voter. Nixon was so far in front that his overriding concern was to avoid a serious error-hardly the sort of strategy designed to fire imaginations. But it can also be argued that the Democrats-the majority party...
CONTRARY to some opinions, it is not true that if you have seen one Vice President, you have seen them all. But the question of what kind of a Veep Spiro T. Agnew will make is more than usually clouded. At the beginning of the campaign, he made anonymity an asset. A joking reference to "What's-His-Name" warmed an audience up. The admission that Agnew w.as "not exactly a household word" carried a nice touch of modesty. By the end of the campaign, many Republican strategists wished that Agnew had remained What's-His-Name. The Vice President...
Originally viewed in the Nixon camp as a hard-working but unobtrusive No. 2 man, the Maryland Governor was indeed industrious. He was anything but unobtrusive. In three months, "Agnewism" became virtually a synonym of "malapropism," and Democrats got good mileage out of such comments as "If you've seen one slum, you've seen them all." A Democratic TV commercial consisted of the simple legend "Agnew for Vice President?"?and nearly 30 seconds of laughter...
Forgotten Strengths. Chosen to assure Nixon Southern support at Miami Beach, Agnew was assigned the task of appealing to the potential Wallace vote. He began the drive with the standard spiel on law and order, but as the weeks passed, he grew progressively more abrasive. At times, except for the accent, he might have been mistaken for Wallace himself, making use of such Wallace-like expressions as "phony intellectual." In the end, though Agnew may have hurt Nixon overall, he appears to have helped him win critically important Border states...
More alarmed than they readily admitted by Agnew's clumsiness, Nixon aides gradually de-emphasized his role in the campaign. Increasingly, his rallies were held in suburbs, where he felt most at home, or in small cities. To eliminate, or at least minimize, his now famous bloopers, he held few press conferences and granted few interviews...