Word: goodwin
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There may be hidden reasons why Goodwin prefers to remain a power behind candidates. He is freer to maneuver and runs less risk of passing his political prime. But more immediate reasons become clear when you meet...
...audience trailed in to hear his Kirkland House speech, Goodwin sat calmly at a table in front, fingering a Mark Cross pencil and spinning a copy of John Brown's Body. He eyed the audience intently to find out just what kind of people he was addressing. Yet he spoke quietly, without the rhetorical crescendos expected from a writer of Inaugurals, and did not seem to revise his delivery according to its impact. His voice was so low-keyed that the people in back complained he was unexciting; those in front were far more moved. It is Goodwin's argument...
...Goodwin is not a candidate for a second reason: he is not a handsome man. He has all the sophistication of the Kennedy-style politicians, but with a pock-marked face, heavy eyebrows, and hair brushed flat against his head, he has none of their beauty. His weakness as a candidate he admits implicitly. "Nixon was the only Republican who could have lost to Humphrey," he said. "Anybody who looks like Nixon can always be beaten...
...assassinations and a disheartening election have not openly affected Goodwin's faith in politics. He paused over the name Kennedy while discussing political violence and, as McCarthy used to do, ended his speech with a poem from John Brown's Body. But Goodwin seems to rely less on the success of a single candidate than on his hope for a re-formed progressive coalition...
...Goodwin admits that the policies of welfare liberalism he helped devise in the Kennedy Administration cannot control systematization. Liberal economics was the policy of "making everybody richer, directed from Washington." It distributed more fairly the output of technology, but could not limit productive efficiency for the sake of other values. "It's like putting a man on a window sill and asking him to fly," says Goodwin. "The old liberalism cannot establish communities; it can only build housing units. Liberals used to solving problems through centralization can't conceive of giving people more power in their lives...