Word: wattenberg
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...impact on political affairs. The news media have pushed The Real Majority as the fountain of all current political wisdom. Party heads pored over advance copies, and politicians have embraced its precepts. After the mid-term elections, President Nixon complained to his advisors that "the Democrats read Scammon and Wattenberg." The vogue of political tracts of such influence is usually short. Kevin Phillip's The Emerging Republican Majority was the rage a year ago, but has already been discredited. Unlike Phillip's book, however, The Real Majority holds up remarkably well in light of the recent elections, and its influence...
...better known author of this tract is Richard Scammon, former director of the U.S. Bureau of the Census, now head of the Electronics Research Center in Washington. His partner is Ben Wattenberg, a former aide to President Johnson, and now a speech-writer for Hubert Humphrey. The heart of the Scammon-Wattenberg thesis is the simple truth that the center is the only position of political power. To win an election, a candidate "must capture the center ground of an election battlefield." The center itself shifts with the major issues of the day, but any candidate who is perceived...
Scammon and Wattenberg's dismissal of the Southern Strategy was certainly confirmed. Any movement by the Republican Party, they warn, "toward a Southern Strategy, capitalizing on antiblack feelings, toward capturing the Wallace vote to build an emerging Republican majority," would backfire-an apt description of the Republican midterm foray into the South. Of the sixteen races for Governorship and the Senate in the Southern and Border States, the Republicans...
Shortly before the campaign began in earnest, Political Statisticians Richard Scammon and Ben Wattenberg published a book, The Real Majority, that was to underscore President Nixon's 1970 strategy. The typical American voter, the authors argued, could be found at the political center. They sketched a portrait: "The Middle Voter is a 47-year-old housewife from the outskirts of Dayton whose husband is a machinist." Scammon and Wattenberg did not have a real person in mind, but a Dayton newspaper and the local machinists' union decided that she was Mrs. Bette Lowrey of suburban Fairborn...
...last two weeks of September, "the social issue dominated the campaign," Nixon said. "Then the Democrats read Scammon and Wattenberg [whose book, The Real Majority, argued that Republicans have understood Americans' desires and fears about law-and-order better than the Democrats], and then Hubert Humphrey wrapped himself in the flag and took off on a fire truck." The Democrats, he said, turned to the economic issue: "This was our low point." That was what sent him off to the hustings. (He called the Democrats' subsequent use of unemployment statistics "a lie.") His staff advised against campaigning...