We all tend to see what we expect to see, even when it isn’t there. Mark Twain loved to tell of the occasion, during his boyhood in Hannibal, Mo., when Henry Clay— widely hailed as “the biggest man in Kentucky”—came to town to speak on the Fourth of July. The young Tom Sawyers and Huck Finns of the vicinity were naturally agog to see him. “But shucks,” Mark Twain would add reminiscently, “he warn’t more’n ten feet tall.”
When Mary McGrory, a female flack for liberalism who usually operates out of Washington, rolled into Miami Beach to cover the Republican convention there, it took her barely fifteen seconds to discover that “the romance with the Right is over.” The rest of us, it seems safest to conclude, attended some other convention. In the one I was at, the entire liberal contingent was able to muster exactly 277 votes (out of 1,333) for its darling, Nelson Rockefeller. There were a few centrists, and these tended to support Richard Nixon. But the overwhelming majority of delegates were conservatives, ranging from the milder blends all the way out to the positively hydrophobic; and they were divided (cordially on the whole, but still divided) between Nixon and Ronald Reagan, with Nixon ultimately getting the lion’s share.
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