THE WEEK

• “He may very easily win, and perhaps by a great margin.” So said columnist Joseph Alsop of Hubert Humphrey in West Virginia on the evening of the primary. And so said other peripatetic correspondents and pollsters after climbing the West Virginia mountains for weeks on end. The complete eclipse of the pulse-takers by Kennedy’s unexpectedly whopping victory recalls the fate of the pollsters who confidently predicted a Dewey victory in 1948. Maybe our newspaper editors will learn the lesson by 1968: that both the reporters and the reported-on were better in the old days, when a concern for principles and character was considered more important than the attempt to put “science” into the game of anticipating the vote.

• The victory of Senator Kennedy in West Virginia may prove decisive. It is not a victory he has any reason to be proud of, for his political rhetoric, while perhaps not quite so debased as Humphrey’s, reached a level of vulgarity (“17 million Americans go to bed hungry every night”) qualitatively related to the ignorant attacks on Catholicism the Senator so vociferously deplored. Still, in an age when we have learned to split an atom, we have developed instruments refined enough to measure elusive political differences, and Humphrey, who is left of Kennedy, is out; and that is good news.

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• “He may very easily win, and perhaps by a great margin.” So said columnist Joseph Alsop of Hubert Humphrey in West Virginia on the evening of the primary. And so said other peripatetic correspondents and pollsters after climbing the West Virginia mountains for weeks on end. The complete eclipse of the pulse-takers by Kennedy’s unexpectedly whopping victory recalls the fate of the pollsters who confidently predicted a Dewey victory in 1948. Maybe our newspaper editors will learn the lesson by 1968: that both the reporters and the reported-on were better in the old days, when a concern for principles and character was considered more important than the attempt to put “science” into the game of anticipating the vote.

• The victory of Senator Kennedy in West Virginia may prove decisive. It is not a victory he has any reason to be proud of, for his political rhetoric, while perhaps not quite so debased as Humphrey’s, reached a level of vulgarity (“17 million Americans go to bed hungry every night”) qualitatively related to the ignorant attacks on Catholicism the Senator so vociferously deplored. Still, in an age when we have learned to split an atom, we have developed instruments refined enough to measure elusive political differences, and Humphrey, who is left of Kennedy, is out; and that is good news.