Rostow changed his opinions to suit the president's changed mood in the summer of 1968 and now advised Johnson to limit the bombing raids against North Vietnam. By the time of the Democratic convention in Chicago in August 1968, Rostow approved of the compromise campaign plank of the man who won the Democratic nomination, Vice President Hubert Humphrey, which called for an end of the U.S. bombing of North Vietnam, as by this point he feared that the Republican candidate, Richard Nixon, would win the election. By August 1968, the Democratic Party was tearing itself apart, divisions that were all too apparent at the Democratic convention where anti-war and pro-war Democrats vehemently debated on the convention floor about whatever the United States should continue fighting in Vietnam or not. Given the disarray in the Democratic ranks, it was widely felt if the party did not find a way of unifying itself, Nixon would win. When Humphrey asked for Rostow's help with campaign slogans, Rostow came up with the awkward "We're not going to let a handful of white and black punks turn this country over to Wallace, Strom Thurmond, and those who base their campaigns on their support". By this, Rostow meant that a divided Democratic Party might allow people like George Wallace, the outspoken white supremacist former governor of Alabama who was running for president as a third party candidate, or Senator Storm Thurmond, a Democrat who turned Republican out of his opposition to civil rights for Afro-Americans, would come to power.