Good movie, yet a tad too much cursing

The cursing makes it a even better movie.

Not sure what your experience of the 70s was like, but per my memory, this is pretty accurate to casual conversation amongst politically active people of the time.

The attitude was "no bs", rejecting pretension and being "of the people".

Nowadays that sounds pretentious in and of itself, but that was my experience working campaigns.

I believe it has a lot to do with the way the MPAA ratings changed in the 1970s. "The Candidate" is now rated as PG, which is the same rating most children' cartoons get nowadays...but in the 70s, "PG" content was often somewhere in between today's PG-13 and R. As the MPAA ratings were changed and adjusted, so were the language and visuals in the films of the time.