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George McGovern

[ 79 ] October 21, 2012 | Paul Campos

George McGovern has died. That McGovern suffered a crushing defeat at the hands of Richard Nixon is as good example as any of everything that has gone wrong with politics in this country over the past 40 years.

Comments (79)

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  1. Derelict says:
    October 21, 2012 at 8:12 am

    A great story about McGovern in WWII:

    http://liverputty.blogspot.com/2008/08/george-mcgovern-as-b-24-pilot.html

    Reply
  2. paleotectonics says:
    October 21, 2012 at 8:47 am

    RIP to a very good man.

    Gotta re-read Fear and Loathing On The Campaign Trail ’72

    “The tragedy of all this is that George McGovern, for all his mistakes… understands what a fantastic monument to all the best instincts of the human race this country might have been, if we could have kept it out of the hands of greedy little hustlers like Richard Nixon. McGovern made some stupid mistakes, but in context they seem almost frivolous compared to the things Richard Nixon does every day of his life, on purpose… Jesus! Where will it end? How low do you have to stoop in this country to be President?”

    Reply
    • paleotectonics says:
      October 21, 2012 at 8:49 am

      Seeing that quote again, especially the last line – I wonder what McGovern thought looking at Mitt Romney? “Goddammit, here we go again!”?

      Reply
      • Pestilence says:
        October 21, 2012 at 9:00 am

        or maybe, is this at last the bottom of the barrel?

        Reply
        • c u n d gulag says:
          October 21, 2012 at 9:10 am

          Take a look at Ryan, Rubio, soon to be Senator from TX, Cruz, Cantor, Paul, and other soon to be potential Republican Presidential candidates, and tell me we’re at last at the bottom of the barrel.

          Until we hit peak wingnut, we’ll never reach the bottom.

          And we won’t think for a second that we’ll hit peak wingnung in my lifetime.

          I’m 54, and hoping that Obama wins. I live in NY, so calling people here won’t make much of a difference – unlike in OH, FL, CO, NV, etc.

          So instead, I’m calling for my local Democratic candidate who’s running against CongressTeabagger Nan Hayworth(less).
          And I’ll probably be driving people to the polls on Election Day.

          Reply
          • DrDick says:
            October 21, 2012 at 9:22 am

            There is no peak wingnut and therefore no bottom to that barrel.

            Reply
            • Colin Day says:
              October 21, 2012 at 9:45 am

              As Einstein said, the only things in infinite supply are hydrogen and stupidity, and he wasn’t sure about hydrogen.

              Reply
          • mch says:
            October 21, 2012 at 7:19 pm

            I spent today canvassing for Elizabeth Warren, in preparation for the next two weeks’ GOTV effort. I’d planned to spend my day this way, but it turned out feeling like an act of homage to George McGovern, for whom I worked on GOTV (though not cute acronyms for it then) when he was running for reelection to the Senate in 1968, in Sioux Falls.

            Reply
        • Leeds man says:
          October 21, 2012 at 9:11 am

          I’ve seen nothing to indicate there is a bottom.

          Reply
        • Major Kong says:
          October 21, 2012 at 9:55 am

          We’ve broken through the bottom of the barrel and we’re down in the basement attempting to dig through the floor.

          Reply
          • losgatosca says:
            October 21, 2012 at 10:15 am

            Hell, we’re a quarter of the way to China. Peak wingnut is a inexhaustible, renewable resource. It replicates itself with every generation in one form or another. Ignorance can be overcome but willful stupidity is a thing of stubborn beauty in a very perverse way.

            That over 2000 years ago a man preached love and tolerance in an extremely primitive era which has led to his so-called ‘followers’ and ‘believers’ perverting his lessons to spread hate and intolerance in a country of advanced technology and comforts is all you need to know about human nature.

            Reply
  3. Uncle Kvetch says:
    October 21, 2012 at 9:16 am

    I wonder if we’ll ever see another like him.

    Reply
  4. DrDick says:
    October 21, 2012 at 9:21 am

    He was in many ways what many of us wish all Democratic leaders were. Sadly, he may also have been too nice for national politics, even then. I cast my first ever vote for him 40 years ago.

    Reply
    • Steve LaBonne says:
      October 21, 2012 at 9:37 am

      It’s more that this country didn’t deserve him and still doesn’t. Instead we’ve just kept going farther and farther down the rathole that Nixon dug for us.

      Reply
    • The Dark Avenger says:
      October 21, 2012 at 10:45 am

      I was a volunteer for his campaign when I was 13 years old.

      “May flights of angels sing thee to thy rest.”

      Reply
  5. joe from Lowell says:
    October 21, 2012 at 9:36 am

    I’m not one for the politics of purity, but when you go to work for the other side, that’s a bridge too far.

    Reply
  6. Susan says:
    October 21, 2012 at 9:37 am

    I was 9 in 1972, and in a family that cheered Nixon. But in 1984, when McGovern ran in the democratic primary, I lived in Cambridge , MA and was in love with a man who had been the co-chair of the McGovern campaign in a small city in Washington State in 1972. When he was 15, and couldn’t even vote for the man. But it speaks to how he represented the idea of the future that very smart and thinking young people could view as their own.

    So that was that campaign.

    In any case, in Massachusetts in 1984 on that primary election day, it was a snow day and the roads were barely passable, but there was no way we weren’t going to vote for the man. We got ourselves to the voting booth (first presidential election for me) and along with all the lovely and very old ladies who risked falls and broken bones to get through the icy streets, we voted. Still the most happy vote I have cast, the least compromised, and I have never missed an opportunity for vote.

    Good man. I like to think that the internet age will bring about the possibility of elections where substance is important and considered, and good, intelligent people will be elected by an informed electorate.

    Reply
  7. kerry says:
    October 21, 2012 at 9:43 am

    I wasn’t born till a few years after that election, but it is yet another reason I always take pride in my home state. My parents told me they later got a “Don’t blame me, I’m from Massachusetts” bumper sticker.

    Reply
  8. John says:
    October 21, 2012 at 9:49 am

    George McGovern was certainly a good man, but he was a pretty terrible politician, and he ought to be a cautionary tale. I think any Democratic candidate in 1972 would probably have lost, but the size of the defeat was largely McGovern’s fault.

    McGovern basically won the nomination by staging a hostile takeover of the Democratic Party. Not that there was anything great about the old Democratic establishment, but to have any hope of winning an election as a Democrat, you have to get them on board, and instead the McGovern campaign basically gratuitously insulted them, to the point that a lot of them ended up tacitly backing Nixon. And then the Eagleton fiasco, which McGovern handled horrifically, didn’t help matters.

    There’s really only a few other times in post-bellum American history where a nomination such a major rift in the party – Bryan in 1896, Taft in 1912, Goldwater in 1964. The middle case is strange, because it’s the result of a failed insurgency, rather than a successful one like 1896, 1964, and 1972. All of them led to convincing defeats for the party involved, but 1972 is rather unique in that it achieved no larger long-term goals, either. The Bryan candidacy transformed the Democratic Party, at least to some extent, from a pro-business party basically indistinguishable from the Republicans into a party at least somewhat committed to reform and social justice. The Goldwater candidacy, although itself a fiasco, set in motion the transformation of the Republican Party into a monolithic extension of movement conservatism.

    What did the McGovern candidacy accomplish? If anything, it pushed the Democrats further to the right out of fear of a repeat. An out and out disaster. So, yeah, George McGovern was a good man. He would have been a much better president than Richard Nixon. But the scale of his defeat was at least as much a product of his own mistakes and flaws as a candidate as it was of any larger problems with politics or the American zeitgeist.

    Reply
    • Richard says:
      October 21, 2012 at 9:57 am

      I voted for McGovern in 72 and even went door to door trying to get the vote out for him. And, of course, he would have been a better president than Nixon. But I basically agree with this assessment. He ran a terrible campaign in every way and the result was to make the Democratic Party and the country more conservative.

      Reply
    • Malaclypse says:
      October 21, 2012 at 10:07 am

      1972 is rather unique in that it achieved no larger long-term goals, either.

      The Democrats are not the party of (social) liberalism?

      Reply
      • John says:
        October 21, 2012 at 10:20 am

        Can you explain how this was a result of 1972? To the extent that social liberalism had a home before 1972, it was certainly in the Democratic Party, and the identification became stronger largely because the Republicans moved way to the right in the years after 1972 – in 1976, with a more conservative than usual Democratic candidate, and a less conservative than usual Republican, it wasn’t even clear who was the candidate of social liberalism; that distinction really only emerged clearly in the 1980s after conservatives took over the Republican Party.

        Beyond that, I’ll just say that social liberalism became more important in the Democratic Party in the years after 1972 because the country was moving in the direction of social liberalism for reasons having nothing to do with the McGovern candidacy, and the Democratic Party was the only obvious place for such people to go if they cared about electoral politics. I don’t see anything in the McGovern candidacy, as such, that led to it.

        Do you think things would have been particularly different in this respect if Humphrey or Muskie had won the nomination?

        Reply
      • losgatosca says:
        October 21, 2012 at 10:35 am

        That transformation predated McGovern by about 40 years.

        McGovern ran a terrible campaign, especially so for the times. With the Kennedy, MLK, and Wallace assassinations and LBJ’s death plus Chappaquiddick, the Democratic party establishment and the liberal movement leadership were in disarray. HHH was discredited after being VP and losing in 1968. And George Meany was the worst union leader in the history of the world by choosing to work with Nixon.

        McGovern stepped into that vacuum in an unprepared manner. He confirmed, inadvertently in some cases, every DFH meme of the time. He would have had to been very skilled and much luckier than he was to have made the race competitive. The whole Eagleton fiasco simply confirmed every worst misconception of the Democratic Party being unfit to govern.

        I don’t think McGovern had anything to do with the rightward shift of the country (see Nixon’s Silent Majority speech), he was a casualty of the trend. But he did damage the Democratic brand so severely on national security issues that 40 years later the typical Secretary of Defense in a Democratic administration is a Republican.

        Reply
        • losgatosca says:
          October 21, 2012 at 10:41 am

          Carter didn’t help the Democratic Party brand on national security issues either, for obvious reasons.

          Reply
          • Leeds man says:
            October 21, 2012 at 1:21 pm

            for obvious reasons

            Does this come down to the failed rescue attempt in the Iran hostage crisis? Carter wears that, yet Reagan gets a pass for Beirut and Iran-Contra. Still astounding after all these years.

            Reply
            • Holden Pattern says:
              October 21, 2012 at 5:39 pm

              It’s not in any way astounding. The Republicans invested heavily in propaganda mills, and the Dems are still floundering around wondering what causes public opinion to happen.

              Reply
            • losgatosca says:
              October 21, 2012 at 6:12 pm

              I didn’t say it was fair. I said it was obvious.

              McGovern created an expectation that Democrats were soft and incompetent. True expectation or not, the next big public test was the Iran hostage situation which confirmed for enough people that the new brand of the Democrats was weak on national security so that Reagan became an acceptable alternative. The fact that Reagan was a myth is unfortunately irrelevant – see Beirut, Iran contra, etc.

              And since then both Democratic administrations have had Republicans serve as SoD. That’s a pretty strong, and I would say embarrassing, trend and it started with McGovern.

              Reply
        • John says:
          October 21, 2012 at 11:49 am

          Brown, Aspin, Perry, and Panetta were/are all Democrats – only Cohen and Gates were Republicans. That seems like a bit of an exaggeration.

          Reply
          • losgatosca says:
            October 21, 2012 at 7:11 pm

            How many Democrats served as SoD under Republicans? And if you want to take credit for Aspin, go ahead

            And doing the math, including Aspin – who again demonstrated Democrats ‘weakness’ on security issues that makes the most important job outside of the president in any administration being an appointment to a Republican 3Henie the time when a Democrat is the president.

            You may classify that as an exaggeration – I’d classify that as public confession of a very weak bench and even worse, very little passion in an area that the public at large places a great deal of value. Next time you think of why Democrats are given the ‘wimp’ designation by the Villagers, just consider the likelihood of any Republican EVER appointing a Democrat to be their SoD.

            Reply
            • losgatosca says:
              October 21, 2012 at 7:16 pm

              That’s 33% of the time – have no idea why the iPhone made that substitution.

              33% is a very embarrassing statistic in this regard.

              Which does not exaggerate the damage done to the Democratic brand on national security issues.

              Reply
    • IM says:
      October 21, 2012 at 10:16 am

      Actually the primary system created by McGovern is still the system operating now. And that was one reason he did win: He understood the new system better then the old powers.

      As far as terrible politician goes – how did supporting Nixon did work out for the unions in the end?

      Reply
      • Steve LaBonne says:
        October 21, 2012 at 10:23 am

        Yeah, I’d say it’s George Meaney who was the rally terrible politician. The working class is still paying the price.

        Reply
        • John says:
          October 21, 2012 at 10:26 am

          Meany was certainly short-sighted, in general, but how did supporting Nixon, per se lead to bad results for labor?

          Reply
          • joe from Lowell says:
            October 21, 2012 at 10:33 am

            Labor support for Nixon was never per se. It was part of a larger trend in which a larger number working class, union-affiliated people moved from the Democrats to the Republicans, culminating in support for Ronald Reagan.

            That larger movement was, obviously, bad for labor.

            Reply
            • John says:
              October 21, 2012 at 11:46 am

              Yes, but the specific decision of AFL-CIO leaders to tacitly support Nixon in 1972 was only tangentially related to that larger trend. The Unions loved Mondale, and he did so badly with the working class, labor-affiliated types that we still have to talk about “Reagan Democrats.”

              Reply
      • John says:
        October 21, 2012 at 10:25 am

        Yes, McGovern ran a very clever primary campaign, due to being the only one to understand the new primary system. What good did it do? If you win the nomination in a way that completely alienates the people you need to rally to your cause to win the general election, it’s a bit of a Pyrrhic victory, no? (That’s ignoring the fact that much of the work of getting McGovern the nomination was done by Nixon’s dirty tricks campaign against Muskie)

        Maybe there was nothing McGovern could have done to get the support of Daley and Meany and the rest. But in that case, wouldn’t it have been better to have a solid liberal that those guys could support as the candidate (i.e. Muskie)?

        And, yeah, George Meany and Lane Kirkland’s AFL-CIO is hardly a model of forward-thinking political behavior either.

        Reply
        • IM says:
          October 21, 2012 at 10:29 am

          Who knows? Perhaps they would have deserted Muskie too.

          And the candidate of the old party – Humphrey was tried in 1968 and failed.

          You are personalizing the deep rifts in the democratic party, already apparent by 1968 and full blown in 1972. Any candidate would have got in trouble with either of the wings.

          Reply
          • John says:
            October 21, 2012 at 11:42 am

            Muskie was an ideal candidate to bring the party together, actually. He didn’t have the onus of the Johnson administration’s Vietnam policies hanging over him, like Humphrey, and he didn’t alienate the old-line party establishment like McGovern. There would have still been rifts, certainly, but they would have been much less. There’s a reason Nixon put so much effort into destroying Muskie.

            And obviously the rifts weren’t inevitably going to lose the Democrats presidential elections at that point. They won despite them in 1976 with a candidate very far at one end of the party schism, and in 1968 they very nearly won with a candidate who was much more polarizing than Muskie (although probably not very different from him in actual policies).

            Party divisions don’t necessarily lead to landslide defeats, and 1984 shows us that relative party unity doesn’t necessarily prevent them. The scale of the catastrophe in 1972 was pretty unique, and I don’t see how you can avoid putting much of the blame for that on McGovern.

            Reply
            • IM says:
              October 21, 2012 at 11:58 am

              The scale of the catastrophe in 1972 was pretty unique,

              You already mentioned 1984 and I will add 1980.

              And 1976 was post watergate and even then it was a narrow win.

              Now you could just blame McGovern, Carter, Mondale.

              But that explanation is tad to superficial.

              Reply
    • Murc says:
      October 21, 2012 at 11:31 am

      instead the McGovern campaign basically gratuitously insulted them, to the point that a lot of them ended up tacitly backing Nixon.

      If you go to work for Richard Nixon because your fee-fees got hurt, seems to me that’s a failure on YOUR part, rather than the person who hurled a perfectly accurate insult your way.

      Reply
      • John says:
        October 21, 2012 at 11:44 am

        Most of them didn’t go to work for Nixon, they just sat on their hands. And insulting those assholes (not “accurately” – the insult was to completely sideline them during the convention and win the nomination without even trying to secure their support until after he’d done it; it wasn’t calling them names) may be just what they deserve, but it’s not a strategy for winning a presidential election.

        Reply
        • Murc says:
          October 21, 2012 at 12:20 pm

          Most of them didn’t go to work for Nixon, they just sat on their hands.

          That’s basically working for Nixon. If you’re a party functionary and you sit on your hands during a Presidential election, you are working for the other side. Period.

          the insult was to completely sideline them during the convention and win the nomination without even trying to secure their support until after he’d done it; it wasn’t calling them names)

          That makes it even WORSE. Oh noes, someone won a primary without pandering to your specific demographic slice/power base of the party?

          Hey, you know when that’s happened to me? Literally every election my adult life. Granted, I’m not old, so that’s not a huge number. But its always been the same thing; guy who is way more conservative than I’d like wins their primary by running on relentlessly centrist policies that would have been part of a Republican platform forty years ago, and then I am expected to vote for them because the Republicans are disastrous.

          If that applies to me, it applies doubly to people who are actually employed by the Democratic Party. I don’t get to stop doing my job just because my boss disregards my opinions, and neither do they. They have the same option I do: quit.

          Reply
          • John says:
            October 21, 2012 at 12:31 pm

            I’m not denying that those guys were being assholes. The point is that you have no business being the Democratic nominee for president if you can’t get those people to work for you. McGovern’s job was to get those people on board, and he couldn’t do it.

            Reply
            • jeer9 says:
              October 21, 2012 at 12:48 pm

              Doesn’t this situation speak to the very nature of the current Dem party? A center-right nominee is the only acceptable choice, and, if someone further to the left is selected, then the leadership/party bureaucrats desert him (of course, not before claiming the failure is all his).

              The party could be working to make itself more progressive by funding challengers to hacks like McCaskill, but then no liberal in Missouri could ever beat an intellectual dynamo like Akin. And with visionaries like Wasserman-Schultz in charge, a change won’t be happening any time soon.

              Cuomo in 2016! For an even slower, more imperceptible decline!

              Reply
              • Murc says:
                October 21, 2012 at 1:46 pm

                The party could be working to make itself more progressive by funding challengers to hacks like McCaskill, but then no liberal in Missouri could ever beat an intellectual dynamo like Akin.

                Are you saying this isn’t true?

                McCaskill might still lose, and that’s to an idiot like Akin. Against a more adept liar, she’d be dead meat. But you claim someone MORE liberal than her would do BETTER in Missouri?

                It seems to me the problem isn’t McCaskill. The problem is MISSOURI. Rather than targeting McCaskill in a way that will basically guarantee we lose a Senate seat that, if nothing else, is one more vote for Mitch McConnell as Majority Leader, the party ought to be concentrating on changing the electorate in Missouri such that we can field a better candidate who ALSO has a prayer of winning.

                Reply
                • jeer9 says:
                  October 21, 2012 at 2:22 pm

                  A Rasmussen poll three days ago put her up by eight points. Maybe the final tally will be closer, but it appears to me to be an opportunity lost. Not that the Dems don’t specialize in those.

                • djw says:
                  October 21, 2012 at 4:30 pm

                  538 currently has her up by 4.3, with an 87% chance of winning. Don’t cherry-pick your favorite poll.

                  It’s also worth noting that a primary challenge to Mccaskill would have to have been organized long before Akin was the nominee. He lead in basically no polls prior to the primary election and won with 36%. His two main opponents were less idiotic orthodox conservatives of the sort that would have easily won against anyone notably to the left of McCaskill. I’m sympathetic to the general strategy you’re suggesting when it makes sense. But in this particular case, it would have required some temporally impossible knowledge even if you assume someone notably to the left of Mccaskill could beat Akin, which is far from clear.

                • jeer9 says:
                  October 21, 2012 at 5:36 pm

                  Well, it’s reassuring to know that one of the ways to move the Dems left (through primary challenge) only requires great planning and impossible knowledge. I suppose we’ll get “there” about the same time progressive activists wrest control from the corporate powers and reform our polity from within. In the mean time, it would be nice if Wasserman-Schultz possessed some common knowledge, like the nature of BHO’s kill list.

            • IM says:
              October 21, 2012 at 1:17 pm

              So your explanation for the 2000 result is: Gore had the job to get Nader voters on board and couldn’t do it?

              Other parts of an electoral coalition party have obligations too. Not just the candidate.

              Reply
              • John says:
                October 21, 2012 at 2:43 pm

                “Nader voters” is not the same thing as “a substantial part of the basic infrastructure of the party.”

                Reply
                • IM says:
                  October 21, 2012 at 5:06 pm

                  O of course. This rule you invented is only valid for evil liberals. Good moderates can demand loyalty. And are not obligated to do anything.

                  That is an idiotic way to run a political coalition.

              • John says:
                October 21, 2012 at 6:40 pm

                And no doubt other parts of the electoral coalition has responsibilities. I’m not saying McGovern is entirely to blame for what happened. What I’m saying is that McGovern bears some responsibility.

                The basic issue here is that McGovern designed a new apparatus for determining the party’s presidential nominee, and then exploited his knowledge of the new system to wrest control of the nomination out of the hands of the people who traditionally controlled it. This strategy would have been fine, I suppose, if McGovern could have won without the help of those people. But he couldn’t. And, ultimately, what he was doing was far more threatening to their power than Nixon was. I advise you to look again at the totally unscrupulous way he took over the Illinois delegation. He basically gratuitously humiliated Daley, and not in a way that bore any relationship to electoral democracy (It’s true that the Daley-run slate of individually elected delegates was not a triumph of democratic self-governance, but the installed pro-Mcgovern delegation was completely unelected.) Daley deserved it, probably. But at that point, you can’t reasonably expect the help of the Daley machine in getting the vote out in Chicago, can you?

                The tactics McGovern used to win the Democratic nomination were totally self-defeating, because they were specifically designed as an all out attack on the party elites that he would need to win the general election. The issue wasn’t that he insulted them, or that he was too left wing for them. It’s that his entire campaign was an all out assault on their power within the party.

                If the only way McGovern could win the nomination was by an all out assault on the power of the party regulars, it would have been better not to win the nomination at all.

                I’m not really defending the Daleys and the Meanys and the Humphreys of the party who basically left McGovern to die. They were being unscrupulous bastards. But the McGovern campaign was basically a self-defeating proposition by design.

                So McGovern’s campaign strategy left him with no real chance of winning the election. That’s fine, I guess, if it accomplished other important goals, like putting the anti-war left into a position to take over the party the way the Goldwater campaign did for movement conservatives. But it didn’t do that in any way. Nothing good came out of it. Perhaps this was because, unlike the movement conservatives, the “anti-war left” was such a heterogeneous grouping that it didn’t survive the end of the war – and the war actually ended only a few days into Nixon’s second term, so it’s not like a McGovern presidency would actually have changed what happened in Vietnam. On the subjects that would actually matter over the 20 years that followed the 1972 defeat, McGovern was not even discernibly to the left of Muskie and Humphrey. All three of them were much more liberal on domestic issues than Jimmy Carter.

                I guess I don’t see what the point of violently splitting the party over a war that was drawing to a close anyway is supposed to have accomplished that I should admire McGovern for it. There’s plenty of blame to go around here, but the whole thing was just a fiasco.

                Reply
            • Pestilence says:
              October 21, 2012 at 1:41 pm

              He ran on the not-unreasonable-at-the-time assumption that party unity would bring everyone on board, just as his wing had in ’68 … and he got betrayed. Hell, he even offered compromises to them before and after being nominated (e.g. Eagleton, Shriver) and those were rejected too.

              Reply
              • John says:
                October 21, 2012 at 2:59 pm

                Humphrey didn’t pull any of the procedural shenanigans that McGovern had to use to get the nomination. Sure, McGovern tried to get their support, but only after he’d totally run roughshod over them to get the nomination in the first place.

                More broadly speaking, I don’t see how you can say that a presidential candidate has no responsibility for the fact that in order to win the nomination, he alienated so much of his own party’s hierarchy that they refused to support him. This doesn’t happen very often, and it doesn’t happen by accident.

                Reply
            • Murc says:
              October 21, 2012 at 1:43 pm

              The point is that you have no business being the Democratic nominee for president if you can’t get those people to work for you.

              Uh, McGovern won the primary, dude. Not only that, he won a primary that was more controlled by the actual rank and file of the party than any had been to date.

              You have your responsibilities mixed up. It is the responsibility of the party hacks to bow to the will of their rank and file members, who ultimately are their bosses. It was not McGovern’s responsibility to ‘get them to work for him.’

              Reply
              • John says:
                October 21, 2012 at 2:45 pm

                Of course it was his responsibility. He’s the one who wants to be elected president. He needs those assholes to be elected president. If it’s literally impossible for him to get them on board, he shouldn’t have been the candidate in the first place, because he has no chance of winning the election.

                Reply
                • John says:
                  October 21, 2012 at 2:54 pm

                  Another point – the 1972 process was a complete mess. There were about 22 primaries, of which McGovern won 8. The only genuinely contested primaries McGovern won were Wisconsin and California.

                  He won by being better organized in the non-primary states, which nobody else really understood how to do. And then he treated his opponents absolutely ruthlessly at the convention in order to secure his win, and in a pretty clearly undemocratic way. His people ousted an elected Illinois delegation on grounds that it wasn’t diverse enough and installed a self-appointed delegation in its place that was entirely pro-McGovern. Then, while taking advantage of rules for proportional delegate distribution in states that they lost, they voted to allow California’s delegation to be awarded en masse to McGovern, even though this violated their own rules. It was a pretty outrageous exercise of pure power, and it’s no wonder that the people McGovern screwed over to get himself the nomination were pissed off. I don’t see how any of that has much to do with democracy – if anything, it was the ruthlessness of the McGovern people in securing their victory that alienated their intra-party rivals.

                  My basic point is that if, to secure the nomination, you have to do things that will irrevocably alienate large elements of your own party hierarchy to the point where they won’t support you, then it’s not worth winning the nomination, because you’re certain to lose.

            • Holden Pattern says:
              October 21, 2012 at 5:42 pm

              So, if Obama can’t get lefties to work for him, it’s his fault? Because the consensus seems to be EXACTLY NOT THAT. It’s the lefties’ fault for being assholes.

              Reply
              • John says:
                October 21, 2012 at 6:19 pm

                Alienating voters is not the same thing as alienating the entire organizational apparatus of the political coalition of which you are nominally the head.

                Reply
                • IM says:
                  October 22, 2012 at 5:08 am

                  So nobody is anytime to blame – except McGovern.

                  You are basically scapegoating McGovern for the self-destructive behavior of the democratic establishment in 1972.

                  And even if he Illinois tussle excuses Daley – it doesn’t excuses the rest.

            • Ed says:
              October 21, 2012 at 7:04 pm

              The point is that you have no business being the Democratic nominee for president if you can’t get those people to work for you.

              “Daley is the ballgame.”
              – Robert F. Kennedy

              Reply
    • Ed says:
      October 21, 2012 at 1:41 pm

      McGovern basically won the nomination by staging a hostile takeover of the Democratic Party. Not that there was anything great about the old Democratic establishment, but to have any hope of winning an election as a Democrat, you have to get them on board, and instead the McGovern campaign basically gratuitously insulted them, to the point that a lot of them ended up tacitly backing Nixon.

      This.

      Reply
    • Bill Murray says:
      October 21, 2012 at 6:28 pm

      what are you George meaney’s grandson?

      George McGovern basically started the Democratic party in South Dakota. he turned it from a moribund party that had essentially no major statewide offices held (and no election wins for 16 years) and within 15 years held 4 of the 5 major offices and have remained competitive for the House and the Senate since — at least 2 of the 3 or 4 seats have been Democratic from 1980 through 2010.

      McGovern may not have run a good campaign, but he was a very good politician.

      Reply
      • John says:
        October 21, 2012 at 6:44 pm

        Okay, fair enough, McGovern was very gifted at building the Democratic Party in South Dakota. He was not very good at being its presidential nominee. Ultimately, if I’m assessing McGovern’s abilities as a politician, I’m going to put more weight on the ineptitude of his national campaign than I am on his admirable party-building in one of the smallest states in the country. Because the former is much more important than the latter.

        Reply
  9. Ted says:
    October 21, 2012 at 3:55 pm

    This thread is why I love this blog so much. As soon as I saw that there were 60 comments on this post on the front page I knew that I was going to get McGovern argument I wanted to read.

    Reply
  10. Bitter Scribe says:
    October 21, 2012 at 8:54 pm

    I was one of the few who saw his acceptance speech at 3 a.m. at the Democratic convention. It was one of the most moving political speeches I’ve ever seen, and I think 99% of them are crap.

    Reply

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