FAREWELL GEORGE MCGOVERN

From Daily Kos:

He is best remembered for his disastrous 1972 presidential campaign against incumbent Richard Nixon, in which he only won a majority of votes in Massachusetts and the District of Columbia. Less than two years after his defeat, however, McGovern saw Nixon wave goodbye as he was helicoptered away from the White House after resigning in disgrace over the Watergate affair. One popular bumpersticker of the time read: "Don't blame me, I'm from Massachusetts." That same year, 1974, McGovern won his third and final term in the U.S. Senate.

His brand of politics was used by the Republicans to define other Democratic candidates for decades. A "McGovern liberal" was allegedly soft on defense, weak on the drug war, too compassionate for the poor and too interested in expanding government social programs. It was while campaigning in Nebraska in '72 that he was tarred with another Republican sound-bite that alliteratively transformed him into the candidate of "amnesty, acid and abortion." He did support amnesty for Vietnam draft protesters, including those of us who went to prison rather than serve, was pro-choice on reproductive rights despite personal opposition to abortion and backed reduced penalties for marijuana use, which his enemies managed to twist into favoring the use of hallucinogenic LSD.

The whole effort was an attempt to tie McGovern to radicals like SDS leader Tom Hayden and other leftists who had vigorously opposed the Vietnam War and proposed changes in the American system of governance that some people, including some of the radicals, called revolution. McGovern was no revolutionary. But that didn't stop him from being "swift-boated" before the term was invented.

More here.

George McGovern had the extreme misfortune to be running for president in the era when the once powerful New Deal coalition that had kept the Democrats strong for decades was falling apart, while at the same time his Republican opponent Richard Nixon was perfecting the now common "politics of personal destruction."  Neither the Party, nor McGovern, had any idea what hit them.

Indeed, the Democrats have been essentially wandering in the wilderness since then, with the odd Presidential victory here and there, and the odd majority in Congress.  But always moving further to the right, always trying to win on a playing field determined by the Republicans.  McGovern's devastating loss in 1972 was nothing short of a damning omen of the decades to come.  And really, his party still hasn't figured it out.

But McGovern had no way of knowing, at that point, what was going on.  He knew that the relationship between Democrats and labor was contentious, to say the least, but he had no understanding that it was over for that once seemingly invulnerable alliance.  He knew that the Civil Rights Act meant the loss of Southern Democrats, but just couldn't foresee how the GOP would embrace Southern racism with coded language combined with cracked-out anti-welfare rhetoric.  He had no way of understanding that his party's own self-destruction combined with viscous Republican opportunism would spell the end of the liberal era in which he came of age.

But that's kind of why I respect the guy.

He was pure.  He was a liberal without apology.  He didn't "triangulate."  He didn't suck corporate dick in exchange for campaign cash.  He supported the labor unions.  He opposed war and poverty.  Actually, he's the kind of guy I wish was running the Democratic Party today.  An actual liberal.  But history smashed him, and we've not seen his like achieving such a position within the party since then.  As Rhett Butler says in Gone with the Wind, "I've always had a weakness for lost causes, once they're really lost."  In that sense, I believe the former Senator from South Dakota was a great man.

Farewell, George McGovern.

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