Posted on 11/05/2003 3:54:38 AM PST by RJCogburn
To George McGovern, it all looks very familiar.
Mr. McGovern, the last insurgent Democrat to run for president on an antiwar platform, sees parallels between the 1972 race and the current campaign. And in the candidacy of Howard Dean, he hears echoes of his own.
The pivotal issue in the coming primaries, Mr. McGovern said in an interview, is sure to be the "foolish war in Iraq," just as the Vietnam War was central to his own campaign for the Democratic nomination. Next year, he believes, Democratic voters will insist on a nominee who is outspoken against the war, just as they did then. "I don't see that this war has any more to commend it than Vietnam did," he said.
More than three decades ago, the presidential candidacies of two Democratic senators — Mr. McGovern, from South Dakota, and Eugene J. McCarthy, from Minnesota — transformed their party, making it more liberal and inviting accusations that it was antimilitary and too dovish in foreign policy. Mr. McGovern won the 1972 nomination but was trounced by President Richard M. Nixon in November. Mr. McCarthy drove President Lyndon B. Johnson from the 1968 race but lost the nomination to Hubert H. Humphrey.
It seemed worthwhile to interview the two men, both retired from politics and in their 80's, to see what they thought of the current race.
Mr. McCarthy, who is 87 and lives in a retirement home in Georgetown, said he had not been paying much attention to this year's campaign.
But Mr. McGovern, who is 81 and was reached by telephone at his office at Dakota Wesleyan University, where he is helping to raise money for the George and Eleanor McGovern Library and Center for Public Service, has been avidly following the presidential contest and has strong views about it.
Mr. McGovern wrote a long article in praise of Dr. Dean in the December issue of Playboy. He said the other day in the interview that Dr. Dean "has the best force of grass-roots workers of any candidate, and he has handled himself very well."
But Mr. McGovern also said he was not committed to Dr. Dean.
What does he think of the other Democratic candidates?
He is "very high" on Gen. Wesley K. Clark, "with what he says and his background and his ability to reach lots of people."
He expects Senator John Kerry "to be a very strong candidate," though Mr. Kerry "hasn't caught on as quickly as I thought he would." The principal problem with the senator's campaign, in Mr. McGovern's view, is the vote he cast in favor of the Congressional resolution that authorized use of force against Iraq.
"If he's having second thoughts now, as he seems to be," Mr. McGovern said, "he should say straight out that he was deceived."
In Representative Richard A. Gephardt, Mr. McGovern sees "a very smart, capable guy." But he said Mr. Gephardt and Senators Joseph I. Lieberman and John Edwards were "under a cloud" because of their votes to authorize the war.
"You need to appeal to rank-and-file Americans to win" a general election, Mr. McGovern said. But winning the nomination, he added, is something else, and this is working to Dr. Dean's advantage.
"To win the nomination, you have to activate the voters," Mr. McGovern said. "Primary and caucus voters are the committed people who care about the issues, and in this instance about the war, and they are the ones who are prepared to go out in a blizzard to someone's house for a caucus or to a fire station to vote."
He added that although it was "still a serious problem for Democrats to be considered weak on defense," he thought the war in Iraq would be so unpopular by next year that President Bush could be defeated by an antiwar candidate.
In his own case, Mr. McGovern said, "no Democrat could have beaten Nixon" in 1972. But he said his showing would have been much stronger had George C. Wallace not been forced from the campaign, badly wounded in a shooting.
Mr. Nixon carried every state that year except Massachusetts. Had Mr. Wallace remained in the race, he would have carried all the Southern states as a third-party candidate, Mr. McGovern said, and taken enough votes away from Mr. Nixon in other states that Mr. McGovern might have carried 10 or 12.
In the Democratic primaries of 1972, Mr. McGovern said, he faced formidable candidates, like Mr. Humphrey, Mr. Wallace, Edmund S. Muskie and Henry M. Jackson.
"I think the field of '72 was more capable than this year's group," he said. But he added, "Every time I've heard them this year, I think they're better than they were the last time."
Of course, with Nixon we got OSHA, EPA, Title IX, OEO, and the antithesis of a free society, wage and price controls.
Like the N.Y. Times, David E. Rosenbaum's idea of what is "worthwhile", and the general public's idea of what is "worthwhile", are separated by a difference of about the distance from the earth to the moon.
Or, better yet, like Muskie of Maine he could say he was "brainwashed," then bawl like a baby.
I think it's more like how to win the nomination...and loose the election.
It was the Republican George Romney who was brainwashed and Muskie who wept in front of the Union Leader building, another victim of the weeding out we do here in NH.
No need to thank us up here..we already know.
Yes. Bill Loeb had written one of his to the point and not always nice front page editorials critical of Muskie's wife. He got up on a flat bed in front of the building to 'call him out'. His partisans claimed he didn't weep, but that snow flakes in his face made it appear so.
Who knows, but the weepy story is so much better and more believeable, imo.
And the Democrat candidate will lose just as decisively as McGovern did. They haven't learned a thing in 30 years.
Nixon and McGovern were both socialist internationalists.
the elections of 1968 and 1972 were a civil war within the (then) Leftist ruling class.
In retrospect, their high-water mark in electoral politics was the mid-term elections of 1974. Their power with the people has been declining ever since.
And they're pretty angry about it.
Is this the same McCarthy who was accusing people of being Communists back in the 1950s? Or a relative, perhaps?
In other words, "Vote for me -- I'm easily fooled!" (Not that I think the administration was lying, just that that's the logic of what McGovern is suggesting.)
As for the rest -- either Jackson or Humphrey would have been stronger candidates than McGovern -- in fact, of all the available candidates in 1972, McGovern was undoubtedly the worst choice, in terms of electability, and he went on to prove it in one of the most inept presidential campaigns in living memory.
That business about Wallace is eyewash. I don't believe he would have run as a third party candidate in 1972; he tried it in 1968, and it didn't work. But he was having significant success in the Democratic primaries, and might have had enough delegates to force the nominee to kiss his ring if he hadn't been shot. That would have been quite a spectacle.
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