George McGovern: His Liberalism had nothing to do w/ '72 defeat

[CMT]

The current issue of Playboy has a long article written by George McGovern on the nature of the 1972 campaign and how it relates to 2004 and especially comparisons between himself and Howard Dean.

McGovern makes the point that his "liberalism" wasn't what defeated him in '72. He makes persausive points that the reasons for his loss were:

1)The absence of George Wallace running as an Independent. Wallace was one of the leading Democrats in the '72 primaries winning in Florida, Michigan, and Maryland. But his views on civil rights would not have allowed him to be nominated by the Democratic Party and so Wallace would have run as an Independent in '72 the same as he did in 1968 when he won 13% of the vote. McGovern believes that had Wallace not been shot and disabled by an assassins bullet and actually run in '72 he would have done as well as Ross Perot did in 1992. So most of the Wallace vote swung heavily to Nixon, who had adopted a "southern strategy" once he was installed in the white house.

2) The selection of Thomas Eagleton and his removal from the Democratic ticket. McGovern takes the blame for this. When news came out that Eagleton had received shock treatments for depression McGovern made his famous statement about supporting Eagleton "1,000 percent." only to remove him from the ticket days later when he felt pressure from key Democratic groups. In retrospect McGovern feels he should have withstood the pressure and kept Eagleton on the ticket.

3) The third reason McGovern gives for his defeat is that he never got his best chance to speak directly to the American People when he delivered his acceptance speech. Becuz balloting for VP took so long he delivered this most important speech at 2:47 am east coast time--well after most people went to bed.

To further bolster his point that an his "outsider" reputation was not the reason he lost in 1972, McGovern points out that "my friend" Walter Mondale was the establishment candidate in 1984--winning heavy duty endorsements from establishment democrats and the AFL-CIO endorsement only to meet the same fate that McGovern did in '72, lose 49 states.

I have no link, becuz it is not online, but it made fascinating reading.

1. I was just thinking the same thing yesterday.

Weird.
I particularly agree with reasons 2 and 3. Hadn't thought about reason 1.
I was thinking about this in reference to Dean's grass roots campaign and McGovern's.
I was 16 in 1972 and McGovern's campaign was the first one I actively worked on.

[HootieMcBoob]

2. guess i'll have to buy that edition

for the mcgovern article of course :)

[mlawson]

3. I dunno. Could anyone have beaten Nixon in 1972??

I doubt it. Just like Ronnie in 1984, and Clinton in 1996. Voters LIKED Ronnie and Big Dog, and felt secure with Nixon.

Who else could have run in 1972?? Muskie was a Mondale, and Teddy Kennedy's chances had been destroyed by Chappaquiddick. Humphrey was through with it, and Carter was still unknown. Who have I left out, if anyone?

[Mairead]

4. It sounds about right

My main reason for not voting for him was the sense of having been steamrollered by his machine during the caucus. My second reason (but I think the first reason for a lot of people from the way they made '1000%' an epithet) was his shameful treatment of Eagleton.

[birdman]

17. Shameful trreatment ?

Eagleton lied to him. He knew full well that his
background was deadly for a national campaign but
told McGovern that he had no "skeletons". McGovern
handled the issue terribly but it was a lose-lose
situation and Eagleton should have been honest.

[Mairead]

27. Yes, shameful treatment

By 1972, treatment for depression was no longer grounds for people backing away with their eyes bugged out. I ran into only a few people with your attitude; the rest were more tolerant. But everybody was contemptuous of McGovern. The most pro-McGovern attitude to be found was 'he should have dumped him right away, not say he supports him and then dump him'.

[birdman]

33. If the public was so enlightened about depression why did Eagleton lie ?

Simple. The public was nowhere near so enlightened.

Eagleton knew that McGovern would have had to go to his second
choice if he knew the truth. So he lied to the McGovern people
and left a time bomb ticking in the campaign.

Agreed that McGovern handled it badly but he was faced with two bad choices (dump a running mate or keep one with deadly baggage).
The fault, however, is Eagletons.

[Mairead]

37. He lied for the same reason Clinton lied about Monica

It's none of anyone's damned business, just as FDR's use of a wheelchair wasn't.

Treatment for paranoia, schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, or some of the neuroses would be problematic, but treatment for depression should not be any more than treatment for a broken arm should be.

[birdman]

39. So it was none of McGovern's business Eagleton was hiding a time bomb

that was going to destroy the campaign. Hellooooo!

Eagleton lied for the exact same reason that Clinton lied -
to protect himself from embarrassment (personal and political).
Do you think Bill was trying to protect some great principle
of personal privacy or else he would have told the world
exactly where he had been putting the Presidential prong?

If treatment for depression (electro-shock therapy by the way)
was not "any more than treatment for a broken arm" then Eagleton
should have brought it up while he was running for the Senate from Missouri. But he didn't because he knew it was a liability. And
he allowed it to ruin the McGovern campaign and damage the national party.

I worked for McGovern that fall and I have never forgiven that creep Eagleton for torpedoing the campaign. Screw him.

[denverbill]

5. I disagree with McGovern, and I'm surprised he says this stuff.

Personally, I think the reason he lost so bad was that Nixon was able to claim he'd ended the Vietnam War. He was pulling troops out all year long. Without the war issue, McGovern had nothing to campaign on.

[CMT]

6. I think that was an issue as well

along with everything McG said.

8. history

History is strange.
It sure didn't feel to me like the Vietnam War was over in '72. Not the way I remember it.
But others might remember differently.
Plus they were still giving out lottery numbers for the draft until the end of 1974.

[AP]

9. McGovern didn't see what was happening then, so I'm not surprised

that he still doesn't get it now.

[Muddleoftheroad]

16. When you run too far left

You run away from the rest of America. George didn't grasp that. Thirty years later he is still trying to rationalize getting his ass kicked by Nixon of all people.

[Classical_Liberal]

25. You think running left of Reagan is too far left

.

[Muddleoftheroad]

34. You think

If that is the accurate term, that anyone who disagrees with you is a winger. Tain't true. There are bunch of Democrats who are much more in step with the rest of America. Run away from us and you lose elections.

[AP]

35. Actually, I think the issue was more that he ran on a single issue.

When you define yourself according to a single issue, especially one that's controled by the other side, you run the risk of having that issue removed.

Dean is almost entirely defined by opposition ot Bush's Iraq war. If Bush didn't run/pulled out of Iraq, nobody would know who or what Dean was.

This is part of the reason why LBJ said you have to run FOR something. You can't be against everything. Once you've defined yourself in terms of what you're for, the other side can never take that away.

[Muddleoftheroad]

38. I think you mischaracterize Dean

And I'm no Dean supporter. But I see him as a three-dimensional candidate, not a one-issue concept.

[Zuni]

10. I think that is very true

Nixon had made it seem like the war was at it's very end by election day, only to bomb the shit out of hanoi a couple of weeks after it.

[AP]

7. McGovern ran on one issue: opposition to Vietnam

All Nixon needed to do was talk about his secret plan to end the war, talk about ending the draft, and there went the rug out from underneath McGovern.

Bush will do the same thing with Iraq.

They're bringing us way down on the economy and on Iraq so that we can come up a little before the election and feel like everything's headed in the right direction.

[Zuni]

11. I sure as hell hope not

because there alot of things I hate about bush and iraq is only a small part of it.

[dolstein]

12. Blaming his loss on Wallace NOT running as an independent?

Frankly, that alone seems to be an admission that he was too liberal to win a majority of the popular vote. Besides, McGovern's share of the popular vote was still lower than what Humphrey received in a three candidate race in '68. And I seriously doubt Wallace would have had neadly as much impact in 1972 as he did in the earlier race.

[jiacinto]

13. And it was even lower than what Mondale and Dukakis

received in their landslides.

[Silverhair]

14. What about his other issues?

McGovern proposed that the Gov't send $1,000.00 annually to every man, woman & child in the U.S. (In today's terms that would be about 5,000 to 6,000) In the Dem debates another Dem said that the proposal would cost over 200Billion. McG said that was silly, and asked where that figure came from. The other Dem candidate replied that it was the population 200Million time 1,000. Grade school arithmatic. McG stayed with the idea. THAT PROPOSAL ALONE WAS ENOUGH TO CONVINCE PEOPLE THAT HE WAS NUTS.

He proposed reducing the military budget by 1/3. That was during the cold war, with a hot war going on.

The Eagleton affair could have been minor if he had handled it right. (Call Eagleton, confirm story, get Eagleton's resignation, Publicly announce that regretfully he was accepting the resignation of a good man, etc., replace Eagleton, keep going.) Instead he stuck by Eagleton 1000%, publicly announced that support, then dumped Eagleton. It made him look indecisive and two-faced.

The first two items by themselves would have been enough to defeat him. He was double digits behind in the polls before the Eagleton mess hit.

[Michael Harrington]

15. There's also the minor matter...

of him running against the foulest campaign organization in modern American history, one that (happily) sowed the seeds of it's own destruction in that very campaign. It's a good article.

And Shannen Doherty is very hot :loveya: especially for a Republican :evilgrin:

[Lydia Leftcoast]

18. I've said this before

but nobody even knew what McGovern's positions were, other than ending the war. His proposal for $1000 to everyone was rarely discussed, nor were most of his other issues.

Instead, he bore the brunt of middle America's feelings about the youth culture.

The news media always portrayed him as surrounded by long-haired supporters, and as if he had no issues other than the war.

The overwhelming votes for Nixon had little to do with McGovern and everything to do with middle America being horrified at the youth culture.

That was certainly the feeling I got listening to my parents' friends.

[Silverhair]

19. His positions were well known.

The Dems had their TV ads too. The $1,000 to everybody was discussed. After all, I still remember it 30 years later. There were lots of newpaper columnists that wrote about it. McGovern was able to get his message out, and it was rejected overwhelmingly.

[robcon]

20. I agree about the $1,000 to everyone.

I still remember that 31 years later, and it positioned McGovern as a nutjob - like Goldwater in 1964.

[JaneQPublic]

21. And wasn't there a little thing called Watergate?

Didn't the Repukes break into the Dem HQ before the election and steal info about campaign strategy ?

And didn't it go undiscovered until AFTER the election and Tricky Dick was returned for a second term?

[Silverhair]

23. Close, but not quite.

The break in was caugh red handed by a security guard. They had bugging gear on them so it was obvious that the Reps were trying to bug the Dems. It became a campaign issue, most people didn't care because they were afraid of McGovern.

The sad part is that McG understood war. He was a B-17 pilot in WWII and flew combat missions, if my memory is right.

[andym]

28. He was a WWII hero, but he chose to deemphasize it

He was a WWII hero, but he chose to not to emphasize it.


http://www.commondreams.org/views01/0910-04.htm

[Paschall]

30. Not to mention Nixon's Dirty Tricksters

Those wonderfully American agents who infiltrated, not only the McGovern campaign, but the anti-war camp to discredit it.

Who remembers J. Edgar Hoover's greasy little hands in that abhorrent distortion of the political process? Or Donald Segretti, who was hired specifically by the Committee to Re-elect the President to "harass" Democratic candidates?

<snip> The crisis of Watergate began with wiretaps in 1969 on an "enemies list" of those who opposed of the secret Cambodia invasion, the Tom Huston plan in 1970 to investigate protesters and cause their arrest and possible mass internment, the creation of the White House plumbers unit under John Ehrlichman to plug leaks such as Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers in 1971, the CRP organization and the use of dirty tricks in the 1972 campaign, led by Donald Segretti and CRP legal counsel G. Gordon Liddy, including the first break-in of the Democratic National Committee headquarters in May 1972 to plant a wiretap on the telephone of Larry O'Brien. </snip>

http://history.sandiego.edu/gen/20th/nixon01.html

[jiacinto]

22. He got only 37%

Americans rejected him decisively--his platform did play a role in that.

[Classical_Liberal]

26. So we should have stayed in Viet Nam?

nice!

[Silverhair]

36. We did stay. Nixon won. n/t

[andym]

24. I'm not sure if he would have even been the nominee if

I'm not sure if he would have even been the nominee if
Nixon's dirty tricks hadn't taken out Muskie.

[0rganism]

29. Wait.... how can he say "liberalism" wasn't what defeated him when...

the VERY FIRST ITEM you listed pertains to the essence of liberalism.

Nixon's "southern strategy" was aimed at picking up the dixiecrat votes the Democratic party sacrificed by supporting civil rights.

Something just doesn't add up there.

[Name removed]

31. Deleted message

Message removed by moderator. Click here to review the message board rules.

[Ani Yun Wiya]

32. How did you end up at this site?

nt