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News & ArtsSunday, October 21, 2012
Death / Politics George McGovern, R.I.P.
Posted by Goldy on Sun, Oct 21, 2012 at 11:54 AM
I once heard Senator George McGovern give an interview in which he talked about the roots of his liberalism. His father was a Methodist minister—a Republican—and one Sunday after church, chatting with congregants as they left to go home, a neighbor started complaining about how high his income tax bill was that year.
"Praise the Lord," McGovern recalled his father telling the complaining congregant. "You had a very good year."
McGovern, one of the great champions of liberalism, died early this morning at the age of 90.
McGovern was on the losing end of one of the greatest electoral defeats in US history, winning less than 38 percent of the vote against incumbent President Richard Nixon in 1972, and only 17 electoral college votes: those from Massachusetts and the District of Columbia. Republicans have worked hard since to conflate his electoral failure into a caricature of failed liberalism. It was a caricature, he told the New York Times, that he resented:
“I always thought of myself as a good old South Dakota boy who grew up here on the prairie,” he said in an interview for this obituary in 2005 in his home in Mitchell. “My dad was a Methodist minister. I went off to war. I have been married to the same woman forever. I’m what a normal, healthy, ideal American should be like.
“But we probably didn’t work enough on cultivating that image,” he added, referring to his campaign organization. “We were more interested in ending the war in Vietnam and getting people out of poverty and being fair to women and minorities and saving the environment.
“It was an issue-oriented campaign, and we should have paid more attention to image.”
When Republicans ridicule Democrats like McGovern, it is those values that they are ridiculing, not to mention the idea that issues should matter at least as much as image.
Twenty years ago I started a small business, which got me on all sorts of weird marketing lists. I still regularly get cold calls from financial advisors pitching me their latest investment opportunity or tax dodge. In fact, I got one just last week, offering me "an opportunity to protect your future earnings from higher taxes."
I tried to talk the guy off the phone as quickly and politely as possible, but he was typically persistent. I no longer operate that business, I told him, and I don't have any money to invest. He pushed on. "But what if your circumstances turn around?" he insisted. "What will you say the next time you're faced with a high tax bill?"
"Praise the lord!" I told him. And then I hung up.
2
" The Watergate burglary... it was a Haldeman operation. The whole business was run by Haldeman, the money... everything. It won't be easy getting at him. He was insulated somehow, you'll have to find out how. Mitchell started doing covert stuff before anyone else. The list of the people involved is longer than anyone can imagine. It involves the entire U.S. Intelligence Community. FBI... CIA... Justice... it's incredible. The cover-up had little to do with the Watergate foul-up. It was mainly to protect the covert operations. It leads everywhere."
Nixon was a traitor, rigged the '72 elections. The Republicans have never backed down from that approach. They'll steal your life savings and then insult you for being poor.
Nixon was a traitor, rigged the '72 elections. The Republicans have never backed down from that approach. They'll steal your life savings and then insult you for being poor.
3
Praise The Lord would be right. Fuck ups like Goldy rarely contribute to the federal income tax base.
4
Will Goldy give away the blood money he's made from his Apple stock or does he plan on profiting from child labor and human rights violations
5
Neither drafted soldiers, dead Vietnamese, the poor, women, minorities nor the environment vote.
McGovern brought a knife to a gun fight and should be remembered most as the guy who lost to Silent Majority Nixon.
We were more interested in ending the war in Vietnam and getting people out of poverty and being fair to women and minorities and saving the environment.
Neither drafted soldiers, dead Vietnamese, the poor, women, minorities nor the environment vote.
McGovern brought a knife to a gun fight and should be remembered most as the guy who lost to Silent Majority Nixon.
7
It's not easy to convey how high the stakes seemed in 1972, how much hope was invested in McGovern, and how crushing his landslide defeat. When McGovern and his longtime friend Gore Vidal appeared together at the Nixon Library in 2009 to talk about Abraham Lincoln, one of VIdal's remarks sums up how so many felt: "How different this was from 1972, when all seemed possible: 1972 convinced me that all things were not possible."
8
Fnarf said it best in the Morning News comments. I'll just add that not one of this year's Republican presidential candidates will be remembered as a great American (indeed, as anything other than a maggot on the body politic) ten or twenty years from now, let alone forty.
11
Meh. I used to have a dim view of tax cheats, however technically legal yet totally unethical they may be. But with our psychopathic, blood-thirsty, criminally insane KKKongress using all their power for more wars and enriching the super-wealthy while a sickening majority of AmeriKKKans cheer them on, I say take every legal tax dodge you can to starve this despicable, destructive monstrosity.
12
I liked McGovern as a person and politician, the man was a patriot no doubt, but he may have been too liberal for America. The two times the Democratic Party ran real liberals in modern times (1968 and 1984) we got crushed, and in 1988 the moderate governor of MA allowed himself to be portrayed as a liberal. I am not saying they have no place in the party, I am glad our leader in the House is a strong liberal, but maybe not the best when we pick our Presidential candidates.
13
Spelling America with KKK.... How rad! How 80s! How boring, college-educated, middle class, bourgeois white kid of you. Just accept what you are, and vote for centrism. Vote Obama.
14
"however technically legal yet totally unethical they may be"
So taking all my deductions is unethical? I shouldn't take them? Did you take any in '11?
So taking all my deductions is unethical? I shouldn't take them? Did you take any in '11?
15
The proof of liberalism is the history of the two men who fought in that election. McGovern was full of grace and dignity until the end. Nixon was a failed man who betrayed every principle a president should have. We never fucking learn.
16
@11 In the last 12 months the federal government has spent $787 billion on medicare and medicaid, $121 billion on food stamp benefits, and $113 billion on unemployment benefits. By contrast the Department of Defense got $683 billion, the State Department $62 billion, and the Department of Homeland Security $46 billion. The fact of the matter is that most of our tax dollars go to fund federal entitlement programs. Whatever their flaws I don't think programs like food stamps and medicare cause wars or enrich the super-wealthy.
17
Few men in history have been as completely vindicated in the aftermath of total defeat as George McGovern. Richard Nixon was the walking incarnation of the dark side of the American dream: a man who lied as easily as he breathed, a boot-licking toady to those with more power than him and a backstabbing thug to all those with less. McGovern had more decency and honor in his fingernail trimmings than in every aggregate cell of Nixon's body, and his entire life of service in the aftermath of the 1972 election is testimony to that bedrock fact.
The fact that the United States elected Richard Nixon president over McGovern proves just how far from our ideals we fall. The fact that we are capable of generating men like McGovern in the first place is the only reason to have any hope that we could yet come closer.
The fact that the United States elected Richard Nixon president over McGovern proves just how far from our ideals we fall. The fact that we are capable of generating men like McGovern in the first place is the only reason to have any hope that we could yet come closer.
19
Oh, and remember it was pretty boy JFK who took an election from Nixon through TV good looks (image) and votes off gravestones. 12 years later, turnabout became fair play.
20
Nixon:
Controlled the Soviet threat at a time of American weakness.
Opened relations with China
Set current on the modern exchange system
Created the most far reaching social welfare system ever, far beyond what Democrats ever conceived. His aid to dependent women and children was stunningly progressive.
The list goes on and on..
Controlled the Soviet threat at a time of American weakness.
Opened relations with China
Set current on the modern exchange system
Created the most far reaching social welfare system ever, far beyond what Democrats ever conceived. His aid to dependent women and children was stunningly progressive.
The list goes on and on..
21
@20 "Controlled the Soviet threat at a time of American weakness" No, he was a coward who refused to confront Soviet waepons supplies to the Viet Cong.
23
Even for a man as reliably stupid as you, Bailo, praising Nixon on one line for belligerence against one group of communists and then on the next for rapprochement with a different group of communists demonstrates a hilarious lack of self-consciousness.
Needless to say Aid to Families with Dependent Children was in no way a Nixon program: it was part of the original Social Security Act of 1935. You are perhaps thinking of the Family Assistance Program, which was proposed in bad faith (Haldeman wrote in his diaries that Nixon "wants to be sure it's killed by Democrats and that we make big play for it, but don't let it pass, can't afford it.") and which never signed into law in any case.
But of course, Nixon's primary accomplishments remain: campaigning on a "secret plan to end the war" which was a bald-faced lie, and then in actuality ordering the carpet-bombing of Cambodia. And then, of course, ordering his private troop of Bircher thugs to burgle and wiretap the offices of his opponent for the presidency, followed by a cavalcade of suborned perjury, evidence-tampering and bogus claims of executive privilege as he was, inevitably, driven disgraced from the White House.
Strangely, the EPA and the EITC do not in any way redeem his legacy in the face of the rampant, unrepentant criminality of both his foreign and domestic policies.
Needless to say Aid to Families with Dependent Children was in no way a Nixon program: it was part of the original Social Security Act of 1935. You are perhaps thinking of the Family Assistance Program, which was proposed in bad faith (Haldeman wrote in his diaries that Nixon "wants to be sure it's killed by Democrats and that we make big play for it, but don't let it pass, can't afford it.") and which never signed into law in any case.
But of course, Nixon's primary accomplishments remain: campaigning on a "secret plan to end the war" which was a bald-faced lie, and then in actuality ordering the carpet-bombing of Cambodia. And then, of course, ordering his private troop of Bircher thugs to burgle and wiretap the offices of his opponent for the presidency, followed by a cavalcade of suborned perjury, evidence-tampering and bogus claims of executive privilege as he was, inevitably, driven disgraced from the White House.
Strangely, the EPA and the EITC do not in any way redeem his legacy in the face of the rampant, unrepentant criminality of both his foreign and domestic policies.
24
Nixon. Too bad he was a fucking crook. Argh.
But yeah, by today's standards, he wasn't so bad. That doesn't say anything good about him.
But yeah, by today's standards, he wasn't so bad. That doesn't say anything good about him.
25
Goldy, do you think that the choice of Thomas Eagleton as McGovern's VP had anything to do with his loss?
26
McGovern's overwhelming loss to Nixon in 1972 is a pretty damn strong case that Americans are not worthy of the right and responsibility to vote.
27
@25, No doubt the Eagleton affair hurt. But in McGovern's defense, almost every other prominent Dem chickened out and turned down the VP spot. Had Ted Kennedy agreed, it wouldn't have been such a blow out.
28
"McGovern introduced yearly measures in the Senate to reduce the defense budget and to establish a commission to plan the conversion from a militarized economy to a civilian one. " = Hero Love.
from Making Sense of American Liberalism, Bell, Stanley
Thanks for the write-up, Goldy.
from Making Sense of American Liberalism, Bell, Stanley
Thanks for the write-up, Goldy.
29
By today's standards Nixon would be to the far left of Obama. And McGovern? Hell, the Democrats would call him a commie if he were to run for the nomination nowadays.
30
@27: Also in McGovern's defense Eagleton was not really candid when asked if there was anything they should've known. I also think that the way some people choose to protest the war hurt, focusing protest on the military, especially draftees, instead of the politicians was both a moral and a tactical mistake, and managed to anger the working class enough to vote for Nixon, this was especially tragic when you consider that the working class and the poor opposed the war in larger numbers than the upper middle class until 1968.
31
I've heard some people argue that by defeating moderate but electable Humphrey, McGovern basically guaranteed that Nixon would be elected.
32
@31: Humphrey would probably have made a better showing than McGovern did (especially since he would presumably nominated a safe party hack as VP, instead of picking Eagleton), but Nixon would still have cleaned his clock. And from the point of view of the left at the time, who the fuck cared? The point wasn't to prop up the rotting carcass of the Democratic Party, the point was to end the war. From that perspective, Humphrey was just as bad as Nixon.
33
…we will call America home to the ideals that nourished us from the beginning.
From secrecy and deception in high places; come home, America.
From military spending so wasteful that it weakens our nation; come home, America.
From the entrenchment of special privileges in tax favoritism; from the waste of idle lands to the joy of useful labor; from the prejudice based on race and sex; from the loneliness of the aging poor and the despair of the neglected sick — come home, America.
Come home to the affirmation that we have a dream.
Come home to the conviction that we can move our country forward.
George McGovern, 1922-2012, Rest in peace.
From secrecy and deception in high places; come home, America.
From military spending so wasteful that it weakens our nation; come home, America.
From the entrenchment of special privileges in tax favoritism; from the waste of idle lands to the joy of useful labor; from the prejudice based on race and sex; from the loneliness of the aging poor and the despair of the neglected sick — come home, America.
Come home to the affirmation that we have a dream.
Come home to the conviction that we can move our country forward.
George McGovern, 1922-2012, Rest in peace.
34
@31: I'm sure you're right, but it's hard not to be nostalgic for hawkish Democratic party hacks who were backed by the AFL-CIO instead of Goldman Sachs.
35
This is a far better tribute than the blurb Chelsea wrote earlier.
George McGovern did something bold in 1972. He took on the ultimate political cynic with a campaign based entirely on principle. He stood for peace, for the proposition that we're all in this together, and for the common man. While his opponent hired thugs to break into McGovern's campaign offices, George McGovern played it clean. Just two years later, the country learned all too sadly that it had made the wrong choice.
Like Tommy Douglas in Saskatchewan, George McGovern grew up surrounded by human tragedy and responded by working to improve the lot of those around him. He never turned his back on the poor or used his power and influence to pad his own wallet. he did the right thing, always. And for one bright, shining moment, it looked like the good guys might win, That all too brief campaign was the dying breath of American idealism.
George McGovern did something bold in 1972. He took on the ultimate political cynic with a campaign based entirely on principle. He stood for peace, for the proposition that we're all in this together, and for the common man. While his opponent hired thugs to break into McGovern's campaign offices, George McGovern played it clean. Just two years later, the country learned all too sadly that it had made the wrong choice.
Like Tommy Douglas in Saskatchewan, George McGovern grew up surrounded by human tragedy and responded by working to improve the lot of those around him. He never turned his back on the poor or used his power and influence to pad his own wallet. he did the right thing, always. And for one bright, shining moment, it looked like the good guys might win, That all too brief campaign was the dying breath of American idealism.
36
The last good and decent American politician said: "What is right has always been called radical by those with a stake in things that are wrong." RIP, good sir.
38
I worked my ass off for McGovern in 1970-72 age 17 to 19, and was active in the ACLU as well, and became a lifelong activist. I could never forgive Henry M. Jackson for ruining the convention for McGovern with his ridiculous grab for the nomination. The truth is he wanted Nixon to win I think.
Liberal ideas have not failed, they have never really been given a chance. George Stanley McGovern, a real American Hero.
Liberal ideas have not failed, they have never really been given a chance. George Stanley McGovern, a real American Hero.
39
Well, this is certainly interesting. Heads around here might very well explode. Unlike Obama and most other heroes of the Democratic Party, McGovern was an actual liberal.
"George McGovern, Libertarian Hero"
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-10-21…
In 2008, also in the Wall Street Journal, he attacked what he called “economic paternalism” from right-wing and left-wing politicians who were seeking to ban subprime loans and the pay- day lending business. Such laws don’t actually help people of limited means, he stressed, even as they reduce everyone’s ability to deal with their finances.
He also took aim at “health-care paternalism” that made it impossible for consumers to shop across state lines for insurance and stuck them with unwanted or unaffordable gold-plated plans. “I’ve come to realize,” he wrote, “that protecting freedom of choice in our everyday lives is essential to maintaining a healthy civil society.”
"George McGovern, Libertarian Hero"
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-10-21…
In 2008, also in the Wall Street Journal, he attacked what he called “economic paternalism” from right-wing and left-wing politicians who were seeking to ban subprime loans and the pay- day lending business. Such laws don’t actually help people of limited means, he stressed, even as they reduce everyone’s ability to deal with their finances.
He also took aim at “health-care paternalism” that made it impossible for consumers to shop across state lines for insurance and stuck them with unwanted or unaffordable gold-plated plans. “I’ve come to realize,” he wrote, “that protecting freedom of choice in our everyday lives is essential to maintaining a healthy civil society.”
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