Dean and the McGovern Thing

Washington Post ^ | Sunday, January 4, 2004 | Lawrence F. Kaplan

[SunkenCiv]

Dean and the McGovern Thing
by Lawrence F. Kaplan
Washington Post
Sunday, January 4, 2004

Taking the argument a step further, the Dean 2004 Web site trumpeted the rollout of the governor's ostensibly tough-minded foreign policy team with the admonition, "McGovernize This!" -- a request, alas, that anyone who bears the slightest familiarity with the writings of its members could all too easily oblige. Which is the burden those who reject the McGovern caricature must bear: In Dean's case, the caricature happens to be substantially true.

This would hardly be the first time backers of an antiwar candidate have convinced themselves that the truth contains more nuance than it actually does. Arguing that McGovern himself was no McGovernite, his campaign biographer, Robert Sam Anson, insisted that the candidate could "sound almost hawkish" and touted "an almost conservative philosophy." New York Post columnist Pete Hamill assured his readers that McGovern, who "comes at you like one of those big Irish heavyweights in the 1930s," stood a very real chance of winning the election, while peace activist Allard Lowenstein enthused that McGovern was "in a very real way almost too good to be true. He was a centrist . . . He was a bomber pilot."

The election, of course, revealed that Lowenstein's center was located several degrees to the left of the rest of the country's.

[SunkenCiv]

Historical tidbit: In 1972, Richard M. Nixon won 49 out of the 50 states (excepting only Massachusetts). The only president to receive all electoral votes was George Washington.

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[ChiMark]

George McGovern is taller than 5'6".

[FreedomFlynnie]

Any of y'all ever read The Wild Blue by Stephen Ambrose? I figured out he was a liberal when I read the foreword to Nothing Like It in the World, when he goes off on how a transcontinental railroad is so important that only the gov't could make it happen. And also when it came out that he was a plagiarizer; I assume people who get caught lying in public are leftists.

Be that as it may, that book made McGovern out to look pretty good, heroically if not politically. And Ambrose took a swipe at the "far-right press" for giving McGovern a hard time during his candidacy. Since I wasn't born for a good ten years after he lost his presidential election, I'm wondering just how bad he really was. Not that I'd have voted for him, but was he JFK half-decent or Clinton miserable?

[Little Bill]

Scum!

[ARepublicanForAllReasons]

Not that I'd have voted for him, but was he JFK half-decent or Clinton miserable?

Think of Jimmy Carter's foreign policy (appeasement at all costs), combined with Hubert Humphrey's big-gov't socialism (guaranteed income, etc.). Add a slack jaw that seems to bespeak character weakness, and you can see how McG lost 49 states.

[rmh47]

Any of y'all ever read The Wild Blue by Stephen Ambrose? I figured out he was a liberal when I read the foreword to Nothing Like It in the World, when he goes off on how a transcontinental railroad is so important that only the gov't could make it happen. And also when it came out that he was a plagiarizer; I assume people who get caught lying in public are leftists.

Be that as it may, that book made McGovern out to look pretty good, heroically if not politically. And Ambrose took a swipe at the "far-right press" for giving McGovern a hard time during his candidacy. Since I wasn't born for a good ten years after he lost his presidential election, I'm wondering just how bad he really was. Not that I'd have voted for him, but was he JFK half-decent or Clinton miserable?

I am old enough to not only remeber that election, but to have participated in it. McGovern was a decent man. He would have made a horrible president. So the answer to your question quoted above is: Neither.

If he had been president, for instance, in 1962, the Soviet Union, or it's successor, would still have missiles in Cuba, but you wouldn't have been afraid to leave your wife or daughters alone with him.

[jim_trent]

That was the first election I could vote in. I did not vote for him, but I did believe he was an honorable man (not a Clinton). Unfortunately, what he believed in and what I believed in were exactly opposite.

I will say something for McGovern. He never, never said "I told you so" after Nixon resigned.

[Froggie]

He was, and is, an honorable and decent man - whose ideas were as far left-leaning as you can imagine.
I agree, he would have been a terrible president overall, but his candidacy did aid in bringing an end to the Vietnam experience!
He has had a lot of personal tragedy in his life, losing a daughter to the ravages of drug addiction.
I was walking down a street in San Francisco about 5 years after the election. As I crossed the street, coming in the opposite direction was a man - by himself - with a rather blank, depressed look on his face - as I got closer, I recognized him as George McGovern. I actually felt sorry for him at that moment...
A wrong man for the country, indeed, but on the decent person scale, Clinton isn't worthy to tie his shoelaces!

[SunkenCiv]

He was beaten for many reasons.

He ran in favor of the "negative income tax" which comes from (I believe) Milton Friedman. The US wound up with the Earned Income Tax Credit instead.

McGovern wasn't strictly speaking against US war in Indochina. When Pol Pot took over Kampuchea (among other things, that regime boasted of having destroyed 3,000 years of Cambodian history) he suggested that the US should go back to Cambodia and overthrow him.

Vietnam invaded instead. I think McGovern also suggested a US effort to oust the Vietnamese occupation of Cambodia by Vietnam.

When he dumped his first VP candidate he started to look a bit flighty (he'd previously said he was behind him 'One thousand per cent'). I remember a sort of press conference he had, perhaps in his own backyard. He was cleaning an inground pool. A reporter asked him if he shouldn't be out campaigning instead of taking the day off. McGovern said he liked to do something where he could see some progress.

[OESY]

[SunkenCiv]

YEAH! Heh heh... General Clark skipped Iowa to campaign in New England, where he's been making headway. Plus...

Forget the South
by Ryan Lizza
excerpts from 12/14/03
New York Times

As for Tennessee, Louisiana and Arkansas, there is an argument to be made for the Democrats to fight hard in each of them, but they are less competitive than the swing states outside Dixie. This process of elimination leads inexorably to the Forget-the-South strategy. It also lets Democrats be Democrats. Instead of pandering to (as Howard Dean famously put it) ''guys with Confederate flags in their pickup trucks,'' thus alienating blacks and liberals, a Democratic nominee like Dean could aim his message at Americans who might actually vote for him.

[SunkenCiv]

AFSCME Union Withdraws Support for Dean
by Ron Fournier
Saturday, February 7, 2004

Ironically, the blow came as Dean scored the best showing of a campaign season filled with disappointments. He gained 30 percent of the vote in caucuses in Washington. That was far behind the winner, Sen. John Kerry, but represented his highest percentage of any of the 11 states to hold primaries or caucuses to date... The loss of AFSCME denies Dean valuable organizers, money and political contacts at the worst possible time: The one-time front-runner is fighting for his political life after going winless in the primary season to date... McEntee is one of Dean's earliest backers from the ranks of the Democratic elite. McEntee's early endorsement of Bill Clinton helped propel the then-Arkansas governor to the presidency. But the union leader is no kingmaker this year. He had flirted with backing Kerry and Wesley Clark at different points last year, before jumping on Dean's bandwagon when the former Vermont governor was leading in polls and fund-raising... AFSCME, one of the nation's politically powerful labor unions, spends more on politics than any other union. The union $40 million on politics in 2000. In a telephone interview, Neel said that Dean would have more resources at his disposal in Wisconsin than any of his rivals, front-runner John Kerry included... In an early morning e-mail on Thursday, he told his Internet-savvy supporters he would make Wisconsin his last stand and appealed for a fresh infusion of cash to buy advertising needed to contest Kerry there.

AFSCME is a gov't employee union (Federal, State, County & Municipal), and this is yet another example of the shredding of the Democratic Party in 2004, despite the apparent "last stand" of Dean against Kerry.

Kerry's early lies about Bush' AWOL (never was AWOL), his flip-flops (his actual votes on the war VS what he sez his position is), and the business as usual approach of the rubberstamp supporters (like AFSCME) are all going to hurt him, despite the partisan shill mass media.