George McGovern

The death of former US Senator George S. McGovern at age 90 makes me think of the 1972 US presidential election, as it’s done for many others. However, unlike many other people I know personally, I wasn’t on his side back then. That eventually changed.

The US presidential election of 1972 isn’t the first that I can remember, but it is the first I participated in by wearing political campaign buttons. I was 13. In those days, buttons were given away for free, and I wore a lot—all of them for Republicans. I distinctly remember the buttons with way too much text: “President Nixon. Now more than ever.” It was accompanied by a button with the punchier, “Nixon Now” (a slogan, I later learned, that was used in Nixon’s losing 1960 campaign). I wore both buttons.

I remember watching McGovern campaign and disliking him intensely. Coming from a Republican family, and living in a mostly Republican area, I quite frankly had no reason to give McGovern a fair go—I simply didn’t know any differently. So, when McGovern lost in a huge landslide, I was pleased. Less than two years later, of course, we watched Nixon resign in disgrace.

Many of McGovern’s obituaries have noted that in the decades after that defeat, he remained true to his ideals even when the Democratic Party wanted him to just go away, and to pretend that 1972 never happened. It’s a typical Democratic response: Something goes wrong and they run a mile in the opposite direction.

McGovern’s 1972 campaign was a disaster. The debacle over picking then-Missouri US Senator Thomas Eagleton, only to drop him when it was revealed he’d had electric shock therapy as treatment for depression, made McGovern look fickle and unable to properly vet his running mate. Picking the "little-known" Sargent Shriver (who in my area was known only as “part of the Kennedy family”) as the replacement running mate—after five Democrats turned him down—didn’t help.

But McGovern represented something special: What it meant to be a liberal Democrat. As AP reporter Walter R. Mears, who covered McGovern in 1972 and in the Senate, wrote today, “McGovern was a partisan without the poison that increasingly infected American politics.” He was of that era in which it was still possible for Democrats and Republicans to not only work together—barely imaginable nowadays—but also to actually compromise, something that’s now impossible.

McGovern was what we used to call a statesman—idealistic, willing to put partisan needs aside even while trying to remain true to an ideology. He was not a slash-and-burn politician, as most modern ones are, particularly on the right. That’s why I say McGovern was statesman, and why we can’t use that word for modern politicians.

I think that, in a nutshell, is why I came to respect McGovern and to identify with his politics. He wasn’t perfect, and he was a pretty lousy politician—if by that you mean the manipulative, scheming, self-serving stuffed shirts we now have in Congress. Clearly not such a bad thing to not be one of them.

The death of George McGovern is a loss. But the tragedy is that we have so few like him anymore.

The photo of McGovern accompanying this post was taken in 1972 and is from the Library of Congress. It has no known usage restrictions.

_____

Update: Also check out the blog posts on McGovern from my friends Jason and Roger, who also share personal recollections.