It is amazing how far to the left the party has drifted over the decades since. I don’t think my father, who died a third of a century ago would recognize it. I actually had a McGovern sticker patching up a tear in the rear window of my MGA in 1972, but I was a callow youth, slightly too young to vote. If I hadn’t been, it would have been the other vote that I regretted (the first one was for Carter in 1976 — I wised up by 1980).
22 thoughts on “George McGovern”
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Not unly further to the Left, but stupider (I see cause-and-effect there) and just plain nastier.
I recall hearing a political ad by Ted Kennedy a few days before the Nixon/McGovern election; Kennedy was saying that, if you’re a republican you didn’t need to vote, that Nixon would carry it easily. If you were a democrat, on the other hand, you needed to go out and vote, that every vote counted.
I hadn’t paid much attention to politics up to that point, but that was enough to convince me that the democrat party was sleaze.
the democrat [sic] party was sleaze
As opposed to what Nixon was doing in ’72?
McGovern is a great example of life’s unfairness. The voters re-elect the worst president of the century, and when the truth of their catastrophic misjudgment comes out, and McGovern is owed the world’s biggest I-told-you-so, he is instead branded an embarrassing loser.
On the other hand, Nixon gave us wage and price controls, which should warm the statist cockles of your heart.
Wage and price controls were and are stupid. Nixon’s health care proposal, on the other hand, would have been great. Even Ted Kennedy eventually realized his mistake in killing it.
Democrat.
The voters re-elect the worst president of the century
Jim, Carter was elected in ’76, and he wasn’t re-elected, just elected.
A bit of ironic trivia: McGovern trained to fly the B-24 at “Liberal Army Airfield” in Kansas.
Well McGovern flew B-24’s in WWII so that right there gets my respect.
And he said what he believed, pretty much.
But what really earned my respect was when he became a businessman, and experienced the back-breaking load of regulations and admitted he didn’t know what damage he was doing:
“I … wish that during the years I was in public office, I had had … first hand experience about the difficulties business people face every day. That knowledge would have made me a better U.S. Senator and a more understanding presidential contender.”
He goes on to explain how needless regulations, Federal, State, and local rules–many that he says he supported–created impossible conditions for doing business. He then says:
“While I never… doubted the worthiness of any of (the) goals, the concept that most often eludes legislators is: `Can we make consumers pay the higher prices for the increased operating costs that accompany public regulation and government reporting requirements with reams of red tape.’ It is a simple concern that is nonetheless often ignored by legislators. ”
He owned up to his mistake. Takes a man for that.
It is amazing how far to the left the party has drifted over the decades since.
On abortion and gay rights, yes. But not on foreign policy, labor, the safety net, healthcare, taxes, economic regulation, education, gun control, etc. In all those areas the Democratic party has moved to the right.
I don’t think my father, who died a third of a century ago would recognize it.
Would he recognize the GOP? Nixon proposed universal healthcare, said “we’re all Keynesians now,” created the EPA, pushed detente with nuclear-armed enemies, and supported a raft of other policies that would get him laughed out of a modern-day Republican primary. Heck, the mainstream GOP positions of 2008 (in favor of cap-and-trade, immigration reform with a path to citizenship, and an individual health care mandate) are verboten today.
So Jim, it sounds like you would like Nixon, since instead of being more consistently pro-freedom (something that gives State-shtuppers the horrors) he was a “moderate” (i.e., moderately statist)? I’ve noticed that statists love “moderate” Republicans because they’re not only no threat to the Plantation, and at most put up wimpy little speed-bumps on the Road to Serfdom.
So, Jim will be voting Romney then?
Thank God (or whatever) McGovern was defeated. Nixon was no libertarian prize, although he did abolish the draft, which various Democrats have wanted to re-instate in various forms in recent years; and also rescinded FDR’s ban on private ownership of gold, which I see signs of “liberals” wanting to bring back. (Thomas Frank–the Linda Lovelace of State-fellators–apparently wants to do so, as did OWS placard-bearers.) But can you imagine what this country would be like now, if the New Left, using McG as their Trojan Horse, had taken over the country back then? Right now we have a Red Diaper Baby and former member of the socialist New Party in the White House, eager to drag us further down the Road to Serfdom. Had McG won, we’d probably already be there.
We have a system where a decent person can’t be elected president. Nixon was a saint compared to what we have today. His minions broke into a hotel and he erased a tape. Today, they kill Americans and others and take no responsibility.
“I take responsibility” being the biggest joke of all.
We focus on the coming election because we have to, but the problem is bigger than any election.
Don’t forget run guns to Mexico.
I heard McGovern ran some kind of business following his defeat in 1972. He learned how much a pain in the ass government regulation and taxation was and changed much of his worldview as a result of his experience. He deserves recognition and credit for this.
Here’s what I meant:
http://reason.com/blog/2012/10/19/george-mcgovern-an-appreciation
The key part:
though it’s worth noting that later in life, after he acquired the leasehold on a Connecticut inn, McGovern came to understand the underside of the regulatory state. “In retrospect, I wish I had known more about the hazards and difficulties of such a business,” he wrote in 1992. “I also wish that during the years I was in public office, I had had this firsthand experience about the difficulties business people face every day.” In more recent years, citing the same experience, he campaigned against new labor regulations.
In other words, McGovern learned. Most liberals seem incapable of learning.
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-10-21/george-mcgovern-s-legacy-as-a-libertarian-hero.html
I have far greater regard for him than before. He actually GOT IT.
Yes, I remember reading McGovern’s op-ed in the Wall Street Journal about his travails with the government’s regulatory apparatus. He definitely got hit over the head with a clue-by-four.
In order to see the depths to which the Democrat Party has sunk since 1972, watch this video.
Thanks for posting that.
So he got clobbered by the same regulations he help put in place. What did he do to actually fix the situation that he helped create? Admitting he was wrong was the least he could do. Big deal. It did nothing to reduce the damage he had already done.
As we all now know, he learned of the entropic hazards of regulation when he actually had to run a business. That’s how it is in life. Adolescents think they know everything, until they get out and experience life, and realize their pat little answers for how to make the world right are woefully uninformed.
That, in a nutshell, is the problem with the Democratic Party in America – a gaggle of conceited adolescents, certain of their omniscient righteousness, and dumbfounded by the failure of their ideals when applied in the real world. It is the Party of arrested development. Can’t wait until the adults are back in charge.
Or, as Billy Joel sang in Angry Young Man: