The Greatest Loser

To many of the few people who know who he is, George McGovern is a joke, the guy who managed to lose 49 states to a man forced to resign less than two years later. But if you scratch beneath the surface of that debacle, you will find a man who contributed more to democracy than any other living American.

As I was teaching 1968 (like 9/11, 1968 requires only numbers to evoke recognition) to high school seniors, I explained the Democratic Party's primaries of that year as the first democratic elections in American history.

We have it drilled into our heads that we live in a democracy, and the power and appeal of that paradigm is sufficient to obscure the matrix for most people. But 1968 was, in fact, the first time that choosing a party's nominee was open to the public.

For every prior election in American history, the candidates were chosen by party leaders in the proverbial and/or literal "smoke-filled room". Those choices were only "democratic" if you happened to be a party leader.

After picking their frontmen, the parties would present the American people with their great "democratic choice".

If a small clique decides on the candidates without any public input, then the choice between said candidates is only "democratic" in a very indirect way. In a real democracy, the people would pick the options and then pick from among the agreed-upon options rather than to be force-fed two stale and pre-packaged "choices" to pick from.

What's more "democratic": choosing between hamburgers and cheeseburger, or choosing from an entire menu of choices?

At any rate, things changed in 1968 when Robert Kennedy went directly to the people and ran in primary elections rather than courting the party elite, to whom Kennedy was too radical and independent for their blessings.

After Kennedy's murder, the Democrats reverted to their traditional modus operandi and nominated Vice-President Hubert Horatio Humphrey, a man who had ran in precisely zero primaries.

And so, the American people, weary of war, were given the "choice" between two pro-war candidates, Richard Nixon and Hubert Humphrey. For many of those who still believed in the system, this was the death-knell.

But this is where George McGovern comes in. A close fried of Bobby Kennedy, McGovern stood for his slain colleague at the 1968 convention that coronated Humphrey. After the convention and the riots outside and inside the hall, McGovern set to rewrite the rules for the Democratic Party.

Long story short, it was McGovern who rewrote the rules to allow for a system of open primaries to replace the smoke-filled rooms. It was McGovern who made the Democratic Party democratic. And he was their first nominee under the new system.

McGovern was crushed by Nixon in 1972 for three reasons.

Reason the first: the old Democratic establishment tried to destroy him. Even after McGovern had won enough delegates in open primary elections, the old bosses tried to sandbag him at the convention by nominating....wait for it....Hubert Horatio Humphrey. The counterrevolution failed, but the party was split.

Reason the second: Richard Nixon was directing a vast criminal conspiracy using public and private agents of the White House, FBI, CIA, IRS, Post Office, etc., to destroy McGovern. "Rat-fucking" was the term that Nixon's campaign gave it. An example of rat-fucking? Breaking into the home of the man who had just shot third-party candidate George Wallace and planting George McGovern campaign literature.

Remember, the umbrella of shit that came to be known as Watergate explicitly and specifically originated in the Campaign the Re-Elect the President. The campaign against McGovern was so tainted that it forced a sitting president from office. That must factor into historic appraisals of that defeat; the 1972 election was hardly a fair fight.

Reason the third: Vietnam. Fucking Vietnam. Nearly everyone agreed in 1972 that the war was a tragedy. The only question was whether it was a mistake or a crime. George McGovern never called it a crime, but he was unnervingly honest and blunt in how he talked about Vietnam, and many Americans were disconcerted with his failure to condemn the Communists in the middle of each sentence.

Vietnam is the ultimate case-study in the imperial American mind. Absolutely fascinating. And here's one of the things that jumps out at me. Americans hated the war, but they hated the protesters more. Americans knew they were wrong but they hated anyone who would dare say it out loud. And McGovern said it out loud.

George McGovern was a combat pilot during World War II who had killed hundreds of people and who had men in his own plane killed beside him. And he was called a coward for demanding that his country stop bombing poor people. He was hated, as so many men are, because he told the truth.

If he is to be remembered as a loser, I wish we had losers like him in politics today.