George McGovern dies at 90 at Catallaxy Files

George McGovern dies at 90

George McGovern passed away yesterday at 90. The man who ran against Richard Nixon in 1972 and lost every state but one and also winning the District of Columbia. The LA Times begins its story in characteristic media fashion:

Democrat George S. McGovern, a war hero who opposed the Vietnam War, was crushed by President Richard Nixon’s Watergate-tainted campaign. A die-hard idealist, McGovern inspired scores of budding politicians.

The story is not surprisingly to a large extent devoted to Nixon and to Watergate, not to the way in which McGovern was throttled in the election itself or the reasons why that was. It is the media reliving its glory days while once again raking over the Nixon coals. The most notable aspect of McGovern, however, is that he helped begin the descent of the Democrats into the party of the left that it has become. Without McGovern and the media there could be no Obama today.

Written by Steve Kates

October 22nd, 2012 at 6:30 am

Posted in Uncategorized

14 Responses to 'George McGovern dies at 90'

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This will fix the LA Times:

Rupert Murdoch eyes bid for LA Times

According to reports by the Los Angeles Times and Reuters, News Corp executives, including Mr Murdoch’s youngest son, James, have flown to Los Angeles twice this month for early stage talks to buy the papers in a deal which could be worth $400m (£249m).

Walter Plinge

22 Oct 12 at 6:45 am
Link to preceding comment doesn’t appear to have worked. Here it is in another form –

http://bit.ly/T5OzzC

Walter Plinge

22 Oct 12 at 6:46 am
If McGovern began what made it possible for Obama to become president, that’s reason in itself to honour his memory.

1735099

22 Oct 12 at 7:07 am
What made it possible for half Caucasian Hawaiian mediocrity Obama to become president was media corruption and the starry-eyed naivete of elitist whites.

The most powerful real blacks appointed to consequential high office have George W. Bush to thank for it.

C.L.

22 Oct 12 at 7:12 am
McGovern certainly is the example the Sun King has based his presidency on.

* He nominated a crazy vice president (though McGovern sensible dropped him).
* Insane regressive economic policies
* Foreign polices based upon isolation and surrender to the forces
* He stoked the fires of social division as he campaigned

4 for 4, and once the public understand who McGovern was they rejected him and his regressive platform.

This is what Nixon campaing for during the election (so you understand how progressive he was as a candidate):

Richard Nixon, who has been called “the greatest school desegregator in American history” by historian Dean Kotlowski due to his compliance with a 1971 Supreme Court ruling mandating desegregation,[31] was in favor of desegregation but not through forced means such as busing.

Token

22 Oct 12 at 7:29 am
Didn’t McGovern recently recant?

Apparently some epiphany cast the scales from his eyes, and he not only stated that he had never had any idea how hard life is for businesses, but that had he known this at the time, he’d have been a much better presidential candidate, and a much better elected representative. (His words).

Steve at the Pub

22 Oct 12 at 7:35 am
Powerline does a bio on McGovern and is tough but fair:

Everyone who knew George McGovern will tell you—I heard this first from George Will many years ago—that McGovern was one of the most gentle, decent persons you’d ever encounter in American politics.

…He said some truly stupid things over the years, such as his carelessly chosen words in a Playboy interview implying that Ho Chi Minh could rightly be compared to George Washington, or his blaming the Cold War chiefly on the United States and the West, writing in his autobiography that “Without excusing the aggressive behavior of the Soviets in Eastern Europe after 1945, I have always believed that we not only overreacted to it but indeed helped to trigger it by our own post-World War II fears.”

…It was McGovern’s misfortune that he could not control the “Movement” he rode to the nomination. With a few notable exceptions, McGovern caved in to the demands of many of the liberal interest groups he used on the road to the nomination, acquiring along the way a number of positions that would haunt him in the general election campaign. While he held typical naïve liberal sentimentalist views, this former World War II bomber pilot (and winner of the Distinguished Flying Cross) was no purebread pacifist.

In summary he was a valiant man with a proud history who seems to have lost himself by letting himself become the face of the watermelon left.

Numbers, I actually mentally associate you and McGovern in many ways (though he was much more successful in his life).

Token

22 Oct 12 at 8:10 am
see http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/politics-obituaries/9623845/George-McGovern.html which says that McGovern’s name became a byword for disaster.

McGovern himself said in 1973 that “I opened the doors of the Democratic Party and 20 million people walked out.”

Jim Rose

22 Oct 12 at 8:57 am
McGovern was a well meaning man who was big enough to admit when he was wrong after he went into business for himself:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_McGovern

McGovern had made several real estate investments in the D.C. area and became interested in hotel operations.[210] In 1988, using the money he had earned from his speeches, the McGoverns bought, renovated, and began running a 150-room inn in Stratford, Connecticut, with the goal of providing a hotel, restaurant and public conference facility.[210][220] It went into bankruptcy in 1990 and closed the following year.[221] In 1992, McGovern’s published reflections on the experience appeared in Wall Street Journal and the Nation’s Restaurant News.[220][222] He attributed part of the failure to the early 1990s recession, but also part to the cost of dealing with federal, state and local regulations that were passed with good intentions but made life difficult for small businesses, and to the cost of dealing with frivolous lawsuits.[220] McGovern wrote, “I … wish that during the years I was in public office I had had this firsthand 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 was also a distinguished military man

http://isteve.blogspot.com.au/2012/10/george-mcgovern.html

jtfsoon

22 Oct 12 at 9:07 am
“Amnesty, abortion, and acid”

The unofficial motto of McGovern’s Presidential campaign.

Zatara

22 Oct 12 at 9:57 am
I don’t know about others, but everything I see about McGovern comes filtered through first reading about in “Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail”, which remains for me a political junkies must read.

Ed Snack

22 Oct 12 at 11:26 am
http://www.themoneyillusion.com/?p=17208 reprints the op-ed on his time as a motel owner. McGovern could have become a republican as a result.

Jim Rose

22 Oct 12 at 2:30 pm
Ed, me too. Most of what I know about McGovern came from Hunter S. Thompson’s account of the campaign.

tbh

22 Oct 12 at 3:29 pm
the toughest obitury of all is from all places http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/oct/21/george-mcgovern?intcmp=239

• To this day no one has ever satisfactorily explained why Nixon’s campaign managers thought it necessary to bug the Democratic national committee. It was clear throughout that McGovern had ensured his own defeat long before.

• McGovern had a serious personal failing – a need to be all things to all men. Several times during his Senate career he had made mutually incompatible deals and thus made enemies of those whom he had let down.

• The AFL/CIO trade union federation, still smarting from his failure to vote as promised on an important closed-shop amendment, flatly refused to endorse him.

• McGovern already dismal performance on picking a VP was exacerbated by his rash promise of a guaranteed annual income for every American family with no consideration of financial controls. It served mainly to outrage blue-collar and middle-class voters unable to grasp why tax payments should be offered to layabouts.

• his Christian fervour was unaccompanied by any coherently presented policies or administrative ability, and his presidential election bid quickly descended into chaos

The author of this Obituary has no time for losers or the making of heroes out of them. winners win because they hate to lose.

Jim Rose

23 Oct 12 at 6:45 pm

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