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Mcgovern and Nixon--why the landslide?
- Thread starter tall_guy1
- Start date
My parents voted McGovern -- Dad supported him because he thought McGovern was an honest man, and he was an Air Force veteran, like my father was -- but a lot of people my folks knew simply did not trust the guy. He was going to mail everybody a check. He said so on TV. It was part of a program to reduce poverty. A primitive UBI proposal, which didn't fly with a lot of people as it seemed a bit fanciful.
Also he stabbed his first running mate in the back, not supporting him when it was revealed that Thomas Eagleton has some bipolar issues. He dumped Eagleton for Shriver. The Democratic party was split, also. Southern Democrats apparently found McGovern too liberal.
My parents did too. My mom apparently got in a heated debate with my dad's mom on her first meeting with her where my grandmother went after her and called Mcgovern a "commie" and going after her, while my dad just sat idly by. That still causes strife in their marriage to this day.
The dumping of Eagleton was unfortunate, but was pretty much unavoidable. Keep in mind this was 50+ years ago when public understanding of mental health issues wasn’t what it is today.
The Democratic Party was in total disarray in 1972. Its national convention was a complete gong show, pretty much hijacked by what you might call the “looney left” which wasted huge amounts of time on radical proposals that went nowhere.
The Vice-Presidential nomination procedure and vote were such a farce that McGovern’s acceptance speech wasn’t delivered until after 3am, when most of the country was asleep.
Which was a major reason behind the nomination of the more centrist Jimmy Carter four years later.
Most people at the time were grudgingly satisfied with Nixon, and saw no reason for a change. Same situation in 1984 with Reagan, which was another 49 state election sweep. Remember that the Watergate scandal didn’t really blow up until after the 1972 election, even though McGovern had brought it up during the campaign to what was then public indifference.
How was it "looney"?
I used the phrase “looney left” as many activists at the 1972 Democratic convention had political viewpoints and proposals that were excessively radical, impractical, unworkable, unaffordable, and far outside of mainstream U.S. politics and the value systems of most Americans. If you recall some of the extreme leftist rhetoric and activism that followed the George Floyd murder in 2020 you’ll have an idea of what went on in 1972. It was the political inverse of what we see today with extreme right wing groups.
All the antics of those activists turned the 1972 convention into a dysfunctional fiasco. McGovern’s acceptance speech, which should have been delivered to a prime time television audience, instead occured around 3am when nobody was watching. The Democratic Party pretty much destroyed any slim chance it had of winning the presidential election that year.
Unfortunately many political activists on both ends of the spectrum are more obsessed with ideological purity and radical thought rather than actually winning elections, a problem that continues today.
One thing to understand is that the Watergate scandal didn't really break until *after* the election -- so Nixon had reasonably good approval ratings going into the election.
As for McGovern being perceived as "loony left", a less inflammatory way of putting it is to note that he was considered to be substantially left of the mainstream and that drove voters away. It was pretty much the same thing that had happened to Barry Goldwater eight years previously, when he lost in a landslide to LBJ -- as McGovern was perceived as being far left in 1972, Goldwater had similarly between seen as extreme right in 1964. So it could hit on either end of the political spectrum.
It's very different from the way things are today -- back then, a candidate like Trump would never have been able to get as far as he has.
As for McGovern being perceived as "loony left", a less inflammatory way of putting it is to note that he was considered to be substantially left of the mainstream and that drove voters away. It was pretty much the same thing that had happened to Barry Goldwater eight years previously, when he lost in a landslide to LBJ -- as McGovern was perceived as being far left in 1972, Goldwater had similarly between seen as extreme right in 1964. So it could hit on either end of the political spectrum.
It's very different from the way things are today -- back then, a candidate like Trump would never have been able to get as far as he has.
I never said that McGovern himself was “looney left” but that label fit most of the activists that sent the 1972 convention into chaos. Those activists considered McGovern as too conservative and part of the establishment. Nonetheless during the campaign McGovern got painted with the radical left brush by more mainstream and conservative voters.
McGovern couldn't have been too far left if he picked someone like Eagleton to be his running mate. Eagleton was definitely liberal, but he was also very much of an establishment figure in St. Louis, where he was from. The political and business establishment of St. Louis was not known for being progressive, let's say. That's one of many reasons the city has stagnated in recent years.
The whole deal with mental health and depression was dredged up by a would-be gadfly named True Davis, who felt disrepected by the Democratic establishment in Missouri (back when Missouri had one). In any event, Eagleton did far more good as a senator than he probably could have done as a vice-president.
When I was a reporter, I met Eagleton a few times. He knew his stuff, he was serious, he understood power, and he knew how to deal with reporters productively. After he retired from the Senate, he did commentaries for St. Louis TV station KSDK. Those commentaries were almost always perceptive and informative. I would consider him to have been a left-leaning moderate, someone committed to working within the system to effect change in a useful manner. There are no public figures in Missouri with that kind of stature or capability today.
The whole deal with mental health and depression was dredged up by a would-be gadfly named True Davis, who felt disrepected by the Democratic establishment in Missouri (back when Missouri had one). In any event, Eagleton did far more good as a senator than he probably could have done as a vice-president.
When I was a reporter, I met Eagleton a few times. He knew his stuff, he was serious, he understood power, and he knew how to deal with reporters productively. After he retired from the Senate, he did commentaries for St. Louis TV station KSDK. Those commentaries were almost always perceptive and informative. I would consider him to have been a left-leaning moderate, someone committed to working within the system to effect change in a useful manner. There are no public figures in Missouri with that kind of stature or capability today.