Bill Kauffman: Liberals need another George McGovern-and perhaps conservatives do too
To the slanting wall above my desk is taped a large "Come Home America/ Vote McGovern Shriver '72" poster. Designed by artist Leonard R. Fuller, the collage fills an outline of the United States with iconographic images, historic statuary, and photos of unprepossessing but individuated Americans.
The message is peace and brotherhood and a return to the ideals of the Founders. The mood is civics-class hippie, antiwar wife-of-a-Rotarian, liberal community-college-professor-who-cries-at-"America the Beautiful." Like George McGovern himself, the poster suggests that a hopeful and patriotic mild radicalism resides on Main Street America. Or as Elvis Costello and Nick Lowe once asked, what's so funny `bout peace, love, and understanding?
Even now, 30 and three years after Sen. George McGovern of Mitchell, South Dakota was buried by Richard M. Nixon under an electoral-vote landslide of
520-17-1 (Virginia elector Roger MacBride, heir to the Little House on the Prairie goldmine, bolted Nixon for Libertarian John Hospers), "McGovernism"
remains Beltway shorthand for a parodistic liberalism that is, at once, ineffectual, licentious, and wooly-headed. It stands for "acid, amnesty, and abortion," as the Humphrey-Jackson Democrats put it.
But perhaps, as George McGovern ages gracefully while his country does not, it is time to stop looking at McGovern through the lenses of Scoop Jackson and those neoconservative publicists who so often trace their disenchantment with the Democratic Party to the 1972 campaign. What if we refocus the image and see the George McGovern who doesn't fit the cartoon? Son of a Wesleyan Methodist minister who had played second base in the St. Louis Cardinals farm system, this other George McGovern revered Charles Lindbergh as "our greatest American" and counted among his happiest memories those "joyous experiences with my dad" hunting pheasants. He was voted "The Most Representative Senior Boy" in his high school and went to the college down the street, walking a mile each morning to Dakota Wesleyan and then coming home for lunch.
This other George McGovern was a bomber pilot who flew 35 B-24 missions in the Dakota Queen, named after his wife, Eleanor Stegeberg of Woonsocket, South Dakota, whom he had courted at the Mitchell Roller Rink. He grew up in and remains a congregant of the First United Methodist Church of Mitchell; he knows by heart the "old hymns" and sings them aloud "with the gusto of those devout congregations that shaped my life so many years ago." This other George McGovern is a lifelong St. Louis Cardinals fan and member in good standing of the Stan Musial Society. He lives most of the year in Mitchell, his hometown, and says, "There is a wholesomeness about life in a rural state that is a meaningful factor. It doesn't guarantee you are going to be a good guy simply because you grow up in an agricultural area, but I think the chances of it are better, because of the sense of well-being, the confidence in the decency of life that comes with working not only with the land but also with the kinds of people who live on the land. Life tends to be more authentic and less artificial than in urban areas. You have a sense of belonging to a community.
You're closer to nature and you see the changing seasons."
This George McGovern, dyed deeply in the American grain, is a hell of a lot more interesting than the burlesque that was framed by his neocon critics.
* * *
On a clement November morn, I chatted with Senator McGovern in his room at the Jefferson Hotel in Washington. He was in town for a memorial service for his friend, the late Sen. Gaylord Nelson (D-Wis.), another casualty of 1980, when a pack of liberal Senate Democratic lions were defeated by New Right "family values" Republicans, many of them with rather more unconventional domestic lives than the liberals.
Targeted by Terry Dolan and NCPAC, McGovern was trounced 58-39 percent by the ineloquent James Abdnor. McGovern can laugh now about the perversity of the 1980 election. "It ticked me off, and it was also kind of laughable. A group called American Family Index rated us. I came out with a zero, Jim Abdnor got a perfect score. Here I am a guy who has been married to the same woman for 37 [now 62] years with five children and ten grandchildren and I'm running against Jim Abdnor, a 58-year-old bachelor who gets a 100 percent rating. I'm not against 58-year-old bachelors, not for one minute, but they're hardly a symbol of what promotes the American family."
McGovern is, as you might guess, an opponent of the Iraq War and the Bush administration, which he finds appallingly un-conservative. "I like conservatives," he says, citing Bob Dole and Barry Goldwater. "Bob Taft I always admired." He grins. "But I don't like these neoconservatives worth a damn! They have this view that we are so much more powerful than any other country in the world that we need to run the world-none of this business of coexistence. I think that's just terrible. It's not conservatism, and it's not liberalism, either. It's a new doctrine that I find frightening. If Iraq hadn't gone sour, there was a whole string of countries they were gonna knock off. That's not conservatism to me."...
Read entire article at American Conservative
The message is peace and brotherhood and a return to the ideals of the Founders. The mood is civics-class hippie, antiwar wife-of-a-Rotarian, liberal community-college-professor-who-cries-at-"America the Beautiful." Like George McGovern himself, the poster suggests that a hopeful and patriotic mild radicalism resides on Main Street America. Or as Elvis Costello and Nick Lowe once asked, what's so funny `bout peace, love, and understanding?
Even now, 30 and three years after Sen. George McGovern of Mitchell, South Dakota was buried by Richard M. Nixon under an electoral-vote landslide of
520-17-1 (Virginia elector Roger MacBride, heir to the Little House on the Prairie goldmine, bolted Nixon for Libertarian John Hospers), "McGovernism"
remains Beltway shorthand for a parodistic liberalism that is, at once, ineffectual, licentious, and wooly-headed. It stands for "acid, amnesty, and abortion," as the Humphrey-Jackson Democrats put it.
But perhaps, as George McGovern ages gracefully while his country does not, it is time to stop looking at McGovern through the lenses of Scoop Jackson and those neoconservative publicists who so often trace their disenchantment with the Democratic Party to the 1972 campaign. What if we refocus the image and see the George McGovern who doesn't fit the cartoon? Son of a Wesleyan Methodist minister who had played second base in the St. Louis Cardinals farm system, this other George McGovern revered Charles Lindbergh as "our greatest American" and counted among his happiest memories those "joyous experiences with my dad" hunting pheasants. He was voted "The Most Representative Senior Boy" in his high school and went to the college down the street, walking a mile each morning to Dakota Wesleyan and then coming home for lunch.
This other George McGovern was a bomber pilot who flew 35 B-24 missions in the Dakota Queen, named after his wife, Eleanor Stegeberg of Woonsocket, South Dakota, whom he had courted at the Mitchell Roller Rink. He grew up in and remains a congregant of the First United Methodist Church of Mitchell; he knows by heart the "old hymns" and sings them aloud "with the gusto of those devout congregations that shaped my life so many years ago." This other George McGovern is a lifelong St. Louis Cardinals fan and member in good standing of the Stan Musial Society. He lives most of the year in Mitchell, his hometown, and says, "There is a wholesomeness about life in a rural state that is a meaningful factor. It doesn't guarantee you are going to be a good guy simply because you grow up in an agricultural area, but I think the chances of it are better, because of the sense of well-being, the confidence in the decency of life that comes with working not only with the land but also with the kinds of people who live on the land. Life tends to be more authentic and less artificial than in urban areas. You have a sense of belonging to a community.
You're closer to nature and you see the changing seasons."
This George McGovern, dyed deeply in the American grain, is a hell of a lot more interesting than the burlesque that was framed by his neocon critics.
* * *
On a clement November morn, I chatted with Senator McGovern in his room at the Jefferson Hotel in Washington. He was in town for a memorial service for his friend, the late Sen. Gaylord Nelson (D-Wis.), another casualty of 1980, when a pack of liberal Senate Democratic lions were defeated by New Right "family values" Republicans, many of them with rather more unconventional domestic lives than the liberals.
Targeted by Terry Dolan and NCPAC, McGovern was trounced 58-39 percent by the ineloquent James Abdnor. McGovern can laugh now about the perversity of the 1980 election. "It ticked me off, and it was also kind of laughable. A group called American Family Index rated us. I came out with a zero, Jim Abdnor got a perfect score. Here I am a guy who has been married to the same woman for 37 [now 62] years with five children and ten grandchildren and I'm running against Jim Abdnor, a 58-year-old bachelor who gets a 100 percent rating. I'm not against 58-year-old bachelors, not for one minute, but they're hardly a symbol of what promotes the American family."
McGovern is, as you might guess, an opponent of the Iraq War and the Bush administration, which he finds appallingly un-conservative. "I like conservatives," he says, citing Bob Dole and Barry Goldwater. "Bob Taft I always admired." He grins. "But I don't like these neoconservatives worth a damn! They have this view that we are so much more powerful than any other country in the world that we need to run the world-none of this business of coexistence. I think that's just terrible. It's not conservatism, and it's not liberalism, either. It's a new doctrine that I find frightening. If Iraq hadn't gone sour, there was a whole string of countries they were gonna knock off. That's not conservatism to me."...