×
Like Jon Chait, I don't really buy this Obama-as-McGovern thesis. But I'll go a step further and say I don't really buy this McGovern-as-McGovern thesis. The circumstances of that campaign were complex, the historical moment peculiar, and the lessons that have been passed down bear only a tenuous connection to what actually occurred. Rick perlstein has a really good article on "The Myths of McGovern," and I want to highlight this graf:
any account must consider the political exhaustion of the old Democratic order–that the bosses’ cities provided 21 percent of votes in 1960, but only 14 percent in 1968; that union members voted 66 percent for John F. Kennedy, but only 51 percent for Humphrey; that in those same years the number of students in college almost doubled. It also must consider the regulars’ moral decrepitude. AFL-CIO chief George Meany was by then a bitter old man, who told John Ehrlichman in the White House, "When I was a plumber, it never occurred to me to have niggers in the union." In 1966, he specifically gave leave to McGovern, facing a tough reelection fight in a conservative state, to vote against cloture on banning right-to-work laws. In 1971, he explicitly signed off on McGovern as an acceptable Democratic candidate, and then, in 1972, ruthlessly sabotaged him in a fit of cultural pique for turning over the Democratic Party, as Meany claimed from the dais at a Steelworkers’ convention, to "people who look like Jacks, acted like Jills, and had the odors of Johns about them."This is precisely opposite to the current moment, when the Democratic order is demonstrating unprecedented unity, breadth, and political excitement. Democrats are seeing higher voter turnout than ever before, raising more money than ever before, attracting buy-in from more constituencies than ever before -- if any institution looks exhausted, it's the Republican Party, which nominated a man they didn't trust and have proven unable to fund him at levels even close to either of the two Democratic candidates.McGovern emerged at a moment when the Democratic Party seemed to be dissolving, and his campaign received enthusiastic backing from only a couple of the many warring factions. This was a year in which police beat protestors at the convention, in which many militant African-American groups were arguing for outright secession, in which hordes of activated students had the world "revolution" on their lips. Conversely, Obama and Clinton are both running in a moment when the party appears to be growing, and it's hard to conceive of the union or major constituency that will abandon either candidate after the convention. They have nearly indistinguishable platforms, and are involved in a bitter primary defined by small differences, not in a civil war that straddles violent societal tensions and the total breakdown of the old political order. That's not to say victory is assured. But neither Clinton nor Obama could possibly be McGovern, because McGovern was as much -- or more -- about the moment than the man, and we're not in a similar moment.
