There's something about Andrew Sullivan's Gene McCarthy remembrance that I find really poignant:
He and TNR's editor-in-chief, Marty Peretz, went back a very long way, and McCarthy would occasionally drop by the office and read a poem or two and ask gingerly if we'd publish them.
The thought of this fearless moral crusader tentatively submitting his poems for examination is somehow strikes me as unbelievably powerful and unimaginably sad.
Update: On the subject of McCarthy, this is interesting:
I think there's a more obvious strain that runs from Stevenson to McCarthy to McGovern to Gary Hart to Paul Tsongas to Howard Dean (and could include Russ Feingold if he emerges as a major candidate in 2008). It's a tradition of candidates who expanded the Democratic appeal into previously Republican or independent upscale professional territory, but at the risk of losing touch with the old Democratic coalition of working-class and minority voters.
That's largely right, it's also why election seasons tend to include so many anecdotal articles on fed-up Republicans. The sort of Republicans reporters tend to know are already ideologically tilted away from the anti-intellectual populism currently in vogue among Republican presidential candidates. During the 2004 election, you kept seeing articles about how the reporter knew Republicans switching to Kerry, but no Democrats switching to Bush. In the blogosphere, a variety of prominent conservatives (Dan Drezner and David Adesnik being two good examples) swung towards Kerry. And yet Bush improved on his totals.
Democrats can swing Rockefeller Republicans, but the more of them they grab, the more ground they lose among the working class. Only problem is, structurally, there's nobody in place to notice that dynamic until Democrats actually lose the election, so liberals tend to think they're atop a groundswell of support when the ground is actually dropping out from under them. Nasty stuff. Meanwhile, it's a bit undernnoticed that the much-maligned, non-exit polling, in fact, largely called the election right.
