McGovern first helped engineer and then exploit the quota system for the Democratic Party that elevated people with no popular standing in their states into positions of power. His hatred of the Vietnam War led him to say stupidly provocative things, like calling Ho Chi Minh “the George Washington of his country,” and his brand of “be in” politics made the 1972 Democratic Convention as farcically disorganized as the 1968 Convention had been brutally organized. One can wonder of any “compromise” candidate—Hubert Humphrey again?—could have done any better, but George led with his chin all the way and we Democrats took a monumental pasting.
Frustration drove George left and Jeane right. Kirkpatrick, a serious scholar of the horrors of totalitarianism, could hardly be blamed for being angered when her decades of honest scholarship were dismissed as fascist bullshit, but did she have to go to the Republican Convention in 1984 and call us all “San Francisco Democrats”—that is to say, “homos”? No, she did not.
I voted for Dick Gregory over Hubert Humphrey in 1968 and felt good about it. I voted for McGovern in 1972, confident that he would lose. I was thinking about voting for John Anderson in 1980, but when I entered the voting booth my hand reached instinctively for the Democratic lever and I felt reassured. In 2012 I won’t be reaching for the Democratic lever. George the helpless and Jimmy the hapless I could accept; but Obama the bloody is too much for me to bear.
Afterwords
I felt particularly betrayed by Kirkpatrick when I learned that she privately opposed the invasion of Iraq. She could go on national TV to call us homos, but she couldn’t speak up when she saw a Republican lying us into a bloody and counterproductive war. Jeane, were you afraid they would take away your pension?
