The 1972 Nixon-McGovern Presidential campaign and the 2020 one

Now that the Presidential primaries are close, we're getting lots of interesting political points being made. As well as a lot that are trivial or worse. I'm both amused and a bit mystified at the people popping up in my Twitter feed from political people who are whining that politics is getting political!

It's hard not to think of this as a real case of Unclear On The Concept.

And of course, generations are Democrats are still traumatized in one way or the other by Richard Nixon's victory over George McGovern in 1972 and even more so by the Presidency of St. Reagan.

I honestly view Richard Nixon as one of the real villains of American history. Trump makes Nixon's threats to the Constitutional order look like small-time delinquency by comparison.

But 1972 was an era when there were hardcore segregationist Democrats. And the now-extinct species called "liberal Republicans" were still alive, thriving, and even serving in Congress.

Nixon in 1972 had drastically reduced the number of US troops in Vietnam with his "Vietnamization" program. He concluded the extremely important SALT 1 nuclear arms control treaty and thus started "detente" with the Soviet Union.

He took a giant step toward normalizing relations with "Red China" with his "pingpong diplomacy" and a Presidential visit to Chairman Mao Zedong. The Beatles 1968 release "Revolution" contained the lines, "But if you go carrying pictures of Chairman Mao/You ain't gonna make it with anyone anyhow," a jibe directed at the more theatrically radical Western protesters of the time. But Nixon's triumphal Republican National Convention that year featured photo display of Nixon smilingly consorting with General Secretary of the Soviet Communist Party and Chinese Communist Party Chairman Mao Zedong (then conventionally spelling Mao Tse-Tung in English).

Nixon established federal "affirmative action" programs to mitigate racial discrimination though somehow managed at the time to campaign against it ("quotas") in the Presidential campaign.

He enforced the final end of de jure school segregation in the South, admittedly reluctantly and at the demand of the Supreme Court.

And to combat a level of inflation that would look tame compared to that later in the decade, he had imposed wage-and-price controls nationwide and had declared himself a Keynesian. Nixon had served during the Second World War under John Kenneth Galbraith, the deputy head of the Office of Price Administration (OPA) that administered wartime domestic price controls.

Gorge McGovern during the campaign supported withdrawal of troops from Vietnam, the SALT Treaty, improved relations with the USSR and China, affirmative action programs and ending school segregation, though he wanted faster and complete troop withdrawals from Vietnam.

McGovern opposed the wage-and-price controls.

And, of course, in October Nixon's National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger famously declared "peace is at hand" in Vietnam.

No one can afford to write off the possibility that Trump could win, whether Status Quo Joe or Grumpy Bernie or someone else is the Democratic nominee. But it's hard to imagine a political scenario very comparable to Nixon-McGovern playing out in 2020.

From 01/06/2008: George McGovern on impeaching Cheney and Bush

I'm re-upping this post from 12 years ago (slightly edited for clarity):

Former South Dakota Senator and 1972 Democratic Presidential candidate George McGovern has an op-ed in the Washington Post today on impeachment, Why I Believe Bush Must Go 01/06/08. I'm pleased to see that he gives a reasonable description of the current partisan atmosphere:

Of course, there seems to be little bipartisan support for impeachment. The political scene is marked by narrow and sometimes superficial partisanship, especially among Republicans, and a lack of courage and statesmanship on the part of too many Democratic politicians. So the chances of a bipartisan impeachment and conviction are not promising. (my emphasis)

And the following is straightforwardly true:

Bush and Cheney are clearly guilty of numerous impeachable offenses. They have repeatedly violated the Constitution. They have transgressed national and international law. They have lied to the American people time after time. Their conduct and their barbaric policies have reduced our beloved country to a historic low in the eyes of people around the world. These are truly "high crimes and misdemeanors," to use the constitutional standard.

From the beginning, the Bush-Cheney team's assumption of power was the product of questionable elections that probably should have been officially challenged -- perhaps even by a congressional investigation.

In a more fundamental sense, American democracy has been derailed throughout the Bush-Cheney regime. The dominant commitment of the administration has been a murderous, illegal, nonsensical war against Iraq. That irresponsible venture has killed almost 4,000 Americans, left many times that number mentally or physically crippled, claimed the lives of an estimated 600,000 Iraqis (according to a careful October 2006 study from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health) and laid waste their country. The financial cost to the United States is now $250 million a day and is expected to exceed a total of $1 trillion, most of which we have borrowed from the Chinese and others as our national debt has now climbed above $9 trillion -- by far the highest in our national history.

All of this has been done without the declaration of war from Congress that the Constitution clearly requires, in defiance of the U.N. Charter and in violation of international law. This reckless disregard for life and property, as well as constitutional law, has been accompanied by the abuse of prisoners, including systematic torture, in direct violation of the Geneva Conventions of 1949.

McGovern also has an appropriate description of the Bush Gulag, calling it a "shocking perversion".

And he doesn't forget about the administration's response to Hurricane Katrina, which Cheney, Bush and Karl Rove decided to embrace as ethnic cleansing by natural disaster:

In addition to the shocking breakdown of presidential legal and moral responsibility, there is the scandalous neglect and mishandling of the Hurricane Katrina catastrophe. The veteran CNN commentator Jack Cafferty condenses it to a sentence: "I have never ever seen anything as badly bungled and poorly handled as this situation in New Orleans." Any impeachment proceeding must include a careful and critical look at the collapse of presidential leadership in response to perhaps the worst natural disaster in U.S. history.

Impeachment is unlikely, of course. But we must still urge Congress to act. Impeachment, quite simply, is the procedure written into the Constitution to deal with presidents who violate the Constitution and the laws of the land. It is also a way to signal to the American people and the world that some of us feel strongly enough about the present drift of our country to support the impeachment of the false prophets who have led us astray. This, I believe, is the rightful course for an American patriot. (my emphasis)

McGovern, a bomber pilot in the Second World War, hasn't forgotten that patriotism is about more than listening to Rush Limbaugh and cheering about killin' foreigners. It also involves commitment to the notion that Andrew Jackson defined as a democratic nation that respects the Constitution.

McGovern, whose wife Eleanor just recently past away, ends on a poignant note:

I believe we have a chance to heal the wounds the nation has suffered in the opening decade of the 21st century. This recovery may take a generation and will depend on the election of a series of rational presidents and Congresses. At age 85, I won't be around to witness the completion of the difficult rebuilding of our sorely damaged country, but I'd like to hold on long enough to see the healing begin.

There has never been a day in my adult life when I would not have sacrificed that life to save the United States from genuine danger, such as the ones we faced when I served as a bomber pilot in World War II. We must be a great nation because from time to time, we make gigantic blunders, but so far, we have survived and recovered.

We could all aspire to be as lucid, engaged and committed to the public good when we become octogenarians as George McGovern is.