Transcript
George McGovern: "The question is not are we better off than we were four years ago, the question is, where will America be four years from now?"
Melissa Harris-Perry: You're listening to George McGovern. He is speaking at the 1984 Democratic National Convention, and urging his party and the American people to jettison incumbent President Ronald Reagan and embrace the Democratic nominee Walter Mondale.
That is not what happened. In fact, 1984 was the most decisive presidential victory of the modern era. Ronald Reagan carried 49 states, amassed 525 electoral college votes, while Mondale carried only Minnesota's 13. This was also an outcome McGovern was painfully familiar with. As the Democratic nominee in 1972, McGovern also lost 49 states to Richard Nixon and carried only 14 electoral college votes from the State of Massachusetts.
These overwhelming defeats, they've assigned McGovern to the dustbin of presidential history. A new podcast, Of The People, is taking a closer look at McGovern in order to ask what we can learn about today's politics from his campaigns. I spoke with Ben Bradford, creator and producer of the Of The People podcast.
Ben Bradford: George McGovern, if you started where I started, you knew of him as nothing other than maybe the Democratic candidate in 1972, who loses in a huge landslide in the Watergate election. He's gone down in history as an inept, too liberal loser, this kind of buffoon who falls over himself against Nixon. The true story of that is actually much more interesting.
You can see by watching the 1972 presidential race how the country is divided along today's political battle lines between the parties. Essentially, this election is 50 years ago, and you go back before that election, and the political parties really are not the ones that we recognize today. They are not ideological in the same way. They are really more machines. They have party bosses who control them. Those bosses pick candidates.
Voters are not sorted along ideological lines with culturally and socially conservative people in the Republican party and more liberal people in the Democratic party. By the end of this race, you can see essentially the shape of today's political division form, and George McGovern rather than being a buffoonish radical turns out to be this guy who runs this innovative campaign. He is a 200 to 1 long shot to win the Democratic nomination. By following his rise and fall, you can see all of these other factors that helped shape today's political division.
Melissa Harris-Perry: All right. When we think about that shaping, I want to walk through a couple of different aspects of it. How much of it is about a broadly accepted analysis that you gave us a shorthand there, the two liberal buffoon who loses, and then the Democratic party then responds to that angst about being too liberal. Is that what happens or is there something maybe more structural that McGovern gives us?
Ben Bradford: One of the things that I just found fascinating covering the story is that prior to several months into the Democratic primaries in 1972, the big knock on George McGovern has nothing to do with him being too liberal or radical or anything along those lines. Essentially, the establishment view at the time was that he couldn't win because he was too boring. He had no charisma. He had this dole, flat voice, and this has been a criticism of him going back to high school when his debate coach called him colorless.
It really was not a story of him being too liberal, it is a story of him being branded as too liberal, and not just by Republicans, but importantly, it was by his own party. One of the things that I think makes this such a compelling story is that the reasons that that happens have less to do with policies. I'm not saying they don't have anything to do with policies, but a lot of it is personal vendettas and power struggles within the party, and we still live with the consequences.
Melissa Harris-Perry: What are some of those consequences?
Ben Bradford: Anytime you see a Democratic candidate being tagged as a radical, I mean, Joe Biden had attacks from the right, saying that he was another McGovern.
Melissa Harris-Perry: I'm sorry, it's hard to say that without laughing. Oh, yes, that radical Joe Biden, but yes, okay.
Ben Bradford: That's exactly right. This has been a label that has been tagged on Democrats ever since then, but more importantly, what you see by the end of this election, the fallout, the margin of the landslide, is this realignment that I alluded to earlier, where more conservative people, culturally and socially, who had been long time Democrats, parts of the labor movement, move into the Republican column. McGovern does very well. He incorporates social movements that had previously been locked out of politics.
We're talking about the women's movement, the gay rights movement, people of color line up behind him, and gain power in the party and gain new power in politics. There's this social cleavage that happens for better and for worse over the course of this election.
That is also partially fallout from the ways in which McGovern has branded. You see this leader in the series and of the people, you see essentially his own party attacking him. It doesn't have as much to do with ideology as it has to do with the struggle for power, but the fallout is an ideological one.
Melissa Harris-Perry: Talk a bit more about the extent to which it truly is unique unlike other campaigns in American history.
Ben Bradford: You have to understand there is a major change that happens to the political system prior to 1972. In 1968, the Democratic party is the real big tent party. They have won a landslide election four years before that, so in 1964 with Lyndon Johnson. They have as much as 60% of voters or more than that are identified as Democrats. In 1968, the party fractures over the Vietnam War. There are protests outside the Democratic National Convention, and police are beating protestors. Inside the convention, the party nominates Hubert Humphrey, who's the vice-president, and Humphrey has not won a single primary race, because at the time, the way that candidates were chosen was by party bosses. These party leaders who were state officials or local politicians they chose the delegates rather than voters choosing the delegates in primaries.
The Democratic party fractures. The anti-war Democrats walked out of the convention. Afterwards, there is a real fear among Democrats that those anti-war voters may not come back. They may go to a third party. There's a lot of angst in the Democratic party. The party leaders say, okay, we're going to soothe the hurt feelings. We're going to figure out how to make this process of nominating presidential candidates more inclusive, and so they create this commission. Actually even though it sounds very small and bureaucratic, it's national news. They appoint this uncharismatic, boring, rural backbench senator from South Dakota who has no chance of ever being the nominee to write the rules, to oversee the commission and share it, to really form it, and that's George McGovern, of course.
McGovern really creates the modern primary system or helps write the rules and oversees it, and then he uses those rules to run a campaign. All of a sudden, the fundamental way that the parties operate, which is the party bosses choosing candidates. That's out the window, and instead, the people who have the best chance are the people who can turn out their voters.
McGovern starts as a 200 to 1 long shot, but he is the anti-war candidate at a time when Vietnam is continuing, and it's getting more and more unpopular, and tens of thousands of people have died. He has the record of being anti-war, and he is strongly against it. He says, ''If you vote for me, I will end it.'' His campaign is this huge grassroots movement, and it incorporates other as I mentioned social issues and the social movements of the time. He's this kind of egalitarian guy who says people should be equal. Of course, a lot of anti-war voters are young people, college educated, and liberal, and that, of course, colors how he is viewed himself. This campaign really is unlike any other because he appeals to the people rather than needing to appeal to party bosses, and that has all kinds of knock-on effects.
Melissa Harris-Perry: If there is one key story that you want us to take away from the podcast, is it about these divisions? Is it about the fact that we have misunderstood McGovern, or is it something else?
Ben Bradford: My driving focus for telling this story was the question of how did we get here, and looking at it through the lens of this presidential race. When I started, like I said, I didn't know very much about George McGovern other than this idea of this kind of too liberal loser in this landslide race. Looking at what the country looked like before, and, of course, it was very divided, because America has always been divided, but looking at the shape of American division and the way that it was articulated in politics, and then as I looked at this story, and seeing how that changed, and how this guy who has gone down as an all-time loser, instead place these incredibly important roles. Some intended, some not intended.
I just think that that is the thing that is really incredible. For people who are wondering how did this happen today? How did we get to this extreme polarization where we have this Conservative party and this more Liberal party. There's this kind of this big rift between them. You can see those forces here in this story.
Melissa Harris-Perry: Ben Bradford is creator and producer of the podcast Of The People. Thank you so much for spending this time with us today.
Ben Bradford: Thank you.
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