Almost President

by Scott Farris

  Goldwater had already become the liberals’ favorite conservative in 1974, during the Watergate scandal, when he was chosen to head the Republican delegation that told Nixon he could not survive an impeachment trial in the Senate. Now he was winning their further admiration while diminishing his standing among conservatives. Goldwater’s increasingly libertarian bent was at odds with the beliefs of largely Southern evangelical Christians and other conservative traditionalists who were now the base of the Republican Party. That portion of the Southern populist tradition that looked to the government to enforce certain moral standards now populated the GOP.

  Goldwater had been the catalyst of this new populist conservatism, but he did not like all aspects of it. “The conservative movement is founded on the simple tenet that people have the right to live life as they please,” he said, “as long as they don’t hurt anyone in the process.” He said he was “damn tired” of the role evangelical ministers were playing in the new Republican Party. When the Reverend Jerry Falwell was misquoted as criticizing Reagan’s choice of former Arizona legislator Sandra Day O’Connor, a Goldwater protégé, to be the first woman on the Supreme Court because of her views on abortion, Goldwater said, “Every good Christian ought to kick Falwell right in the ass.” He further distanced himself from the religious right and the bulk of his party when he endorsed allowing homosexuals to openly serve in the military. “You don’t need to be ‘straight’ to fight and die for your country; you just need to shoot straight,” said Goldwater, whose views were influenced by the fact that he had a gay grandson and a lesbian grandniece. Unlike his views on civil rights thirty years before, Goldwater was now linking the individual experience of prejudice with the need to provide a broader group with government protections.

  In the years since his defeat and more so since his death in 1998, two years after he suffered a massive stroke, Goldwater has occupied a strange place in American politics, admired by liberals as well as conservatives, but fully embraced by neither. A 2007 reissue of The Conscience of a Conservative, which features a foreword by conservative commentator George Will and an afterword by liberal environmental activist Robert F. Kennedy Jr., exemplifies this. Will focuses his praise on Goldwater as a catalyst of conservative ideas, particularly the argument that conservatism, not liberalism, preaches ideals higher than simple material gain. Kennedy specifically absolves Goldwater of any role in the formation of the new, Southern-oriented Republican Party, instead citing the “thuggery” of a host of power-mad Republican consultants who are guilty of “the hijacking of Goldwater’s rational conservatism” and interjecting divisive social issues into the American political debate, neglecting Goldwater’s role in the very same.

  Goldwater remains a great example of how we misread the impact of losing presidential campaigns. In the wake of his historic loss, some said that Goldwater had both destroyed the Republican Party and “broken the back” of the conservative movement. Of course, the opposite turned out to be true. The Goldwater campaign, Kevin Phillips wrote, “was a Rubicon for the Republican Party,” and in crossing that line, Goldwater fundamentally altered both who and what the Republican and the Democratic Parties stood for.

  16 Worth noting is that Nixon’s 1972 vote totals were remarkably close to the sum of his and Wallace’s totals in 1968, indicating that Wallace voters had switched their support to Nixon’s re-election en masse and further reinforcing the supposition that Nixon would have carried the South in 1968 had Wallace not been in the race.

  17 Republicans also won an unprecedented nine congressional seats in the South in 1964 and would have won more if they had been able to field candidates in several more districts.

  18 One result of Goldwater’s defeat of McFarland was that it opened the way for Lyndon Johnson to become the new Senate Democratic leader, the post that made his own national reputation.

  19 Bozell and Buckley had both been students of Yale University professor Willmoore Kendall, a particularly influential thinker in the conservative movement, who developed the argument adopted by Goldwater that promoting racial equality is not a conservative principle because it is not mentioned in the Constitution.

  20 Kennedy received 49.7 percent of the popular vote to Nixon’s 49.6 percent.

  21 Nearly forty years later, in the May 2003 issue of Psychological Bulletin, some scholars were still debating whether ultra-conservatism was a political belief or a psychological pathology.

  CHAPTER NINE

  GEORGE MCGOVERN

  1972

  Thoughtful Americans understand that the highest patriotism is not to blindly accept official policy but to love one’s country deeply enough to call her to a higher standard.

  Conservative Republicans trace the genesis of the Ronald Reagan presidency back to Barry Goldwater’s landslide loss to Lyndon Johnson in 1964. Likewise, liberal Democrats should view George McGovern’s landslide loss to Richard Nixon in 1972 as the precursor to the presidency of Barack Obama—and, for that matter, the 2008 presidential candidacy of Hillary Clinton, too.

  That anything positive could come out of McGovern’s 1972 campaign would have struck those who lived through the debacle as miraculous. Surveying the enormity of his defeat, in which he carried only Massachusetts and the District of Columbia, McGovern himself quipped, “I opened the doors of the Democratic Party—and twenty million people walked out.” McGovern exaggerated—but not by much. An estimated third of all registered Democrats—ten million—abandoned McGovern to vote for Nixon.

  But those same doors through which many longtime Democrats walked out also remained open to let other newer Democrats march in. The McGovern campaign may have marked the end of the Democrats’ old New Deal coalition, as urban ethnics and organized labor were among those who exited the party in droves, but the reforms McGovern instituted within the Democratic Party created a new Democratic base. Just as Goldwater’s “Southern strategy” pointed the way for Republican conservative majorities in the 1980s and 1990s, McGovern’s “New Politics” coalition of women, minorities, young voters, and highly educated activists may provide a blueprint for Democrats to build a new liberal majority in the twenty-first century.

  McGovern’s critics, then and now, have derided this new coalition as “identity politics” and a motley collection of “special interests,” but the potential of this coalition, first envisioned by McGovern, was finally realized with Obama’s election in 2008. That year, Obama joined LBJ as the only Democrats since Franklin Roosevelt to win more than 50.1 percent of the popular vote. Where McGovern won only 37.5 percent of the vote in 1972, Obama won 53 percent in 2008 by appealing to roughly the same demographics. Those demographics had grown between 1972 and 2008, and trends in the U.S. population suggest that Obama’s vote total may not be an anomaly, but a benchmark for future liberal candidacies willing to join Obama in following the trail blazed by McGovern.

  Of course, when McGovern was labeled “the Goldwater of the left,” it was not meant as a compliment to either man. Just as pundits in 1964 incorrectly forecast that Goldwater had left conservatism in shambles, even some liberals believed the McGovern campaign had “discredited liberalism.” The magnitude of McGovern’s loss was such that the Democratic Party spent the better part of four decades actively distancing itself from the South Dakota senator who was unfairly labeled “the candidate of the three As—acid, amnesty, and abortion.”22

  Rather than embrace McGovern’s “New Politics,” most subsequent Democratic presidential candidates have looked back with nostalgia to Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal coalition, but with little success in reassembling it. Between McGovern in 1972 and Obama in 2008, the high-water mark for a Democratic presidential candidate was Jimmy Carter, who received 50.08 percent of the popular vote in 1976. Between Carter and Obama, no Democratic candidate for president received even 50 percent
of the vote—not even Bill Clinton in his perceived rout of Bob Dole in 1996. Walter Mondale tried to rebuild the New Deal coalition in 1984, and he won back the support of organized labor but lost the youth vote and ended up winning the same number of states as McGovern: one. And yet, as poor a showing as Mondale made, it is still the McGovern campaign that is cited as the greatest Democratic disaster of all, and to be called “another McGovern” is considered an enormous millstone around the neck of any candidate.

  There were repeated attempts by conservative commentators to tie Obama to McGovern during the 2008 campaign. One labeled Obama “the most liberal Democrat running for the presidency since McGovern.” Another said, “Obama comes to us from a background farther to the Left than any presidential nominee since George McGovern, or perhaps ever.” They also noted that Obama’s early opposition to the Iraq War mirrored McGovern’s opposition to American involvement in the Vietnam War and McGovern’s campaign theme, “Come Home, America.”

  The intent was not only to label Obama a radical but to dispirit Democrats still haunted by the specter of the McGovern campaign’s supposedly woeful legacy. Some Democrats feared the McGovern label might indeed be affixed to Obama with dire results. Early in 2008, a New Republic writer fretted that in Obama’s supporters “you begin to see the outlines of the old George McGovern coalition that haunted the Democrats during the ’70s and ’80s, led by college students and minorities.”

  The writer was correct. There were “striking similarities” between Obama’s coalition and McGovern’s (as McGovern himself noted), and Obama won precisely by appealing to the new Democratic coalition that McGovern had first put together in 1972 but that other Democratic candidates, “haunted” by the fiasco of 1972, had declined to embrace as enthusiastically.23

  What McGovern understood in 1972 was that key pieces of the old New Deal coalition were shrinking in size and influence and their remnants were increasingly attracted to the conservatism and cultural traditionalism of the Republican Party. To replace these lost Democrats, McGovern reached out to voters who had not been actively courted in previous elections but whose level of political participation could be expected to grow: women (particularly working women), young voters, African Americans, Hispanics, other minorities, and gays. The difference between 1972 and 2008 is that these elements of the new Democratic coalition grew to a size in which they could form a real majority, and in Obama the Democrats found a candidate who could rally and inspire these varied elements. Obama did so, in part, by using McGovern’s “grassroots” campaign style—though by 2008 the grassroots would be supplemented by the “netroots.”

  McGovern can take some credit that Obama, as an African American, was taken seriously as a candidate at all. Reforms pressed by McGovern, beginning in 1969, when he chaired a Democratic Party commission, and continuing through his 1972 campaign, greatly advanced the role minorities have since played in the Democratic Party and significantly increased the number of elected black officeholders. Without those reforms, minority participation in Democratic politics might have been years behind what it was in 2008, and the time for a major African-American candidate to run for president might have been years or even decades away.

  Women received the same boost. For the 2008 Democratic nomination, Obama had, after all, defeated former McGovern campaign worker and New York senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, wife of the former president. That the first African-American and the first woman candidates with realistic chances to become president were both Democrats is not a coincidence but was due in large part to the work of McGovern in opening up the party to nontraditional voices. Indeed, two pundits who had been predicting “an emerging Democratic majority” even before Obama was elected have described the party’s early twenty-first century make-up as “George McGovern’s revenge.”

  Racial and ethnic minorities were a key component of the McGovern coalition, and they proved essential to Obama’s election. As noted in the previous chapter on Goldwater, African-American voters abandoned the Republicans when the GOP abandoned federal guarantee of their civil rights as a core party philosophy. McGovern won more than 85 percent of the African-American vote; Obama, as the first African-American major party nominee, won nearly 95 percent.

  While “Brother McGovern,” as the Reverend Jesse Jackson dubbed him, had simply continued a trend of overwhelming black support for Democratic presidential candidates, he made new inroads with America’s Hispanic population. McGovern tried to address the specific concerns of Hispanic voters and sought and received the endorsement of the legendary Mexican-American farm labor leader César Chávez. In states with significant Hispanic populations, McGovern insisted his convention delegations include a proportionate number of Hispanic delegates.

  McGovern and Obama each won roughly two-thirds of the Hispanic vote in their respective races. The difference: In 1972 there were fewer than ten million Hispanic Americans while in 2008 there were nearly fifty million, and by 2050 it is projected there will be more than one hundred million people of Hispanic heritage in the United States.

  Another group critical to both McGovern and Obama were women voters. Women had traditionally strongly favored Republican presidential candidates from the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920 through the 1960 election. Dwight Eisenhower had won 63 percent of the women’s vote in 1956 and Nixon 53 percent in 1960. But that was still when the Republican Party was seen as the party of civil rights—an issue important not just to African Americans. Thomas Dewey, for example, was the first major national politician to endorse the Equal Rights Amendment for women.

  As the Republican Party ended its identification with civil rights, many women joined African Americans in searching for a new political home. McGovern did his best to ensure they found one in the Democratic Party. At the 1968 Democratic National Convention, just 13 percent of the delegates were women and the party platform made no mention of issues specifically important to women. In 1972, thanks largely to party reforms pushed by McGovern, 39 percent of the delegates were women and the party platform included a fifteen-point “Rights of Women” plank that included such thereafter mainstream proposals as equal pay for equal work, paid maternity leave, appointment of women to key government posts, ending sex discrimination in employment, and including gender discrimination in the enforcement of civil rights.

  Not included in the platform was anything about legalized abortion. Despite the taunts of his rivals and critics, McGovern did not favor national legalization of abortion. Running for president in the year before the U.S. Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade decision, McGovern believed the issue of abortion legalization should be left to the individual states to decide.

  While it would be incorrect to label McGovern a “feminist,” he had “a wonderful instinct for fairness,” said his women’s outreach coordinator, Amanda Smith. He also provided women with real positions of authority. While his senior campaign staff was uniformly male, McGovern did select Jean Westwood to become chair of the Democratic National Committee, the first woman to head either major party.

  McGovern did not win a majority of the women’s vote in 1972 (if he had, he wouldn’t have lost in a landslide), but he did receive a large share of the votes of single women, working women, and college-educated women. More importantly, after McGovern’s campaign, “women had to be at the table,” said Doris Meissner, the first executive director of the National Women’s Political Caucus.

  In successive campaigns, Democrats continued to whittle away at the previous Republican advantage with women voters, so that by the late 1980s Democrats benefited from a significant “gender gap.” Exit polls in 2008 showed Obama winning 56 percent of the women’s vote, including an extraordinary 70 percent of the vote of unmarried women, one of the fastest-growing demographics in the United States. Particularly beneficial to Democrats, women make up a larger percentage of the voting population than men and turn out to vote in higher percentages. In 2
008, an astonishing ten million more women than men voted in the presidential election.

  A third component of the McGovern coalition was a hodgepodge of “issue-oriented voters” whose passion was not around partisanship but individual issues, such as the environment. These movement voters, as they were called, tended to be highly educated, which further distanced the Democrats from their working-class roots. But McGovern was aware that the number of white collar workers was increasing in the United States while the number of blue collar workers was in decline. In 1900, barely 5 percent of high school graduates went on to attend college. By 1970, more than 50 percent of high school graduates went on to attend college, and that number had increased to 70 percent by 2009.

  Well-educated professionals had previously voted overwhelmingly for Republicans, primarily on the issue of tax and social welfare policies. But the post-industrial economy, with its focus on the production of services and ideas rather than on manufactured goods, has placed a higher value on diversity and equality than the old, hierarchical, male-dominated industrial economy. As social issues became more central to presidential campaigns, large numbers of educated professionals moved to the left in their politics. McGovern won a significantly higher percentage of the vote of college graduates (42 percent) than previous Democratic candidates, while Obama won 47 percent of the votes of college graduates.