Jon Chait, via Daniel Larison, on Lieberman’s endorsement of McCain;
The most interesting question may be why Lieberman took this suicidal path. My guess would be that he didn’t consider it suicide. Lieberman is a true believing New Democrat who is influenced by the neoconservatives. One common thread uniting these two strands of thought is an overly-developed fear of McGovernism. George McGovern, the very liberal Democratic nominee in 1972, lost in a landslide, and his defeat ever since has been held up as evidence that middle America rejects and always will reject unvarnished liberalism. I think there’s some truth to that but it’s an oversimplified view.
The point, though, is that Lieberman is almost certainly a true believer in the legend. And you have to remember that, when Barack Obama won the Democratic nomination, a lot of centrists and neoconservatives viewed him as the heir to McGovern and a likely loser. In Lieberman’s mind, I would submit, Obama was the heir to McGovern, and after he went down to defeat at the hands of popular maverick John McCain, Lieberman would be well-positioned to say “I told you so.” He could then tell Democrats that only his brand of moderate Democratic politics could truly prevail, and the sadder but wiser party base would trudge back to his column.
Did anyone really believe the “Obama will lose like McGovern” stuff? Every knowledgeable person I spoke with consistently said the Democratic nominee (whoever it was) would likely win, starting in about January 2008 and continuing through the election (with a brief terrifying respite from this belief right after the Republican convention). The polls almost always favored Obama over McCain (again with that one two-week break) and the registration numbers favored Democrats more generally.
Was the Beltway myopia so great that DC insiders believed 40 year-old legends more than they believed Nate Silver?
Dennis SGMM
Their belief in the profundity and excellence of their own insights trumps all else.
cleek
it was just GOP nonsense, trying to split the Dems. and it was aided by the press which loves to create drama where none exists.
morzer
In my experience, a good number of Republicans simply refused to believe that Obama could win. They were more worried about Hillary. If Obama was mentioned, it was usually dismissively or with a laugh, at least in the early days. Once he had the nomination, they started to buy into Obama = bambi and/or Obama = radical crypto-Muslim. Strangely inconsistent ways of thinking, but it was how they rolled.
El Cruzado
YES
(SATSQ).
Adding, while I’m reasonably sure McGovern would have lost anyway, no one should discuss the 1972 election results without a big fat *
* Watergate.
TR
I’m sure Lieberman thought that. He really does believe he can do no wrong, and he really does find it hard to imagine a scenario in which the people wouldn’t see that he was doing things right.
Not even getting unseated in the 2006 Democratic primary for his own Senate seat could shake him of that belief. He ran as an independent — and on the quite revealing ticket of “Connecticut for Lieberman,” rather than “Lieberman for Connecticut.” The state was going to serve his needs, not the other way around.
And in any case, once he retires he can make his living as a concern troll on Fox News. Move over, Lanny Davis, there’s a new Droopy Dog in town.
bleh
Was the Beltway myopia so great that DC insiders believed 40 year-old legends more than they believed Nate Silver?
Are you kidding? The legend is theirs. It’s what they talk about all day, it’s what they repeat endlessly to each other and to others in their echo-chambers. It is more real to them than real life.
Nate Silver quantifies present reality. These guys live in a fantasy world full of distortions, misdirections, and lies.
You might as well ask whether someone in Portugal believes what’s in the local newspaper or something that’s just been published in a Russian journal of cosmology. I don’t think they’d even understand the question.
(No offense to the Portuguese man on the street. Just that he’s not a Russian-speaking astronomer.)
Nick
I sensed that too, but more than that, I got the sense they feared Obama would win. Hillary they figured they could control. She had high unfavorables. it would be really easy to demonize her among the 5%-10% they need to to push her under 50% permanently.
Obama was a blank slate. If he was to succeed, they couldn’t control it. They feared that.
Plus, you know, he’s black.
James E Powell
Yes, absolutely yes.
Recall how the whole Village viewed and talked about the 2004 election through the prism of the Viet Nam War.
Jennifer
They just got caught up in all the Joementum.
inkadu
I’m not sure Lieberman’s support for McCain could at the time have been considered suicidal. Lieberman had already pissed off the Democratic base in CT and largely won due to Republican / Independent support. You have to remember the GOP barely ran a campaign, making Joementum the de facto Republican candidate. Given all that, why not support John McCain?
Common Sense
These people seriously worried about The Bradley Effect
morzer
Incidentally, is it me or is Candy Crowley trying (disastrously) to rock a brown leather jacket? Slightly off-topic, I know, but it says something about the deluded state of the Villagers.
Phil Perspective
Did McGovern really lose because people claimed he was the second coming of Eugene Debs? Or did he lose because of Nixon’s dirty tricks?
JBerardi
Does the Pope shit in the woods?
Phil Perspective
@inkadu: Yes, people forget that about 2006. Turdblossom even gave HolyJoe his seal of approval. And it helped HolyJoe that the CT GOP ran a putz with a serious gambling problem.
DougJ DougJson
@Common Sense:
The chair of our political science department was obsessed with the Bradley effect. I felt bad having to tell everyone (many of whom liked him) that only an idiot could believe that it was worth ten points (which he suggested).
Linda Featheringill
I understand the doubts that Obama could be elected. You didn’t have to be racist or anything bad to have a good deal of skepticism about his chances. Actually, you didn’t even have to be “white” to be skeptical. You just needed to have a low opinion of your fellow Americans.
I am an Obot and was then but I was surprised when he actually was elected. Never thought I would see that in my lifetime.
Life’s funny, ain’t it?
fourtrkmind
Didn’t McGovern lose because he picked a “centrist” VP candidate disliked by initial McGovern supporters and who subsequently flamed out the campaign? I mean, that plus Nixon’s ratfucking.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
“Dirty Fucking Hippie” is a joke, but not by much. It’s always 1973 in Broderville. And if you take Palin– and all that McCain’s selection demonstrated to anyone with a brain in their heads– out of the equation, I think ’08 would have been a damn close election. Villagers are still afraid to call Palin stupid, much less admit to themselves that stupid is as McCain does.
ETA: I should be fair. It’s not always 1973. Sometimes it’s 1981, so it made perfect sense to talk about “Reagan Democrats” in 2008.
Also, limiting your discussion to “knowledgeable people” ignores a lot of voters. “Obama is teh new McGovern, you kids just don’t get it!” was a favorite PUMA theme.
patrick II
The difference in reaction between democrats and republicans to big national losses has always made me wonder. Goldwater lost big to LBJ in 1964. Sixteen years later they ran and won with a nearly equally conservative Reagan. And of course, the democrats have been running away from the McGovern loss ever since.
I do not understand the different reactions.
JGabriel
DougJ:
Well, when you put it that way: yes.
Here’s an Ambinder post on The General Election Map, from May 2008, showing 245 electoral votes for McCain vs. 221 for Obama.
Unfortunately, the comments are gone, but Ambinder got lambasted over those predictions. He disabled commenting after that post. I know, because I was one of those commenters, and I was using Nate’s analyses as a basis for criticism. Nate Silver’s numbers weren’t really getting much attention until around September or October, if I recall correctly.
.
Nick
@Phil Perspective:
If he had lost by 1-2%, I’d say it was dirty tricks. But he lost by 23%, it’s pretty clear it was more than dirty tricks.
J.W. Hamner
In the primaries there was definitely a “too liberal and too black” argument made by Clinton/Edwards supporters. I’d have to go back and look at my own blog entries to see for sure, but I think we all feared he would lose despite how awesome the poli-sci fundamentals were for him… I don’t think the McGovern view was completely out of whack.
mss
@DougJ DougJson:
Wow. As a political scientist, I find that embarrassing, and I’m hoping that chairs subfield is as far away from American politics (and, for that matter, quantitative data) as possible. If it helps, I encountered few political scientists in Fall 2008 with those sorts of doubts.
Dennis SGMM
@Phil Perspective:
McGovern’s campaign was severely damaged by his choice of Thomas Eagleton as VP. Some time after the choice was announced it came to light that Eagleton had been hospitalized for mental problems and had undergone shock treatments as a part of his therapy. McGovern failed to act quickly to replace Eagleton and so the press and the opposition had a field day. Eagleton eventually resigned from the ticket and he was replaced (I believe) by Sargent Shriver but, the damage was done.
Aaron S. Veenstra
Even if the basic premise were true (which there really is no evidence for), it still doesn’t explain the endorsement. Believing Obama will lose and harm the party is a good reason to say, “Hey, Obama’s going to lose and harm the party.” It’s not a good reason to endorse his opponent and try to make Obama’s situation worse. If you don’t want to countenance the idea that Lieberman just wanted to strike back at the liberals that worked to kick him out of the party, isn’t the simplest explanation that he both preferred McCain and correctly believed there would be no punishment for his apostasy?
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Aaron S. Veenstra:
IIRC, Obama was still the longshot when Holy Joe endorsed McCain. IMneverHO, the endorsement was all about the war(s) and, at least as much, getting revenge on the Clintons for the fact that Lieberman The Pure needed the endorsement of Clinton the Dirty to save his ass in ’06.
burnspbesq
DougJ:
DC insiders say “Nate Who?”
DougJ DougJson
@mss:
What he said, more or less exactly, is that (1) Obama might lose because the polls might be wrong (Bradley effect) and (2) even if he won by the amount predicted by the polls, Hillary might have won by twice as much.
ItAintEazy
@Phil Perspective: There was a reason why they ratfucked Edmund Muskie back in 1972: Muskie was a waay better campaigner than McGovern.
And remember, McGovern wasn’t all that lefty either. He came out against wage and price controls, so the only thing “left” about him is his opposition to a failed war.
J
I don’t know. Lieberman’s capacity for self-delusion is very, very highly developed–it often happens with people who are so vain. After all to think as highly of himself as Lieberman does requires a an ability to ignore inconvenient facts and believe convenient fictions of a very rare order.
This is important to remember when faced with the inevitable defense of Lieberman that goes: ‘Joe Lieberman can’t be an opportunist acting out of narrow self-interested motives, his reasons for doing what he does must be principled, because his choices have been so disastrous for him’. There is every reason to believe that Lieberman is an unprincipled opportunist, whose lofty ‘principles’ are selected with a view to promoting his own career. It’s just that he’s no better an opportunist than he is anything else.
J.W. Hamner
I would also like to point out that you didn’t have to subscribe to Nate Silver’s particular model to see a big Obama victory in the offing… all the polls in all the battlegrounds were consistent with this prediction. Yet, IIRC we were all still worried.
Alex S.
Maybe the GOP moved quicker to the right than Lieberman was able to follow.
Gardenvarietygator
Its possible. I’m not sure its the truth but he MAY have thought that. I don’t think its unique to washington punits to be behind the times by a fair bit. The Bradley effect was given a lot of air time and not seriously challanged except by Nate Silver. ALL of the TV people including all the local talent I saw discussed it seriously and none of them seemed to realize how the electorate changes due to age and demographics in even 4 years let alone 20 or 30. they talked about those changes and completely didn’t believe them. They all sounded like they had read textbooks in college 20 years ago (about things that were true then or had just been true a couple of years before) and not noticed what was happening just under their own noses at the grocery stores and in all job places.
Obama isn’t particularly liberal and didn’t run as such. He’s black. thats what the Leiberman article doesn’t say, though the connection is the assumption that only a liberal will vote for a black man. Hillary and Bill too said things…I don’t think the 3 are racists. I think they still assumed that their were more racists than there really were. Cynics. In fact their life experience would have given them reason to conclude that. Its just,they hadn’t been to my local grocery store lately. Race has been over for many people for a long time.
I did overhear from those who ARE racists, a lot of talk that made me realize that they didn’t know they were not a majority anymore. I think they have the view that all the PC talk is is an agreement not to talk about certain “impolite” things. they don’t realize the reason these things are impolite is that we consider them WRONG. At any rate they have been shocked and disbelieving at the election results because they literally could not see it coming.
Leiberman is old enough to not expect this, and probably his advisors were a least as old. I still don’t know if I believe this is the cause though. He’s not the oldest pol out there, and plenty of others saw Obama more accurately. I guess I’ll go with not being impressed with his brains generally, and having an abrasive personality.
Davis X. Machina
It was PUMA gospel.
JD Rhoades
Anyone remember this famous post?
It may have originally been trolling, but I was hearing this sort of crap right up to Election Day.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@JD Rhoades: Who was that?
TR
The Broderites have it partially right in that McGovern did lose because he was perceived as too liberal at the time. The nominating process in 1972 meant that “special interests” like women, racial minorities, etc. were highlighted on stage, and Nixon did a good job at painting McGovern as the candidate of “abortion, amnesty and acid” who was out of touch with the mainstream.
But liberalism itself wasn’t rejected in 1972. Nixon ran as the president who had created the EPA and OSHA, who had proposed the Family Assistance Plan — essentially a government payment directly to the poor — and had created the first major federal programs for affirmative action. He had proclaimed the soundness of Keynesian economics and was a firm believer in the government use of price and wage controls over private industry.
Seriously, go compare Nixon’s 1972 platform with what Gore or Kerry ran on, and you won’t believe how much more liberal the former is compared to what’s been called “liberal” in recent years.
Anyway, liberalism was largely beside the point. McGovern was running against an incumbent president during a major war, and he was never going to win. His campaign was incompetent — the Eagleton pick, giving his acceptance speech at 3am on the East Coast, etc. etc. — and the Democratic Party was fractured into a million pieces at the time.
It was never going to happen. But it wasn’t because he was liberal.
Bill Murray
the conservative democrats (especially those in the south) didn’t support McGovern nor did the union nor did the party apparatus. here’s a time article from July 1972 that discusses much of the issue
http://www-cgi.cnn.com/ALLPOLITICS/1996/analysis/back.time/9607/19/
TR
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
I believe that was from a conservative trolling at Sadly No!
Sentient Puddle
Beltway myopia was one of the big reasons Nate Silver did what he did. He once observed that the baseball equivalent to saying that the Pennsylvania being a toss-up was saying that the home team being down seven in the bottom of the ninth with two outs and nobody on base was a toss-up game.
TR
@Dennis SGMM:
Close, but not quite.
McGovern first announced that he stood by Eagleton “one thousand percent,” and then unceremoniously booted him from the ticket shortly thereafter. And yeah, Shriver was the new VP nominee.
In a way it was poetic justice, as we later learned that it was Eagleton who had started the “amnesty, abortion and acid” theme that haunted the campaign. Bob Novak ran a quote from “an anonymous Democratic senator” who said: “The people don’t know McGovern is for amnesty, abortion and legalization of pot. Once middle America — Catholic middle America, in particular — finds this out, he’s dead.”
Wile E. Quixote
@DougJ
Yes. These people are a bunch of insular wannabes.
Redshirt
I think many of the neocons, wingnuts, “independents”, and assorted other wackaloons actually believe their own BS. It may sound like nonsense to us, and we might assume they are being knowingly manipulative, but I propose that a large percentage of Republicans believe their lies. To their cores, and thus the anger and irrationality – they’re living lies.
anticontrarian
C’mon, man. If rigorous statistical analysis of trends and likely outcomes were able to overpower received narratives and echo chamber conventional wisdom in Washington, or in our national discourse in general, we would already have solved most of our most pressing problems. It is the persistence of the Epic Saga of the Sixties Redux that drives our politics, and McGovern was the coda to that epic, the refudiation of the Boomers’ leftward swing. To acknowledge or even recognize that the story continued (and still does, some fifty years later) would upset the long-calcified worldviews of our ruling class, many of whom are getting on in years, and if there’s one thing that can be said about both folks getting on in years and ruling classes, it’s that they don’t much cotton to having their worldviews questioned, much less overturned.
Wile E. Quixote
@Phil Perspective:
He lost because he ran a spectacularly incompetent campaign and because the Democrats decided that the circular firing squad tactics they used in 1968 might work again if they tried them in 1972. Nixon’s ratfucking had little or nothing to do with this, even without Watergate he still would have been re-elected. And the whole “I’m behind Tom Eagleton 1000 percent” and subsequent “Tom who?” didn’t help his campaign.
Nellcote
Wasn’t Nate just a punk blogger before the election? Of course the msm didn’t listen to him. Now that he’s been validated by the NYTimes, he’s allowed into the conversation.
I think the thing with Lieberman is as simple as being petty enough to still be resentful that Obama supported the Dem against Lieberman. McCain is still hates Obama over a letter he wrote in the senate.
JD Rhoades
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
Some regular commenter at Sadly, No! IIRC.
Tom Q
To the question, why did the GOP and Dems react so differently to landslide losses — I don’t think the Goldwater/McGovern elections match up, despite their similar margins. The Goldwater loss came as the long-established Democratic coalition was breaking up (in fact, even while losing, Goldwater illustrated this by carrying the Civil Rights-resisting states). McGovern’s came just as the Republican coalition was getting underway.
The better analogy to McGovern might be to Roosevelt/Landon — an opposition candidate urging a move further toward his far wing at a time when the incumbent was popularly moving the country in the other direction. If you use this as your weather-vane, the GOP did react about the same as the Dems post-McGovern — nominating what would today be called RINOs in Willkie, Dewey, Eisenhower, even Nixon (relatively) at the time. It was only after they established themselves as a dominant presidential coalition that they let their freak flag fully fly.
I was 20 years old when McGovern ran, and the degree to which he excited my college-age/counterculture self was inversely proportionate to how much he scared much of middle-America. Yes, the Eagleton thing was a disaster, but McGovern was going to lose anyway — Nixon had what Alan Lichtman calls the Keys to the Presidency lined up (respectable election year economy, foreign policy successes), and McGovern’s perceived radicalism just widened the margin.
But in a way he set the path to the future. He was the original of what Ron Brownstein calls the wine-track candidate (as opposed to beer track), and his spiritual successors have got progressively more of the national vote: Dukakis 45%, Kerry 48%, Obama 53%. The Beltway wisdom that Barack was McGovern’s heir wasn’t so much wrong as mistaken about the result. The coalition McGovern set in motion was quite different from the Southern/ethnic coalition with which Roosevelt was so successful, and it took a while to assemble a national majority with it. But it’s now not only a likely majority in presidential years, it’s a growing one, thanks to the demographics we so often mention here. McGovern is to Obama as Reagan, ultimately, was to Landon.
Wile E. Quixote
@patrick II:
But Reagan wasn’t as conservative as Goldwater. Reagan never went to Tennessee, as Goldwater did, and said that the TVA was a boondoggle and should be privatized. One of my political science professors at the UW, Don McCrone, loved telling that story as an example of how you could be *too* honest during a campaign.
The one time Reagan ever condemned the TVA was during the 1950s when he was working for GE. The management of GE pointed out that they had $50 million in TVA contracts and Ronnie promptly shut the fuck up and got with the program. Reagan is the founding father of today’s “Get the government out of my Medicare” conservatism. He never went out and said anything like “Hey, the TVA is a socialist boondoggle, let’s privatize it and force white southerners to pay market rates for their electricity” or “Farm subsidies are a huge ripoff. It’s time for white farmers in the midwest to suck it up and deal with the market like everyone else instead of relying on government welfare. Nope, Ronnie knew his audience, he didn’t condemn the all of the white conservative welfare recipients out there, it was all “strapping bucks buying T-bones.”
Of course as bad as Reagan was he was at least connected to reality and wasn’t as stupid and nihilistic as today’s lot of Republicans. As others have pointed out if Ronald Reagan ran for president today he’d never make it in the Republican party. His first two acts as governor of California were to sign a bill liberalizing access to abortion and contraception and sign a bill that enacted the most massive state tax increase in American history. Reagan cut taxes in 1981 and then raised them in 1982 and his gas tax increase was the largest such increase in American history. He signed the 1986 immigration act into law which granted amnesty to millions of illegal immigrants.
If the Democrats weren’t stupid, weak and ineffective they’d be pointing this sort of thing out all the time, if anything just to piss off conservatives and make them highlight, even further, how full of shit they are.
Brooklyn Girl
Incumbent wartime presidents always win.
And the country was incredibly divided in 1972.
Andrew
@Tom Q:
Actually, I’m not sure that’s totally correct. McGovern’s run DID foretell the future Democratic coalition, in much the same that Goldwater’s run foretold the future Republican coalition. Ruy Teixeira and John Judis both wrote that, based on demographics, McGovern’s coalition would have allowed him to nearly beat Nixon today.
And actually, Alf Landon, WAS an ultra-moderate RINO. There was a reason he was one of the few Republican governors or senators left in 1936. He pretty much endorsed most of the New Deal but said he’d run it “more efficiently.”
Anyway, one piece of context that people are forgetting is that Lieberman endorsed McCain way back in the fall of 2007. At that point, Democrats still seemed favored, but McCain’s campaign was viewed as dead in the water. So Lieberman probably thought he could endorse his friend, see him lose, then after some egotistical musing in the media, endorse the Democratic nominee.
JRon
No, the myopia is that great NOW.
Lieberman endorsed McCain because he’d been offered the veep slot by his buddy. Only when West Virginia threatened to walk out of the convention if he picked him (with others sure to follow) did McCain relent. After reviewing the lame and uninspiring choices given him by his campaign, he said “fuck you all” and picked Sarah Palin out of the blue.
Holy Joe was going to be one of the first to be on both party’s tickets, within only 8 years. He’d be in the history books.
(I thought this was common knowledge–it was during the election, but that was sooo long ago…)
jfxgillis
Doug:
Yup. They believed it. I forget whose memoir it was, maybe GHWB’s himself, but apparently Bush 41 was convinced up to and including election day 1992 that the American people would never support a “draft dodger” over a “war hero.”
Paris
The correct analogy to the Dems in ’72 is the Repubs in 2012. The hippies were the insurgents back then. The Dem convention was a disorganized mess that went hours over schedule while ‘populist democracy’ sorted out each and every issue. Go Tea Party!
Zuzu's Petals
Except that Lieberman endorsed McCain in December 2007, a month before the NH primary. So it’s more than a bit of a stretch to say he did so in response to the likelihood an Obama nomination…especially since Hillary was such a strong contender in those days.
If it were driven by Obama-fear, it seems more plausible that he would have waited until after the primaries to endorse.
Eliot rosewater
Many GOP/TeaParty types could not imagine anyone they know voting for a black man. They simply forgot that everyone they know doesn’t represent the USA.
PanAmerican
It didn’t help that prior to Nixonland the only counter narrative anybody read about 1972 was Hunter Thompson’s. It’s a well written, fun read but is problematic for a number of reasons.
agrippa
Republicans thought that Obama could not win? Did they actually think that?
There was no way that any Republican was going to be elected president in 2008. That should have been obvious.
The Democrats lost the 2010 election because: Congress did not pass what needed to be passed; the Democrats did not get out the vote; the Democrats ran a very bad campaign.
Bella Q
@bleh: There are probably more Russian speaking astronomers in Portugal than there are Villagers who would see reality as quantified by say, Nate Silver, than believe in their myth. To be precisely fair to the Portuguese man in the street.
NoFortunateSon
Jerome Armstrong had an entire series of posts at MyDD during starting during the primary war early in 2008, first noting how the Obama logo looked similar to the McGovern sunrise logo, and then going on to attempt similar connections.
Citizen Alan
@Phil Perspective:
I’ve always though that it was really Muskie who lost due to Nixon’s dirty tricks. Muskie was beating Nixon in early polls until the “Canuck letter,” a forged letter put out by Nixon’s people in Muskie’s name that disparaged French-Canadians, seriously hurt Muskie in New Hampshire (lots of Quebecois immigrants, apparently) and that’s what opened the door to McGovern in the first place.
NoFortunateSon
@Zuzu’s Petals: Good catch.
Lieberman endorsed McCain in December of 2007, well before Iowa.
That said, I wonder if there is some projection unto Lieberman in Daniel Larison’s assertion:
Has that not been the sole enterprise for many on the Professional Left? Have these authors not been attempting to establish their wisdom exclusively on the back of Barack Obama’s (supposedly inevitable) failure for two years now?
How long have we been reading the dire predictions of Obama’s impending failure? How many times have we been treated to assertions that all of Obama’s troubles could be solved by simply accepting Their wisdom?
I assert the notion that irrational underestimation of Barack Obama’s chances of success have very little to do with Beltway blindness afflicting Lieberman, and all to do with another sort of blindness.
artem1s
I wasn’t afraid Obama couldn’t win, or that McCain would beat him, as much as I was worried that the GOP would find a way to fix the election or there would be some October surprise that an inexperienced campaigner wouldn’t be able to recover from. Mostly, the election of a Republican seemed only likely in a catastrophic scenario. And lord knows we’ve never seen THAT before in Presidential elections.
liberal
His (US) Senate voting record made me think he was pretty middle-of-the-road for a Dem, roughly the same as Hillary (ideologically).
JRon
@efgoldman: seems that Occam’s Razor can be a self-fulfilling prophecy. I think belief in it kept a lot of voters unmotivated.
Napoleon
I think the insane reaction from the right to the election of Obama is in part because their voters always knew a n-r could not win. When he did, which everyone with a brain could see coming, they lost it.
Hunter Gathers
@TR:
According to Novak, that ‘anonymous Democratic senator’ was Thomas Fucking Eagleton himself.
Not Jack Germond
As many have written Nixon was the candidate of peace (he ended the draft, he brought 90% of the boys home by election day, he went to China and Russia) election year prosperity (a rigged economy, but who knew?) and very centrist-to-liberal and popular domestic policies.
He had the fundamentals to beat any Democrat in 1972, ratfucking or no ratfucking. Of course b/c he had barely won in 1968 and lost (he thought he was robbed) in 1960 he was running scared.
McGovern ran a very inept campaign on top of this. The Eagleton mess, the messy convention etc. Kicking Mayor Daley’s delegation out of the convention was kissing a swing state goodbye.
McGovern was rejected by the South, as any mainstream northern Democrat would have been this year. He also -unlike most of his rivals- had a TERRIBLE relationship with labor, which was much stronger then and hated him for his previous support for Taft-Hartley (refused to vote for cloture when Dems tried to reform it in the mid 1960s) and because George Meany hated the fact that McGovern was not really a cold warrior.
On domestic issues he was mostly just mainstream liberal and didn’t seem to care much. He also really, really wanted to be President, which is less clear of Goldwater.
But McGovern really was a peacenik, much more than Obama or anyone else who was demonized for this, e.g. Dean or Dukakis. He had been for Henry Wallace over Truman and as a young professor publicly opposed the Korean War, which was a very radical stand. B/C of midwestern isolationism this maybe hurt him less than it would have in another state. He was the candidates of the DFHs (Acid, Amnesty and Abortion) and the fact that he was a small-town minister’s son and a WWII bomber pilot did not overcome this.
Karen
@J.W. Hamner
Yes people seem to forget that it was Hillary Clinton who said that Obama was “unelectable” than later on talked about the “good hardworking Americans” which basically translated as a black man is unelectable by white people.
And many of those supporters of Clinton became the first Truthers, PUMAs. I’m not saying all PUMAs are truthers but Berg was the first one to sue over the birth certificate and he was a definite PUMA.
Kenneth Almquist
@ItAintEazy: “McGovern wasn’t all that lefty either. He came out against wage and price controls, so the only thing “left” about him is his opposition to a failed war.”
As I recall, McGovern promised every American a guaranteed minimum annual income of $6,000 per year. (That’s equivalent to $31,000 per year in today’s dollars.)
@efgoldman: “The president’s party always loses in his first mid-term”
Not always. In 2002, Republicans gained 8 seats in the House and 2 in the Senate.
Wile E. Quixote
Is it just me or does amnesty, abortion and the legalization of pot sound like a pretty good campaign platform. I’d even go for acid, amnesty and abortion, even though I’m not much into psychedelics, just because it’s alliterative. Too bad that all of the pusillanimous pussyfooters, nattering nabobs of negativism and hypocritical hypochondriacs of history would be against it.
sherparick
The short answer: Yes!
Head start on “Nixonland” for the book club. Rick Perlstein in “Nixonland” documents how Nixon and his minions identified McGovern as the easiest candidate for them to beat and did their best to “ratfuck” (a technical term) all the other Democratic candidates, particularly Muskie and Humphrey. Why Nixon crushed McGovern is pretty much explained in that Nixon used price controls to temporarily repress inflation while having his chum at the Federal Reserve, Arthur Burns, press monetary expansion to the floor. The pseudo-boom, and with Vietnamization reducing the number of U.S. casualties, while painting McGovern as likely to hand the country over to the Soviets was the key to the landslide, along with McGovern running the worst general election campaign in U.S. history with the exception of Tom Dewey’s 1948 campaign, pretty much explains the landslide.
2002 represented the Republicans first and best use of waiving the bloody 9/11 flag.
CalD
I actually think it might have been possible for Obama to lose… right up until the financial industry meltdown, at wich point it was all over for McCain. But there’s simply no doubt in my mind that Lieberman endrsed McCain because he was trying to position himself for a shot at running as a Republican in 2012. But the rise of teabaggerism put the kebosh on that plan.
Emphyrio
I think the snark is trumping logic in some comments here.
Joe was McCain’s preferred running mate, dropped only because polling showed they’d lose the base.
Close friends. It counts, sometimes.
McCain might’ve won. He led after the Palin pick.
The Bradley Effect was a real possibility.
Also caging efforts offered R’s hope.
It was the campaign suspension/TARP meeting that torpedo’ed McCain. Looked silly. Thank God.
bob h
One thing everyone forgets about McGovern is that he was a genuine war hero, with a WWII Bronze Star, I believe. Unlike McCain, he managed to keep airborne and stay in the fight. Unlike McCain, he never carried on like a truculent asshole. There has never been any doubt in my mind who the more manly of the two was.
Barry
@Phil Perspective: “Did McGovern really lose because people claimed he was the second coming of Eugene Debs? Or did he lose because of Nixon’s dirty tricks? ”
I’ve heard that in one of Nixon’s taps, he’s talking with Hubert Humphrey, and acknowledging that HH had to nominally support McGovern, but that HH didn’t really support McGovern, because he (and the rest of the Dem leadership) didn’t want McGovern to win.
oboe
Was the Beltway myopia so great that DC insiders believed 40 year-old legends more than they believed Nate Silver?
Sorry, but this is a fucking joke, right?
Howlin Wolfe
@TR: That’s what I recall. The Sadlynaughts would mockingly write “Book mark that, Libs” for many months afterward. The troll was someone who called itself “The Truth” or some such idiotic Orwellian name. The trollbot was affectionately called Troofie. It took various names, but the S,N! commenters could recognize the style and would call it Troofie no matter what it called itself.
darrelplant
Everyone always points to McGovern in ’72 as an example of the biggest loss in history for the Democrats. “No chance!” “He was the guy Nixon chose to beat!” “Worst candidate ever!”
But then you look at the ’84 race and Walter Mondale actually got fewer electoral votes than McGovern. He beat McGovern by a few points in the nationwide popular vote but won only his home state of Minnesota and DC (he didn’t even manage to pull out a victory in “liberal” Massachusetts).
So what’s the narrative there? Did Reagan pick his opponent and just get away more cleanly than Nixon? Mondale had the full backing of his party apparatus, unlike McGovern who had to deal with openly hostile Democratic stalwarts like Mayor Richard Daley and AFL-CIO chief George Meany (who was a Nixon golfing buddy).
If Mondale couldn’t do discernibly better against the Reagan re-election campaign with the full weight of the Democratic Party behind him than McGovern was able to do against Nixon with a divided party, perhaps it’s time to do a little bit of re-evaluation of the ’72 election.
Not Jack Germond
In 1984 there was a HUGE election-year economic recovery. Mondale was pretty irrelevant. I think that because he was a liberal with no radical taint, got along better with unions etc, he also would have run a couple of points ahead of McGovern in 1972, but also would have lost badly. Had McGovern run against Reagan (he actually ran against Mondale for the nomination) he would probably have lost 50 states, but only run a couple of points behind Fritz.
The main thing is that campaign tactics and even candidate characteristics including ideology are -within their typical range- very secondary in importance to conditions. Few political scientists would disagree with this statement.
Both in 1972 and in 1984 conditions were very favorable to the incumbent. This was also true in 1964 when the GOP ran its extremist.
There are election years when the candidate/ideology stuff matters more, when conditions allow it to be closer, but that’s not typically the case.
AAA Bonds
I second the idea that some Republicans, during the primaries, simply did not believe Hillary Clinton could lose or would be allowed to lose an election in the Democratic Party. That was my purely anecdotal experience.
I don’t know where this narrative came from but it was there. No Republican I know, and I know plenty, believed Obama had a chance, in any conversation we had about the topic, until it was clear he’d already won.
This is in the South, mind you.
AAA Bonds
@Not Jack Germond:
But one limit to that analysis (and it doesn’t matter often) is how conditions are considered basic. In a time of economic crisis, they may depend heavily on incidental effects of ideology in elections. The 1930s in America and Europe are a case study.