Word: mcgoverns
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...McGovern people had to use the evening news, because they didn't have any money," Kearns said. "When you go on TV, the only important decision is: What are your visuals going to be?" Kearns said that while she was travelling with Shriver in August, it was obvious that no final tact had been decided on the visuals strategy of the campaign. "You could tell no real decision had been made by the scheduling," Kearns said. "No political goal was determining where we were going...
KEARNS REMEMBERS THAT in late August and early September two competing visual strategies were being argued in high-level meetings chaired by McGovern adviser Ted Van Dyck. One strategy--favored by Kearns, Pat Caddell '72 and many of the younger campaign advisers--would develop class-conscious themes in the campaign. The class appeals would stress that the Democrats were the party of the ordinary man, the Republicans the party of the Nixon-Connolly rich. Class-conscious visuals would show McGovern visiting a neighborhood that had been block-busted, talking about how both blacks and whites get screwed...
...Brien and others counselled separate appeals to the various constituencies in the Democratic Party coalition. Democratic Coalition visuals would show McGovern visiting old people at a hospital in San Diego: speaking before a Jewish Veterans group in Houston; visiting a poverty project in a black neighborhood in Oakland...
...SUMMER GAVE WAY to fall the voters still did not know who George McGovern was. Indeed, the strategies had been argued separately from McGovern--as ideal types which could work for any Democratic party liberal in 1972. But not any Democrat was running. George McGovern was and the Nixon strategists had managed to make the personality the hottest issue in the campaign. The welded strategies did not develop McGovern's strengths. In this sense, the Democrats ran a disembodied campaign and a campaign which could not converge in the person of George McGovern made the work of the Committee...
...election approached a few brave Democrats came to feel that the problems with the campaign was McGovern himself. "About six weeks ago," recalled Martin Peretz. "I suggested to Frank Mankiewicz that we ought to face up to the fact that McGovern was unpopular. I thought we should set up a Committee called Americans Reluctantly for George McGovern. Lyndon Johnson and Eugene McCarthy would have made ideal Co-Chairmen...