Word: mcgoverns
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...WHEN McGOVERN BEGAN his early primary campaign with the sort of position papers Roberts and the others had advised, Roberts was drawn towards his candidacy. He spent a week in California during the spring drawing up a policy statement on conversion of the aerospace industry, and later was a staff director of McGovern's task force on environmental issues...
Roberts said that he was frustrated by McGovern's inability to present the arguments which he and others developed in the position papers. One source explained that Roberts's frustration could be traced to a McGovern decision following the release of the environmental white paper. McGovern decided that the campaign would issue no more detailed policy statements because they put the candidate himself in the background...
...sure how well McGovern understands economics," Roberts said simply. "His greatest quality is his capacity to sustain moral outrage at a time when the repetitiveness of moral disaster numbs the average person. But, the most successful political figures in modern times have known how to integrate this moral outrage with an apparent confidence and sophistication on nuts-and-bolts issues, like the economy...
...McGovern never developed such confidence, and as a result he made the very error which the faculty study group on populist strategy had decided would be most disastrous for a left-leaning Democrat--he built a constituency of moral individuals who shared his outrage about the war, but had nothing new or persuasive to say about domestic issues...
Marty Peretz, another position paper writer, wonders if the issues were cut away from the McGovern campaign by deliberate decision or inadvertant organizational sloppiness. Peretz joined Michael L. Waizer professor of Government, in authoring McGovern's position paper on the Middle East. "That paper was ready five weeks ago," Peretz said this week. "But it wasn't released until this last Saturday which meant that it never even got published in the Jewish weekly newspapers. That's lost pure in competence...