Word: mcgoverns
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...early consensus was that candidate McGovern was a persistent but nevertheless hapless loser. Although the columnists have in recent days triumphantly resurrected this early line, they were given a scare in the spring and summer...
LATE IN THE PRIMARIES there was rumination on the columnists' collective inability to assess McGovern's strengths and the dedication of his constituency; the dawning sense that the political tour guides had themselves missed the boat led to hasty attempts to clamber aboard during convention time, with excessive praise for the sharp young technocrats of the McGovern staff. Then, having at last paid their dues to McGovern, the columnists could sound objective as they announced a coming Nixon landslide and scolded the post-Eagleton McGovern for not living up to the conventiontime notices on his efficient and pragmatic organization...
Until his China trip. Richard Nixon was generally treated by the columnists--confident that they were smarter and tougher than the President--as a malevolent and silly child. Now, somehow, he's a political genius. George McGovern has become the class served up some bacon, and set to work each morning with a knife and fork. Why this cruelty? Because McGovern had shown weakness: he had shown himself to be politically salve...
...addition to their viciousness, the columnists also have a predilection for foolishness as in their daily discoveries this summer that McGovern is not after all a hair-shirted secetic, but a Democratic Party politician not too different from the rest. Feasting on such obvious and worthless information, we roll along toward October, with the columnists still yapping their way through assessments and re-assessments of candidate McGovern: like dogs, snapping at the air as they pursue their own tails...
PERHAPS THE MOST charitable thing that can be said about the columnists is that they have been ill-equipped to deal with McGovern. Living in Washington, solicitously hovering around the inside sources that are their tickets to fame and prosperity, they see very little of the real world. We see more even in book-laden Cambridge. Since all the people the columnists know are centrists, they counsel McGovern to move toward the center, ignoring the fact that it was a disastrous position for his Democratic rivals. Since all the people the columnists know seem to think that "issues...