Word: mcgoverns
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...shift in the U.S. cycle between bouts of idealism and fits of hunkering down. The election, he says, signaled the retreat of New Deal domestic and postwar foreign policies that had "increased the power of the state beyond the experience of any previous generation." In White's view, McGovern was the spokesman for an increasingly tarnished liberal orthodoxy, advocating ever greater use of federal legislation and revenues for social tinkering. Nixon heralded a welcome standdown, promising voters a withering away of the giant federal state and its intrusive demands. "The Americans," White concludes, "were for slowing the pace...
What the voters saw, White adds, may not have been what they got. Nixon, after all, concentrated power in the Executive Branch to an extent that is only now becoming clear, and his Administration gave law-enforcement authorities new access to private lives. McGovern, for his part, had considerable difficulty in appealing to the Democrats' traditional liberal constituency, and may yet be viewed as the forerunner of some genuinely new politics-or merely as a quirk...
White portrays McGovern's nomination as a well-intentioned but undeniable disaster. The McGovern "guerrilla" movement, as White tells it, was born on a hot, violent night in Chicago in 1968, when distracted delegates to the Democratic National Convention voted to reform their party during the next four years-and unwittingly bound themselves to what in effect became ethnic, sexual and youth quotas. Dominated by a staff of zealous reformers, the resulting commission succeeded in passing a series of sweeping new rules favorable to women, youth and blacks virtually under the unsuspecting noses of many party regulars...
...example, and ignoring a fixed proportion of the elderly, it excluded the old. By insisting on a fixed proportion of blacks, Indians or Spanish-speaking and ignoring, say, Italians, Poles, Irish, Jews, old-stock colonials, it restricted." The Democrats' Pepsi delegations, White suggests, were ready-made for McGovern's antiwar crusades, but left their candidate hostage to a militant elitism that excluded much of the country. Although McGovern sought to edge away from the New Left, in the public mind he was saddled with radical positions on drugs and abortion, among other issues of his farther-out supporters...
White masterfully conveys those few instances in the campaign when real drama flared, including the selection and dumping of Thomas Eagleton as McGovern's running mate. But like the election, the book belongs to Richard Nixon. The President strides into China, and in the moment of a handshake with Chou Enlai, "China was erased as the enemy...