BuzzFlash Reviews
The Liberals' Moment: The McGovern Insurgency and the Identity Crisis of the Democratic Party (Hardcover)
By Bruce Miroff
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"The Liberals' Moment: The McGovern Insurgency and the Identity Crisis of the Democratic Party" is a book anyone interested in the state of the current Democratic Party should read.
Drawing upon the energy of the McCarthy and RFK primary campaigns in 1968, George McGovern came out of the red Plains State of South Dakota as a WW II hero who became the Capitol Hill voice of the anti-Vietnam War movement.
Richard Nixon's strategists capitalized on McGovern's shaky start to his campaign (the infamous Eagleton vice presidential choice), but really went to town with a southern and blue collar strategy on steroids.
It's a bit of a gross generalization, but the McGovern wing of the Democratic Party became populated by the affluent, the college-educated, suburbanites and young people. The other wing (some of whom defected to the Republicans -- McGovern only carried the State of Massachusetts) consisted of the working class, seniors, and the poor.
African-Americans and Mexican-Americans have tended toward the second group, but are swing voters between the two factions.
We want to re-emphasize that these are not meant to be proscriptive descriptions, just tools for analyzing the lines from the McGovern campaign to today.
If you carry this analogy along, you could say that, in general, Obama represents the McGovern coalition in its modern incarnation, and Hillary Clinton represents the second faction.
John Edwards owes more to the RFK primary campaign of 1968.
Unfortunately, "The Liberals' Moment" won't be read by many Democrats. It's from an academic press, and a lot of Dems are too young to remember or care about McGovern. But it's a well-researched recount of both a shining point in the integrity of the Democratic Party, and the beginning of much of its loss of a cohesive identity.
George McGovern was -- and is -- a man of great conviction, honesty and honor. But those characteristics don't always "sell" well in America when put up against cynical ad campaigns and dirty tricks.
McGovern would have been a fine, decent and compassionate president.
But the Democratic Party has been like Moses leading his people around in the desert since 1972, waiting to reunify and enter the promised land.
"The Liberals' Moment" recalls the beginning of that journey, and is a testament to an authentic politician, who was one of the first modern victims of the GOP attack machine that distorts and vilifies opponents.
Book Description from the University Press of Kansas:
"When George McGovern lost the 1972 presidential election, Richard Nixon's landslide victory buried more than an insurgent campaign. In resurrecting the largely forgotten story of McGovern's remarkable presidential bid, Bruce Miroff reveals how his crushing defeat produced an identity crisis for liberals torn between their convictions and the political calculations required to win elections-a dilemma for Democrats that has never gone away.
Miroff follows the campaign from its surprising rise to its catastrophic fall to remind us how a dark-horse candidate captured the nomination--and then disastrously chose a running mate with a hidden past. Drawing on interviews with dozens of participants--including McGovern himself--who share a wealth of anecdotes and insights, Miroff traces the insurgency to the political struggles of the sixties, explores McGovern's ideology, and assesses the Republican attack politics that linked McGovern to "acid, amnesty, and abortion."
Miroff shows how the transformative election of 1972 signaled a major shift in the Democratic base--from urban blue-collar New Dealers to suburban, issue-oriented activists (feminists and gay rights advocates among them)--as the party shed its Cold War past and embraced an antiwar orientation. He also illuminates how the McGovern campaign mastered the new game of presidential primaries and explores the formative experiences of a generation of talented young political actors, including campaign manager Gary Hart, political newcomer Bill Clinton, and future party strategists Bob Shrum and John Podesta. In excavating the 1972 landslide, he follows the subsequent careers of the young McGovernites and describes the loss's effects on later Democratic presidential campaigns.
By tracing the transformation of American liberalism and sixties idealism from their political crash in 1972 to the muddled centrism of the twenty-first century, The Liberals' Moment shows what the McGovern insurgency has to teach us today--and identifies what Democrats must do in order to reassume the mantle of progressive change."
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