Burnt Orange Report

Fear and Loathing in 2004?

By Jim Dallas

Lots of folks have, recently, tried to cast Howard Dean as another hopeless McGovernite. People like Dick Morris and Bruce Reed clearly want you to believe that nominating Dean in Boston will be every much the mistake that nominating McGovern in Miami Beach was 31 years ago:

Bruce Reed, who served as President Bill Clinton's chief domestic adviser and now directs the centrist Democratic Leadership Council, said the other day: "A campaign based on telling the left everything it wants to hear would be a disaster in the general election. ... Dean has thrown his lot in with a neo-McGovern crowd, and what that crowd likes about him is what the rest of America won't like."

There are plenty of reasons to dismiss Reed's sniping, but lets indulge in DLC fantasy that 2004's nomination process will be a lot like 1972.

(Actually, since just about every Democratic nominee since 1960 has had to "fight for the soul of the Democratic Party" in one way or another - Kennedy vs. Everybody in 1960, McCarthy vs. Humphrey in 1968, McGovern vs. Everybody in 1972, Carter vs. Everybody in 1976, Carter vs. Kennedy in 1980, Mondale vs. Hart, 1984, Dukakis vs. Everybody in 1988, and Clinton vs. Everybody in 1992 - I think it's arguable that this year will be a lot like 1960, 1968, 1972, 1976, 1980, 1984, 1988, and 1992. All of them, in one way or another. You got a problem with that? But let's once again dive off into centrist la-la land and pretend that 1972 is the only worthwhile contest worth comparing 2004's race to.)

Consultants and candidates who have a vested interest in making the Dean/McGovern comparison will no doubt be tempted to twist the actual history of what happened in the 1972. Anybody who wants to make a serious argument about this needs to go back to the source and read at least one book about the 1972 primaries which was written in the early 1970s. This is especially important today, since common sense dictates that most of the people who will vote in the Democratic primaries this year weren't old enough to remember what went down in '72 and perhaps as many as 30 or 40 percent of them (including myself) weren't even born yet! Those of us who have even heard of George McGovern probably remember him as a footnote in our high school history books about this weird guy from South Dakota who got his ass handed to him by Tricky Dick Nixon. And that kind of general ignorance - about why the Democrats got kicked so bad in 1972 - only plays into the hands of bigwigs who would rather install one of their own.

To bone up on my party hack acumen, I got a hold of a copy of Hunter S. Thompson's classic act of gonzo journalism, Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail '72. After an all-night reading session, here are my thoughts...

If Dean is McGovern, then who the hell are you?

The 1972 race started out with most pundits predicting Ed Muskie would walk away with it, since he was acceptable to the establishment without being too tarnished by the whole debacle that was 1968. Muskie tried to play both sides of the Vietnam War, and it might have worked, too. He won the New Hampshire primary comfortable (McGovern collected 37 percent of the vote). Yet, Muskie was forced out after a handful of primaries due to what can only be basically described as a total emotional breakdown (aided, Thompson suggests, by drug-induced hallucinations).

Cue Hubert Humphrey, who makes Al Gore look downright inspiring by comparison. Humphrey was the Old Guard's best chance to derail McGovern and keep control of the party within the hands of a small clique dominated by a few labor bosses and elected officials. Thompson describes him with extreme venom --

Any political party that can't cough up anything better than a treacherous brain-damaged old vulture like Hubert Humphrey deserves every beating it gets. They don't hardly make 'em like Hubert any more - but just to be on the safe side, he should be castrated anyway.

Eugene McCarthy was lost on the electorate, too far out of the mainstream to be taken seriously by 1972.

Scoop Jackson ("D-Boeing"), the uberhawk, saw his campaign sputter, ultimately making his biggest impact by joining Humphrey in the "Anyone but McGovern" movement and slurring McGovern as the candidate of "Acid, Amnesty, and Abortion."

George Wallace appealed to the usual suspects, who have since ceased to be a major voting bloc within the Democratic Party.

At the end of the day, George McGovern was the only decent person worth voting for in 1972 (although the idea of drafting Teddy Kennedy was kicked around).

Feel free to state your own view, but if Dean is the new McGovern, I think it's only fair to say Kerry is the new Muskie, Gephardt is the new Humphrey, Lieberman is the new Scoop Jackson, Kucinich is the new McCarthy, and Ross Perot might just be the new George Wallace (again). Playing the savior-in-waiting (ala Ted Kennedy) this time around is Gen. Wesley Clark.

And Thompson very surely felt that neither Muskie nor Humphrey nor Jackson stood any chance whatsoever against Nixon.

Democrats today are angry, but not for the same reasons and not to the same extent as they were in 1972

To sum up this point - in 1968, people like Humphrey sat and watched while civil war broke out figuratively and literally in Chicago. In 2004, the party is coming off an era of relative unity, so there aren't as many grudges laying around.

Moreover, the war will play differently. This year, it might be true that Gephardt, Kerry, and Lieberman were enablers of Bush; but Humphrey, Muskie, and Jackson were very much tied to Lyndon Johnson, who pretty much sent the Vietnam War spiraling out of control. This year, the Democrats don't really have to take responsibility for the war in Iraq if they don't want to; in 1972, the centrists were inextricably linked to it.

Many, if not most, Democrats are disappointed with the Washington centrists, but not with the same sort of visceral hatred and disgust that existed in 1972.

Eagleton and the competence problem
Thompson closes his book with an interview with McGovern as well as reflections on discussions that he had with key campaign aides like Gary Hart and Pat Caddell. The final chapter basically amounts to an autopsy on their 49-state defeat.

Caddell's analysis is worth going over, because it makes an important point - that McGovern still had a decent shot of winning the election as late as July 1972, before Thomas Eagleton (McGovern's V.P. pick) was forced to reveal his psychiatric history and quit the race. And before McGovern attempted to appease Hubert Humphrey and the Old Guard.

After those things happened, McGovern no longer looked like a sincere radical (which Americans actually could like) and more like a confused, incompetent boob.

In short, Caddell argues that McGovern didn't lose for being an angry tribune of the Democratic left, but because in the last few months he failed to inspire confidence. McGovern lost because he acted like a loser.

An afterthought: Thompson on Bush

Hunter S. Thompson is still scrawling away, and his Page 2 columns are archived on ESPN.com.

A couple weeks ago, he wrote this:

When I went into the clinic last April 30, George Bush was about 50 points ahead of his closest Democratic opponent in next year's Presidential Election. When I finally escaped from the horrible place, less than three weeks late, Bush's job-approval ratings had been cut in half -- and even down into single digits, in some states -- and the Republican Party was panicked and on the run. It was a staggering reversal in a very short time, even shorter than it took for his equally crooked father to drop from 93 percent approval, down to as low as 43 percent and even 41 percent in the last doomed days of the first doomed Bush Administration. After that, he was Bill Clinton's punching bag.

Richard Nixon could tell us a lot about peaking too early. He was a master of it, because it beat him every time. He never learned and neither did Bush the Elder.

But wow! This goofy child president we have on our hands now. He is demonstrably a fool and a failure, and this is only the summer of '03. By the summer of 2004, he might not even be living in the White House. Gone, gone, like the snows of yesteryear.

The Rumsfield-Cheney axis has self-destructed right in front of our eyes, along with the once-proud Perle-Wolfowitz bund that is turning to wax. They somehow managed to blow it all, like a gang of kids on a looting spree, between January and July, or even less. It is genuinely incredible. The U.S. Treasury is empty, we are losing that stupid, fraudulent chickencrap War in Iraq, and every country in the world except a handful of Corrupt Brits despises us. We are losers, and that is the one unforgiveable sin in America.

Beyond that, we have lost the respect of the world and lost two disastrous wars in three years. Afghanistan is lost, Iraq is a permanent war Zone, our national Economy is crashing all around us, the Pentagon's "war strategy" has failed miserably, nobody has any money to spend, and our once-mighty U.S. America is paralyzed by Mutinies in Iraq and even Fort Bragg.

The American nation is in the worst condition I can remember in my lifetime, and our prospects for the immediate future are even worse. I am surprised and embarrassed to be a part of the first American generation to leave the country in far worse shape than it was when we first came into it. Our highway system is crumbling, our police are dishonest, our children are poor, our vaunted Social Security, once the envy of the world, has been looted and neglected and destroyed by the same gang of ignorant greed-crazed bastards who brought us Vietnam, Afghanistan, the disastrous Gaza Strip and ignominious defeat all over the world.

The Stock Market will never come back, our Armies will never again be No. 1, and our children will drink filthy water for the rest of our lives.

The Bush family must be very proud of themselves today, but I am not. Big Darkness, soon come. Take my word for it.

I'd like to think that the Good Doctor would return to the campaign trail and write "Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail 2004." This time with a happier ending.

In either case, if there's anything to this whole 1972-2004 parallelism, we're in for a very strange trip indeed. Bring it on!

Posted by Jim Dallas at August 8, 2003 06:21 PM | TrackBack