The Liberals' Moment: The McGovern Insurgency and the Identity Crisis of the Democratic Party

by Miroff, Bruce

• ISBN13: 9780700615469
• ISBN10: 0700615466
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2007-09-25
• Publisher: Univ Pr of Kansas

Summary

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 onlater 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.

Table of Contents

Preface	p. ix
Introduction	p. 1
The Rise and Fall of the McGovern Insurgency
"A Sixties Campaign in the Seventies"	p. 11
Decent Ambition	p. 25
The Left-Center Strategy	p. 41
A Downward Arc	p. 72
"A Long, Slow Crawl"	p. 99
The Meaning of the McGovern Campaign
"Radical"?	p. 119
A Grassroots Army	p. 154
Democratic Insurgency	p. 177
Mass Movements and McGovernites	p. 202
A Textbook for Attack Politics: The Master vs. McGovern	p. 228
The Identity Crisis of the Democratic Party
Excavating the Landslide	p. 247
The Legacy of the McGovern Campaign	p. 260
McGovernites	p. 279
Epilogue	p. 299
List of Interviews	p. 307
Notes	p. 309
Index	p. 343
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