Cockburn: The Coup

[Dennis Perrin/Nancy Bauer]

>I would still stick to "absolute failure" as applied to affecting the
>Democratic Party -- considerable success in affecting the
>whole establishment, "left" and right, by mass action. If we
>had the mass movement that was behind Civil Rights in the
>'60s we could get as much from Bush as we ever got from
>Kennedy or Johnson (or would have gotten from McGovern).
>
>Various minor complexities aside, the future of the left depends
>above all on delegitimating the Democratic Party.
>
>Carrol

I see what you're getting at, and generally agree. McGovern is a mystery.
His acceptance speech in the wee hours of a Miami morning contained a lot of
anti-corporate slams (some of which caused Sen. Henry Jackson, ideological
father of the DLC, and worse, to wince and withhold his applause), and one
wonders if he had won in '72, how his administration would have dealt with
Allende. 

In my view, the best study of the McGovern campaign remains Hunter S.
Thompson's "Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72". HST was very
pro-McGovern, and was dismayed by his candidate's late bows to the likes of
Richard Daley in order to get votes. Not that it mattered. The McGovern
nomination sent the Dems in a rightward direction, and helped to manure the
ground for the "neo-conservatives" and, of course, our last two-term prez. 

DP