Well, how about George McGovern? Couldn't even take his own state. Just another wanker, eh?
I was not here then, but his run triggered the shift of the Byrd machine from the Demos to the Repugs, who now control not only the legislature, but all the top offices in the state without having gone Demo for prez since LBJ. Lot more of that went on.
Now, this did not keep me from being a policy adviser for old George when he ran again in 1984 as the "conscience of the Democratic Party." For those who remember his debate performance in Iowa that year (came in third in the caucuses), I was the author of his proposal to cut the DOD budget by $ 63 billion that he trumpeted then. Oh well.... Barkley Rosser -----Original Message----- From: Justin Schwartz <jkschw at hotmail.com> To: lbo-talk at lists.panix.com <lbo-talk at lists.panix.com> Date: Wednesday, November 08, 2000 5:26 PM Subject: Re: election demographics
>I still haven't provided the figures, but there is an obvious hypothesis to
>explain your puzzle. It's not that people have preferred more conservative
>candidates. It's that they haven't been offered more liberal ones. Why
>Reagan over Carter, Bush Sr over Dukakis, you ask? The thing is, these
>liberals were fleeing liberalism instead of trumpeting it--they treated it
>as something to be ashamed of, and in fact, bought into and reinforced ana
>ggressively conservative rhetoric. There is an old (1960s, I think) book on
>what Americans really think that I liked, can't remember the authors or
>title, have it around here somewhere, that argued that Americans go in for
>conservative global rhetoric and liberal concrete policies. --jks
>
>>
>>Here then is the puzzle: how is it a gradually more liberal electorate
>>prefers to elect increasingly conservative candidates? There's got
>>to be some additional dimension here that slice and dice the meanings
>>and
>>causes of liberalism and conservativism into contradictory fragments.
>>
>>If the electorate now is more liberal than the ones electing Johnson
>>or Kennedy, which helps explain how or why Nixon expanded the social
>>welfare state, how is it that a Democratic President feels compelled
>>to latch onto something like welfare reform because it's seen consistent
>>with the mood of the people?
>>
>>Dennis Breslin
>
>_________________________________________________________________________
>Get Your Private, Free E-mail from MSN Hotmail at http://www.hotmail.com.
>
>Share information about yourself, create your own public profile at
>http://profiles.msn.com.
>
>