> Hmm, no one this side of a morgue ever came across cooler than George
> McGovern, Walter Mondale and Michael Dukakis, and look what happened
> to them. John Kerry, too, looks like he's waiting for interment. I
> think the Dems should dwell in the land of the living this election
> and choose the very much alive Howard Dean.
Yes, but I don't claim that being cool in the McLuhan sense guarantees victory, of course. It's a necessary, not a sufficient, condition :-).
These poor guys had other problems. McGovern was a victim of the patented Nixon shiv in the back plus the backlash against the movements and the first unleashing of the Republican "Southern strategy" = racism; Mondale had the misfortune to be a sacrificial victim drafted to run against the Gipper, whom America for some inexplicable reason had fallen in love with; and Dukakis, besides being from Massachusetts and seeming too "ethnic," committed three inexcusable faux-pas: pardoning Willie Horton, getting into that tank wearing a helmet, and refusing to swear that he would rip the guts, with his bare hands, out of anyone who attacked his wife.
Running for president in this man's land is a very complex art, indeed.
Jon Johanning // jjohanning at igc.org __________________________________ A gentleman haranguing on the perfection of our law, and that it was equally open to the poor and the rich, was answered by another, 'So is the London Tavern.' -- "Tom Paine's Jests..." (1794); also attr. to John Horne Tooke (1736-1812) by Hazlitt