What George McGovern Meant to Me

George McGovern died today.  He was 90 years old, so it was neither unexpected or particularly tragic, but it is sad.  He was a great man.

I am struck, as I read through the comments, how many people are exactly the same as me.  I see person after person saying “He was my  first vote” or “I was a volunteer in his campaign in 1972.”

He was not just a presidential candidate. He was our hero.

It was a memorable moment in time.  I was a High School senior, set to turn 18 well before the election in November, when I started working for George McGovern.  On a snowy night, me and a handful of friends attended our precinct caucus on the east side of Des Moines, and totally overwhelmed the old man (he liked Muskie) and his wife (she didn’t care) who were hosting the event.  Similar events played out across the state of Iowa that night, and we felt we had changed history.  We were on our way.

Now, I watch the Iowa precinct caucuses on the news and they are a much, much bigger deal.

I skipped my High School graduation ceremony to canvass in the California Primary, in the small inland town of Tulare.  When we got back to Iowa, I spent the whole summer working long hours, printing and folding flyers, manning information tables, delivering yard signs, making phone calls for hours, going door to door to door and talking to people, some friendly, some hostile.  Sometimes we worked for 48 hours at a stretch until we collapsed, exhausted, on the mattresses up in the attic.  Great times.  Great friends.

And we got beat by that creep Richard Nixon because the American people feared liberals more than they hated war, and greed, and corruption.  Some of them haven’t changed very much.

History has proven us right.  McGovern would have been a better president than Nixon, just as Mondale would have been a better president than Reagan, Dukakis than Bush, Sr., and both Gore and Kerry better by far than the retarded psychopath who held the office from 2001-2009.  In fact, all of the intervening history has gone to prove what I knew then, which was that the world would be a far better place if no Republican ever won another election.

History will remember you fondly, George McGovern.  Fondly, and with regret.