Quotes About McGovern

To me, the lyrics of the song define the kind of style it is.

A Democrat who had been JFK's Secretary of the Navy, Connally believed that as many as 20 million Democrats would cross over to vote for Nixon because George McGovern wasn't qualified to lead the nation, particularly because of his proposals for military cutbacks.

You know, sometimes, when they say you're ahead of your time, it's just a polite way of saying you have a real bad sense of timing.

I'm someone who's done the opposite of whatever the received wisdom is, to keep your career going into your 50s.

McGovern made some stupid mistakes, but in context they seem almost frivolous compared to the things Richard Nixon does every day of his life, on purpose, as a matter of policy and a perfect expression of everything he stands for. Jesus! Where will it end? How low do you have to stoop in this country to be President?

The only glaring weakness in McGovern's sweep was his failure to break Humphrey's grip on the black wards in Milwaukee—where The Hube had campaigned avidly, greeting all comers with the Revolutionary Drug Brothers handshake. It was

A totally befuddled voter may look at a Vote for McGovern sign and do just that.

We are not a nation of truth-lovers. McGovern understands this, but he keeps on saying these terrible things anyway… and after watching him in New Hampshire for a while I found myself wondering—to a point that bordered now and then on quiet anguish—just what the hell it was about the man that left me politically numb, despite the fact that I agreed with everything he said.

I've always thought that the blue-collar vote had to be a source of his strength," said Frank Mankiewicz, McGovern's main strategist. "It always seemed to me that McGovern—not as the anti-war candidate but as the 'change' candidate—would appeal more to Middle America than he would to any other group. They're the ones with the most to gain from change and they're the ones who get screwed by the way we do business in this country.

McGovern has made it painfully clear that he wants more than just the nomination; he has every intention of tearing the Democratic Party completely apart and re-building it according to his own blueprint…

But if McGovern loses in November, control of the Democratic Party will instantly revert to the Ole Boys, and McGovern himself will be labeled "another Goldwater" and stripped of any power in the party.

He showed me a pencil-written analysis of the voting trends. In most black districts, Humphrey was beating McGovern two to one. In the white labor districts, McGovern was easily taking Humphrey. The blacks were clearly the only bloc in the state that had not gone all out for

Both McGovern and Wallace, he said, draw on the same pool of extremely alienated blue-collar voters, a group that is constantly getting deeper into bitterness, cynicism, and resentment about the current government.

You know, sometimes, when they say you're ahead of your time, it's just a polite way of saying you have a real bad sense of timing.

The disarray of the convention seemed only to grow as the spectacle careened to a close. McGovern had trouble finding a vice-presidental nominee, finally settling on Senator Thomas Eagleton of Missouri, a relative unknown. But the delegates then proceeded to advance thirty-nine additional candidates for the number two slot, including Mao Tse-tung, Archie Bunker, and Martha Mitchell, the outspoken wife of Nixon's campaign manager.

One of the sharp parallels is that neither Vietnam nor Iraq was the slightest threat to America's national security.