The Passing of a Political Edsel
Will, George
George Will The Passing of a Political Edsel The following speech by George Will was given at Michigan State University in East Lansing exactly one week after the 72 presidential election. The...
...And it is not a harmless fiction...
...There are four reasons why McGovern lost...
...Little details...
...1976 will be tougher for us Republicans, but that will be better for the country.76 will be tougher for us Republicans, but that will be better for the country...
...Third, McGovern's personality as revealed in his campaign was repellent to the voters...
...The worst consequence of that quota system is the life it breathes into two very dangerous principles about a very important concept...
...By the logic of McGovern's OHM argument, only a sick society could produce an administration as evil as the Nixon Administration...
...McGovern did not represent the thinking of his party...
...Now I ask you: Does a great people really need to be given moral leadership by politicians...
...Again and again we come back to the matter of McGovern advertising McGovern's very singular virtue...
...The text has been somewhat shortened...
...The reasons for this are not hard to find...
...Every time he declared that Nixon was a villain, he insulted the American people who elected him...
...There are only a few other possibilities...
...The significant thing - not to put too fine a point on it - is that McGovern is not affected by a shadow of a doubt concerning - well, concerning anything...
...Taken together they are destructive of democracy...
...That was a mistake...
...But be that as it may, the McGovern reform rules worked for McGovern...
...It was uncanny...
...And what is insufficiently appreciated is that this inept-ness was not a fluke...
...To help you understand why I say this, let me direct your attention to one of my favorite McGovernisms, a statement that was quoted in The New York Times of June 9. McGovern, speaking about young voters who supported him, said this: They "want a candidate who really knows where he'd like to see the country go...
...Advertising is nothing if not trendy...
...This is a big task because the people were so mar-velously, so thoroughly obdurate in rejecting the candidate who must have set some kind of record for ignoring all evidence while insisting that he was the incarnation of the popular will...
...But the problems persist and multiply, and the money is increasingly scarce...
...Thus we are left with only one possibility...
...This is not just a political tactic on their part...
...Because, he said - really, he said it - because there is such a "climate of fear" in the nation that people are afraid to tell the poll takers they they are going to vote against Nixon...
...Confronted with such woozy utopianism, one does not know whether to laugh or cry...
...Robert Sam Anson is McGovern's biographer and is undoubtedly the first and last man to earn a tidy sum of money as a McGovernologist...
...Students and their celebrators - ideologically fervid and notoriously leisured - form the backbone of the so-called New Politics...
...And this advertising language reflects the trend toward extravagance in all our discourse...
...The unprecedented "sanity" of this flight consists (by the way) in luggage space in the cabin which permits the busy executive to bring his bag aboard, and save time when he arrives at his destination...
...Do you know that the Democratic platform actually speaks about the government delivering - and I am quoting - "a personal life that makes us all feel that life is worth living...
...Let me give an example...
...This has the ring of truth, and it causes me to share with you one of WiU's Self-Evident Truths: No one should be elected president - or dogcatcher, for that matter - whose ideas about important matters remain unchanged since graduate school...
...That purpose was to facilitate the nomination of the Chairman of the McGovern Commission...
...You cannot believe in anything that is of general concern to Americans as Americans...
...And this intelligent voter reaction against McGovern's moralistic rhetoric is, I hope, evidence of a national revulsion against extravagant rhetoric...
...McGovern's moralistic conception of leadership is fine for a Methodist parish - or for any other parish...
...The tiresome litany is always the same...
...For forty years the Democratic party's domestic policy has been to find a problem and throw money at it...
...It certainly was a quota system...
...Britain's former Prime Minister Harold MacMillan once was asked if his government would give the British people a "sense of purpose...
...The tag line of Mr...
...Democrat...
...At a campaign stop in St...
...They cannot be justified because they rest on discredited notions about racial or sexual or ethnic "identities" that can only be understood and "represented" by people of the same race, sex, or ethnic group...
...After all, if poor Tom Eagleton is not to blame, then who is...
...McGovern seemed constitutionally incapable of speaking three consecutive sentences without attacking the moral character of the majority of Americans...
...The rules governing delegate selection to the 1972 convention were drafted by a Commission on Party Reform, the McGovern Commission, named after its chairman...
...Frankly, I do not expect that to happen...
...Should the New Politics maintain its stranglehold on the Democratic party, the Republican party may become the majority party...
...I do not think so, and I do not think I am being excessively fastidious when I object to this kind of language...
...But this year the convention did not represent the party...
...having won the nomination against the gossamer opposition of Senators Muskie and Humphrey, the McGovernites were seized with delusions of adequacy...
...No, MacMillan said, if people want a sense of purpose they should go to their bishop, not their politicians...
...The answer, which takes us to the heart of McGovernism, and to the heart of the contrast between McGovernism and Nixon's Republicanism, was revealed in McGovern's shrill rhetoric...
...Since then he has been more or less a finished product, both personally and ideologically...
...This is so because McGovernism is religion carried on by other means...
...McGovernites are given to describing themselves as "decent," thereby implying that people who disagree with them are "indecent...
...McGovern obviously is mystified by the fact that the majority of Americans resent this...
...The reasons are: First, McGovern did not represent his party...
...Let me explain wherein the insults lay...
...Under the concept of representation advocated by the McGovern reforms, those white senators had no obligation to represent black Americans...
...I wonder what McGovern considers a large detail...
...This is not just traditional advertising hyperbole...
...Second, McGovern's positions on the issues were contrary to those held by the voters...
...What concerns them is the task of being sure at heart...
...Our government has not mastered the homely art of delivering a postcard, and the Democrats want it to deliver "a personal life that makes us all feel that life is worth living...
...Our political language, like our advertising language, reflects the same kind of moralistic extremism...
...McGovern must be "feeling near as faded as his jeans...
...McGovern argued not just that the President was the wrong man to be president, but that the President is a man whose dedication to evil is unique in American history...
...Now that Mr...
...If there are problems between the races, the generations, the classes, the sexes, it is because racists, sexists, or other mean-minded people in power will not make the easy effort to solve our problems...
...Having just finished inflicting upon the country the worst eight years of government in American history, do the Democrats today have more modest pretensions...
...Fat chance...
...It flowed straight from the spirit of McGovernism...
...This makes me a kind of connoisseur of incompetence...
...The point is that details, large or small, do not concern the large-minded folks of McGovern's legions...
...According to McGovern, his young supporters are too large-minded to be bothered about "little details" like what things cost...
...that, in fact, the salient features of the social terrain are racial and sexual distinctions, rather than the accepted differences of political philosophies and interests...
...Kristofferson's definition is to be preferred over, say, Plato's definition...
...To be fair, the McGovernites are not the only offenders...
...One is: The American people felt comfortable with Richard Nixon, and the American people do not casually cashier incumbents with whom they feel comfortable...
...But I tip my hat to Mr...
...My favorite is a statement McGovern made two weeks before the election...
...All this summer and autumn Trans World Airlines has been running a television commercial that has inspired me to go to extraordinary lengths to avoid flying on Trans World Airlines...
...When Senator McGovern uses the word "insane," it is a reflection of politics serving as a surrogate for more traditional pieties...
...That, in fact, is where the candidate fixed it all during the campaign as he prepared to be massacred...
...The notion that all things will be good when the bad men are driven from the corridors of power is the hoariest fiction in politics...
...And McGovern, bowing to the logic of his rhetoric, denounced America as a "sin-sick" society...
...Rather, it is advertising language suited to, and reflective of, the new moralism...
...It is my job today to explain why, in my judgment, Senator McGovern faded, why the American people found Senator McGovern so resistible...
...This is the concept of representation...
...I think not...
...This is the correlation that, in my judgment, was intuited by the voters...
...that the Republican party is like the Ku Klux Klan...
...McGovern's most energetic supporters, outspoken liberals in the media and academic communities, must explain why "the people" once again have behaved so disagreeably...
...They have the ideological incentive to use their leisure time to dominate the nominating process as it has been amended by the Democratic party...
...If there is conflict in the world it is because the pure of heart are not in power in Washington...
...Some quite sensible non-McGovernites suspended their disbelief in McGovern's oft-demonstrated carelessness...
...But that is not the most significant thing about Anson's description of McGovern's intellectual development...
...Poor George...
...The worst consequence of the McGovern Commission's quota system is not the damage it has done and will continue to do to the Democratic party...
...The question is: How can anyone believe such stuff...
...And Mr...
...But I cannot close without mentioning the role of the quintessential McGovern-ites, those in the academic community...
...Louis McGovern proclaimed: "If I win the election I would like to be remembered most of all for restoring the presidency to a position of moral leadership worthy of a great people with great ideals...
...Taken together these principles are destructive of democracy because they destroy two attitudes which sustain the civility and good will that make popular government feasible...
...And the people do not like politicians who constantly tell the people that their souls are corrupt and need saving...
...McGovernism is a spiritual movement and it has precious little to do with the often dull and grubby business of governing...
...These, then, are the reasons why Nixon won: He had performed reasonably well in office and he had an opponent who did not represent his party and who campaigned in a way that alarmed and insulted the American people...
...If that is true, only Massachusetts and the District of Columbia stood between McGovern and perfect political freedom...
...McGovern must now feel...
...The point is that if Richard Nixon is as wicked as McGovern says he is, and if the American people are as "sin-sick" as McGovern says they are (and, indeed, they must be sin-sick if they elect people as wicked as McGovern says Nixon is), then obviously the American people are too corrupt and sick to choose anyone as virtuous as McGovern says McGovern is...
...True, the McGovernites denied, right to the end, that the delegate selection system, with its requirements for so many women, and so many blacks, and so many of this and that minority, was a quota system...
...If one accepts the idea that (say) blacks or women are represented only to the extent that blacks or women are delegates to a convention, or are members of Congress, then one is accepting the principle that American citizens are not united by common bonds of social affection...
...First, a black, or a woman, or a chica-no, or any member of any identifiable group, can only be represented by another member of such a group...
...But when applied to a political office this conception generates overweening, pretentious and, in the end, preposterous moral duties...
...And this is just an example of the contradiction that undercut the entire McGovern campaign against the President...
...But this denial just means that they lacked the courage of their dreary convictions...
...McGovernites are desperately cultivating the idea that their victory express was derailed by the Eagleton affair...
...If one cannot blame Tom Eagleton or the candidate, then another possibility is to blame the supporters who tried to transform Senator McGovern into President McGovern...
...No, he said, he just did not believe the polls...
...Kristofferson for his felicitous phrase-again in the song "Me and Bobby McGee" - which perfectly describes how Mr...
...I think McGovern was the last gasp of the theatrical politics of the 1960s...
...He was asked if Nixon's massive lead in the polls made him doubt that he was going to win...
...that the Nixon Administration evenly divides its time between plotting to re-establish segregation and plotting to win the title as - and I am quoting McGovern - "the most corrupt administration in history...
...The two dangerous principles are these...
...And that is why his campaign consisted largely of unwitting insults directed at the American people...
...Notice the language...
...I think McGovern was the last residue of the receding wave of Radical Chic...
...The ideology of the McGovern Commission reform is the ideology of a quota system...
...that we, the people, are not united by any shared values...
...And as a connoisseur, let me assure you: You can ransack all of American history without finding anything comparable to the ineptness of the McGovern campaign...
...He says this about McGovern's ideas about himself and his purpose in life: "McGovern made up his mind on that subject - and a number of others, from the existence of God to the ideal American foreign policy - nearly three decades ago, while still a graduate student at Northwestern University...
...They believe it because they cannot believe that there would be any problems in the nation, or the world, if "decent" men were in power in Washington...
...And this indignation was not convincing to the American people...
...But that answer is clearly unacceptable to McGovernites...
...I would point out just one thing...
...To me the most pleasing statistic about the election is that while the nation as a whole was busy recording its nearly record-breaking dislike of McGovern, a poll of the Harvard students and faculty revealed McGovern enjoying the adoration of six out of every seven members of that community...
...In his campaign McGovern was short on doubts, but long on indignation...
...The significance of this fact is as follows...
...For about twenty-three of my thirty-one years I have been a Chicago Cubs fan...
...they actually believe it...
...When the great civil rights battles were taking place in the Senate in the 1950s and early 1960s, the Senate was all white...
...The men and women who drafted the rules - McGovernites, mostly - had one overriding purpose...
...Ponder that...
...And we will cease to have problems - indeed, we will all suddenly enjoy what the Democratic platform promises "a personal life that makes US all feel that life is worth living" - if, but only if, we replace the indecent Americans with the decent Americans...
...They don't worry about all these little details about how much every aspect of the program is going to cost...
...You may recall that the leaders of the French Revolution believed that the reign of justice would begin when the last king had been strangled with the entrails of the last priest...
...Having won the nomination largely by rewriting the rules by which the game is played...
...I believe the average American who noticed that remark thought McGovern was implying that the average American is a coward...
...But there are three other, more interesting reasons why McGovern lost...
...I am not persuaded that Mr...
...When he was not comparing President Nixon to Hitler, he was declaring that it would be "indecent" - his word: "indecent" - to vote for anyone but himself...
...The second dangerous principle is: A black representative - or a woman, or a chicano, or whoever - is obligated to represent the interests of, and only the interests of, blacks, or women, or chi-canos, or whomever...
...I am sure every discerning American has one particular piece of vintage Mc-Governism that he treasures above all others...
...Does a people with great ideals need to have those ideals massaged by occupants of the White House...
...McGovern's television commercials was "McGovern...
...Do you suppose the Democrats have in mind a brand spanking new cabinet position - Secretary of Personal Lives Worth Living...
...It is easy to understand why...
...If there is poverty in America, it is because indecent, ungenerous men refuse to take the easy steps to solve it...
...for the People...
...It seems the climate of fear was worse than he thought...
...One possibility is that the candidate is to blame...
...Oh, I know McGovern talked a predictable Democratic line...
...The blame must be fixed on the American people...
...This is so because you cannot make sense of anything that is common to all Americans as citizens...
...McGovern, Democrat, has been laid waste by the "people," a predictable but nonetheless interesting and entertaining ritual has begun...
...The concept of representation implicit in the McGovern Commission reforms is this: the significant characteristics of citizens are racial and sexual distinctions...
...In this commercial a well-known actor strides briskly aboard a TWA jet and announces that now, at last, TWA offers customers - and I am quoting - "the first sane, sensible" short commuter flight...
...TWA offers the first sane commuter flight...
...A close textual analysis of his song "Me and Bobby Mc-Gee" reveals, "Freedom's just another word for nothing else to lose...
...People who believe they are uniquely pure at heart, and who believe that problems yield readily to the pure at heart, will not hesitate to expand the scope and power of any government they manage to capture...
...He did represent the choice of the Democratic National Convention...
...Why not, he was asked...
...That is, no doubt, a very agreeable feature of the TWA flights...
...You see, the fundamental axiom of McGovernism is that all things are easy to the pure at heart...
...And if one accepts the idea that a black or a woman delegate or representative has no obligation to the larger community - that he or she can only represent blacks or women, and that he or she has no other responsibility than representing blacks or women - if you accept that idea, then you cannot make any sense of the idea of the common good, or the general welfare...
...As yet the American people do not want politicians who want to save the souls of the people...
...But McGovernites cannot be expected to blame their fellow McGovernites for the fiasco merely because such blame is plausible...
...But does that make the TWA flight the first sane flight...
...This is a touching moral fable, but it is, alas, a fiction...
...But - and this is the central iron of the political season - the New Politics is capable only of nominating unelectable candidates...
...When the vituperation stakes are run this year, McGovern will win by a furlong...
...McGovern arrived at the opinion - and broadcast it tirelessly - that Nixon is like Hitler...
...Individually, each of these principles defies sensible justification...
...The people were afraid to tell the voting machine that they liked McGovern...
...When TWA invests a significant portion of its huge advertising budget in a commercial that implies that TWA's competitors are not just inferior, but insane, I hear an eerie echo of Senator McGovern and the other moralists who have plagued us in recent years...
...We have problems because, and only insofar as, we are governed by mean-minded men and women who will riot take the easy, obvious steps to solve our problems...
...George McGovern, thanks to Richard Nixon, now enjoys freedom as understood by one philosopher of the new culture, Kris Kristofferson...
...But no matter...
Vol. 6 • March 1973 • No. 6
