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...
...Poor George...
...Confronted with such woozy utopianism, one does not know whether to laugh or cry...
...McGovernites are desperately cultivating the idea that their victory express was derailed by the Eagleton affair...
...Little details...
...It was uncanny...
...For about twenty-three of my thirty-one years I have been a Chicago Cubs fan...
...The concept of representation implicit in the McGovern Commission reforms is this: the significant characteristics of citizens are racial and sexual distinctions...
...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...
...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...
...McGovern must be "feeling near as faded as his jeans...
...McGovern arrived at the opinion - and broadcast it tirelessly - that Nixon is like Hitler...
...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...
...Let me explain wherein the insults lay...
...The blame must be fixed on the American people...
...Britain's former Prime Minister Harold MacMillan once was asked if his government would give the British people a "sense of purpose...
...I wonder what McGovern considers a large detail...
...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...
...Taken together they are destructive of democracy...
...Having just finished inflicting upon the country the worst eight years of government in American history, do the Democrats today have more modest pretensions...
...Now that Mr...
...One is: The American people felt comfortable with Richard Nixon, and the American people do not casually cashier incumbents with whom they feel comfortable...
...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...
...I do not think so, and I do not think I am being excessively fastidious when I object to this kind of language...
...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...
...Does a people with great ideals need to have those ideals massaged by occupants of the White House...
...But does that make the TWA flight the first sane flight...
...To be fair, the McGovernites are not the only offenders...
...This makes me a kind of connoisseur of incompetence...
...Frankly, I do not expect that to happen...
...Rather, it is advertising language suited to, and reflective of, the new moralism...
...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...
...That, in fact, is where the candidate fixed it all during the campaign as he prepared to be massacred...
...McGovern, Democrat, has been laid waste by the "people," a predictable but nonetheless interesting and entertaining ritual has begun...
...If that is true, only Massachusetts and the District of Columbia stood between McGovern and perfect political freedom...
...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...
...The reasons for this are not hard to find...
...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...
...This is the concept of representation...
...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...
...You cannot believe in anything that is of general concern to Americans as Americans...
...I think not...
...I am sure every discerning American has one particular piece of vintage Mc-Governism that he treasures above all others...
...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...
...And it is not a harmless fiction...
...When the vituperation stakes are run this year, McGovern will win by a furlong...
...Fat chance...
...By the logic of McGovern's OHM argument, only a sick society could produce an administration as evil as the Nixon Administration...
...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...
...McGovern's most energetic supporters, outspoken liberals in the media and academic communities, must explain why "the people" once again have behaved so disagreeably...
...This is the correlation that, in my judgment, was intuited by the voters...
...Let me give an example...
...This is a touching moral fable, but it is, alas, a fiction...
...I believe the average American who noticed that remark thought McGovern was implying that the average American is a coward...
...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 two dangerous principles are these...
...It certainly was a quota system...
...The significance of this fact is as follows...
...This is so because McGovernism is religion carried on by other means...
...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...
...they actually believe it...
...This is not just a political tactic on their part...
...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...
...McGovern obviously is mystified by the fact that the majority of Americans resent this...
...Now I ask you: Does a great people really need to be given moral leadership by politicians...
...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...
...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...
...That purpose was to facilitate the nomination of the Chairman of the McGovern Commission...
...This is so because you cannot make sense of anything that is common to all Americans as citizens...
...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...
...You see, the fundamental axiom of McGovernism is that all things are easy to the pure at heart...
...Ponder that...
...McGovernism is a spiritual movement and it has precious little to do with the often dull and grubby business of governing...
...McGovern seemed constitutionally incapable of speaking three consecutive sentences without attacking the moral character of the majority of Americans...
...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...
...But I cannot close without mentioning the role of the quintessential McGovern-ites, those in the academic community...
...And Mr...
...George McGovern, thanks to Richard Nixon, now enjoys freedom as understood by one philosopher of the new culture, Kris Kristofferson...
...But - and this is the central iron of the political season - the New Politics is capable only of nominating unelectable candidates...
...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...
...There are only a few other possibilities...
...That is, no doubt, a very agreeable feature of the TWA flights...
...There are four reasons why McGovern lost...
...McGovern did not represent the thinking of his party...
...No, he said, he just did not believe the polls...
...For forty years the Democratic party's domestic policy has been to find a problem and throw money at it...
...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...
...The rules governing delegate selection to the 1972 convention were drafted by a Commission on Party Reform, the McGovern Commission, named after its chairman...
...Every time he declared that Nixon was a villain, he insulted the American people who elected him...
...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...
...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...
...And this is just an example of the contradiction that undercut the entire McGovern campaign against the President...
...I think McGovern was the last residue of the receding wave of Radical Chic...
...But this denial just means that they lacked the courage of their dreary convictions...
...No, MacMillan said, if people want a sense of purpose they should go to their bishop, not their politicians...
...They have the ideological incentive to use their leisure time to dominate the nominating process as it has been amended by the Democratic party...
...Why not, he was asked...
...Thus we are left with only one possibility...
...Kristofferson's definition is to be preferred over, say, Plato's definition...
...TWA offers the first sane commuter flight...
...I think McGovern was the last gasp of the theatrical politics of the 1960s...
...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...
...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...
...That was a mistake...
...The people were afraid to tell the voting machine that they liked McGovern...
...Advertising is nothing if not trendy...
...And this intelligent voter reaction against McGovern's moralistic rhetoric is, I hope, evidence of a national revulsion against extravagant rhetoric...
...The reasons are: First, McGovern did not represent his party...
...Again and again we come back to the matter of McGovern advertising McGovern's very singular virtue...
...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...
...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...
...But there are three other, more interesting reasons why McGovern lost...
...If there is poverty in America, it is because indecent, ungenerous men refuse to take the easy steps to solve it...
...My favorite is a statement McGovern made two weeks before the election...
...Since then he has been more or less a finished product, both personally and ideologically...
...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...
...According to McGovern, his young supporters are too large-minded to be bothered about "little details" like what things cost...
...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...
...that we, the people, are not united by any shared values...
...When the great civil rights battles were taking place in the Senate in the 1950s and early 1960s, the Senate was all white...
...And this advertising language reflects the trend toward extravagance in all our discourse...
...They don't worry about all these little details about how much every aspect of the program is going to cost...
...It is easy to understand why...
...having won the nomination against the gossamer opposition of Senators Muskie and Humphrey, the McGovernites were seized with delusions of adequacy...
...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...
...Third, McGovern's personality as revealed in his campaign was repellent to the voters...
...Having won the nomination largely by rewriting the rules by which the game is played...
...The question is: How can anyone believe such stuff...
...A close textual analysis of his song "Me and Bobby Mc-Gee" reveals, "Freedom's just another word for nothing else to lose...
...When Senator McGovern uses the word "insane," it is a reflection of politics serving as a surrogate for more traditional pieties...
...And the people do not like politicians who constantly tell the people that their souls are corrupt and need saving...
...McGovern's television commercials was "McGovern...
...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...
...But no matter...
...McGovernites are given to describing themselves as "decent," thereby implying that people who disagree with them are "indecent...
...And that is why his campaign consisted largely of unwitting insults directed at the American people...
...But the problems persist and multiply, and the money is increasingly scarce...
...At a campaign stop in St...
...In his campaign McGovern was short on doubts, but long on indignation...
...Oh, I know McGovern talked a predictable Democratic line...
...But this year the convention did not represent the party...
...McGovern's moralistic conception of leadership is fine for a Methodist parish - or for any other parish...
...He did represent the choice of the Democratic National Convention...
...Second, McGovern's positions on the issues were contrary to those held by the voters...
...But that answer is clearly unacceptable to McGovernites...
...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...
...I would point out just one thing...
...The text has been somewhat shortened...
...Students and their celebrators - ideologically fervid and notoriously leisured - form the backbone of the so-called New Politics...
...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...
...If there is conflict in the world it is because the pure of heart are not in power in Washington...
...After all, if poor Tom Eagleton is not to blame, then who is...
...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...
...It seems the climate of fear was worse than he thought...
...But that is not the most significant thing about Anson's description of McGovern's intellectual development...
...What concerns them is the task of being sure at heart...
...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...
...Under the concept of representation advocated by the McGovern reforms, those white senators had no obligation to represent black Americans...
...And what is insufficiently appreciated is that this inept-ness was not a fluke...
...I am not persuaded that Mr...
...But when applied to a political office this conception generates overweening, pretentious and, in the end, preposterous moral duties...
...This is not just traditional advertising hyperbole...
...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...
...It flowed straight from the spirit of McGovernism...
...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...
...But I tip my hat to Mr...
...One possibility is that the candidate is to blame...
...Some quite sensible non-McGovernites suspended their disbelief in McGovern's oft-demonstrated carelessness...
...Individually, each of these principles defies sensible justification...
...The men and women who drafted the rules - McGovernites, mostly - had one overriding purpose...
...for the People...
...It is my job today to explain why, in my judgment, Senator McGovern faded, why the American people found Senator McGovern so resistible...
...The tag line of Mr...
...Kristofferson for his felicitous phrase-again in the song "Me and Bobby McGee" - which perfectly describes how Mr...
...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...
...Democrat...
...The point is that details, large or small, do not concern the large-minded folks of McGovern's legions...
...Do you suppose the Democrats have in mind a brand spanking new cabinet position - Secretary of Personal Lives Worth Living...
...The tiresome litany is always the same...
...He was asked if Nixon's massive lead in the polls made him doubt that he was going to win...
...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...
...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...
...And this indignation was not convincing to the American people...
...Should the New Politics maintain its stranglehold on the Democratic party, the Republican party may become the majority party...
...Notice the language...
...that the Republican party is like the Ku Klux Klan...
...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 worst consequence of that quota system is the life it breathes into two very dangerous principles about a very important concept...
...But be that as it may, the McGovern reform rules worked for McGovern...
...And McGovern, bowing to the logic of his rhetoric, denounced America as a "sin-sick" society...
...The ideology of the McGovern Commission reform is the ideology of a quota system...
...Our political language, like our advertising language, reflects the same kind of moralistic extremism...
...McGovern must now feel...
Vol. 6 • March 1973 • No. 6
