George McGovern for President

...But it was McGovern's strength at the rank and file level that led to The Christian Science Monitor's report that "Muskie enjoyed the support of most prominent Democrats in the state...

...One need only turn to the Senator's record in opposing the militarization of American foreign policy to judge the range of his attack, the depth of his alternative, and the courage with which he bucks the brass...

...They were all Administration supporters of the war in Vietnam...

...While this showing of four victories in four contests added up to an extraordinary expression of progressive support, Senator McGovern made a good enough showing in the two Democratic caucuses held in January to cause even his detractors to concede his vote-getting prowess...

...Recently, John W. Gardner, chairman of Common Cause, expressed the conviction that the people "demand that the candidates mention the unmentionable...

...It seems clear to us that McGovern's record decisively confirms his impeccable credentials as a progressive leader at the very moment in history when our country most urgently requires new direction and new leadership...

...He suggests a payment of $50 to $65 a month per child—a sum sufficient to lift many families out of the poverty bracket...

...His story, corroborated by the record, is this: "Way back in 1963 I challenged the military budget," McGovern points out...

...foreign policy, and 2) to divert billions of dollars to meeting the social and economic challenge here at home...

...for us it was a time to listen and learn...

...Eight years ago, with the same remarkable foresight he showed in opposing the war itself, he introduced a bill which would have required defense and space contractors to undertake conversion planning as a condition of doing business with the Government...

...On another major domestic front, Senator McGovern, again alone among the contenders for the Presidency, was deeply concerned from the beginning of our miserable war in Vietnam that the United States would be faced with an employment crisis and economic slowdown when the war ended...

...The McGovern drive was a quiet one, behind the scenes, and it worked surprisingly well...

...what are the relations between various groups in our society—are they at peace with each other or do we have an internal war going on that weakens the country as much as any threat from abroad...

...What we find so admirable in Senator McGovern is not only his superb record in public office, not only the power and depth of his indictment of things as they are in a system and society stacked so strongly in favor of the Establishment...

...I started offering amendments then, calling for substantial cuts...

...Step by step, Senator McGovern shows how his military budget would cut total appropriations for the Pentagon by nearly forty per cent, and, said the much decorated World War II bomber pilot, still leave the United States with enough nuclear and conventional forces "to fully protect this country...

...All his opponents, the Senator has pointed out, have "promised new priorities—new money for such urgent problems as education, housing, transportation, environmental protection, and poverty...

...Muskie received only 35.5 per cent, even with the backing of Senator Harold Hughes, Iowa's most popular Democrat, and McGovern 23 per cent, with Humphrey...

...For example, in the bitterly controversial field of welfare, McGovern was not content to criticize the inadequacies of President Nixon's family welfare program...

...We support Senator McGovern without reservation...

...On the related issue of amnesty for those who evaded or resisted conscription for service in Vietnam, McGovern still stands as the only candidate who has declared flatly that if he were President he would not only end the war but he would follow that with a declaration of amnesty—an Executive Order covering young men who have stood up against the war either by going to jail or by going into exile...

...Shortly thereafter, in Philadelphia, where 1,350 delegates attended a meeting of the Pennsylvania New Democratic Coalition, McGovern captured the endorsement of sixty-three per cent of the votes on the first ballot...

...New York Mayor John Lindsay also did better than had been expected...

...Critics have dismissed the McGovern plan as "unrealistically expensive...

...Now, a year later, on the eve of the first primaries, it is a time for decision...

...On the same weekend, he amassed eighty-three per cent of the votes cast at the Florida caucus of the Concerned Democrats, and he received the overwhelming endorsement from New York State's New Democratic Coalition that four years ago supported Senator Eugene McCarthy...

...he stands even taller now in a field of candidates that has proliferated so remarkably during the past year...

...In the Iowa precinct caucuses, Senator Muskie won the largest share of the delegates, but, reported The New York Times, in a January 26 dispatch from Des Moines: "The victory of the Maine Democrat, widely considered the front-runner for his party's Presidential nomination, was clouded by the unexpectedly strong showing of Senator George McGovern," whose vote-getting ability was shown in at least this instance to be seven times better than his most recent standing in the Gallup Poll...

...Until 1969 there was no appreciable difference among those three...

...He swept the Massachusetts Citizens Presidential Caucus, rated by The Boston Globe as "the best political workers in the state," by piling up sixty-two per cent of the vote of 2,600 progressive Democrats present despite the fact that he was not there to make a direct appeal to the delegates...

...Senator McGovern's attack on the constantly expanding Pentagon budget has been motivated by a double purpose : 1) to strike at the growth of American imperialism and its indispensable ally, the militarization of U.S...

...But he would tell the truth and a good belt of the truth is the only thing that will save this country...

...Unlike the President's program, Senator McGovern's envisions the total elimination of hard-core poverty, while Mr...

...It is not even wholly accurate to say that McGovern's rivals for the nomination among his Senate colleagues have now seen the light and are acting and speaking accordingly...

...And, McGovern has correctly noted, "All during the decade of the 1960s, these other Democratic candidates for President were voting for every appropriation the Defense Department sent to the Hill...

...More than any other candidate, he has moved beyond broad goals to specific proposals...

...The children's allowance would cost an estimated $10 billion in the first year, and the cost of the total program would amount to about $35 billion a year by 1976...

...Not for him the bland generalities and the platitudinous hokum cranked out by professional ghost writers...

...Not content to strike out in the usual vague terms against the swollen Pentagon budget, McGovern has come forward with a detailed substitute to the Nixon Administration's proposal for soaring military spending...

...So tall, said Julian Bond, that he rises "head and shoulders" above all his opponents...

...Certainly McGovern's A Man Who Tells the Truth' Senator George McGovern is not given much of a chance, but I think he is going to surprise a lot of people in the states where there are Presidential primaries...

...In addition, Senator McGovern's comprehensive program calls for a guaranteed job at a decent wage for every able-bodied citizen of working age...

...The answer for many is simply that they feel he does not have a chance to win and that it is important to be practical and fight for someone who will be able to overthrow the Nixon Administration...

...Instead, he came up with a viable alternative to the President's plan...

...It was during those early years when he and The Progressive were among the lonely voices raised in opposition to the war that we came to know him and admire him for his courage and foresight...

...The South Dakota Democrat, whose searching inquiries into the scandal of poverty in America have provided him with excellent insight into the plight of the poor, proposes to have the United States adopt the basic welfare device long since instituted in every other industrial nation—a universal children's allowance...

...Paranoia consists of thinking we're stronger when we can kill the enemy ten times over instead of killing the enemy five times over...

...In the light of that, Lindsay and McGovern showed well—McGovern especially...

...what also compels us to McGovern's side is that unlike many candidates, he dares propose specific alternatives to present policies— and to make them radical enough, to use that word in its most affirmative sense, to strike at the roots of the urgent problems that confront us...

...McGovern neither had the Muskie muscle nor the Lindsay-style media campaign...

...The Senator began to dispute the sacred-ness of the military budget in his first year in the Senate...

...I challenged the whole assumption of the Defense Department that you measure the defense of a country in military terms only, and I argued that you had to begin to develop a criterion of defense which includes some measure of how strong we are in education, in health...

...McGovern would not reverse the China moves or escalate the war or throw out wage and price controls...

...He deserves yours too...

...McCarthy, Chisholm, and Jackson trailing far behind with less than two per cent for each...

...The PROGRESSIVE "you shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free" George McGovern for President f It was just a year ago, in our March, 1971, issue, that the Editors of The Progressive welcomed Senator George McGovern's refreshingly unambiguous announcement of his candidacy for the Democratic Party nomination for President...

...It would be a hell of a thing to wake up to a President McGovern, to live in a country where the Executive Branch is run by a man who tells the truth...

...expanded Social Security benefits, and a Federally administered public assistance plan for those few who would still be in need of additional Blueprints Instead of Blurbs McGovern is undoubtedly ahead among current Democratic contenders in the thoroughness with which he has worked out his positions on some foreign and domestic issues...

...These developments in six widely scattered states represent the total of popular expression in this campaign up to the time we went to press in mid-February...

...They go far, in our judgment, to explode the myth that McGovern can't win, and to refute the insulting nonsense suggesting that the American people will not support him because he is "too decent...

...More recently, he sponsored a New National Economy Conversion Act providing that 12.5 per cent of each defense contractor's profits should be set aside as a reserve and used either to finance the contractor's conversion to peacetime production or to pay benefits to workers who might suffer hardship during the conversion...

...Pete Hamill The New York Post record stands in sharp contrast to those of Senators Edmund Muskie, Hubert Humphrey, and Henry Jackson...

...what is the condition of the cities...

...His alternative defense budget runs to fifty-six pages of statistical data, solidly reasoned analyses, and hard-boiled judgments...

...Shortly thereafter, Arizona state caucuses gave Muskie first place, but by a margin far smaller than had been expected in view of his strong support by organization Democrats...

...He has earned our support...

...George McGovern is not content to curse the darkness...

...The heart of McGovern's platform is a plan for income redistribution and tax reform and an alternative defense budget...

...We did not endorse him then...

...No candidate in sight has shown a wider understanding of the issues, a greater courage to raise them, and a deeper wisdom to cope with them than George McGovern...

...Not for him the all-things-to-all-men approach of the conventional politician straddling his portable fence...

...He stood tall when he stood alone a year ago...

...how strong the economy is...

...Time magazine February 14, 1972 income to escape from grinding poverty...

...His feat of rolling up sixty-nine per cent of the vote at the Coalition's state convention led McGovern to express confidence that the New York state delegation to the Democratic National Convention would be committed to his bid for the nomination in July...

...Senator McGovern's commitment to a significant reduction in military spending and a major overhaul of our entire security system is no sudden conversion induced by political ambition in a Presidential election year...

...In a McGovern-Nixon race, there is no argument that could be mounted to give the job back to Nixon...

...But, he correctly added, "whether they come from candidates or from Nixon apologists, the talk of new priorities is no more than empty talk without a plan to find the funds to make them possible...

...Muskie has said that he had some private reservations about it, but it was McGovern who dared express them publicly...

...The "unmentionable" consists of the issues—as opposed to show-biz humbug that has become such a dominant fixture in American political campaigning...

...Indeed, this myth, fostered by some political writers, has achieved a life of its own as a self-fulfilling prophecy...

...Jackson, Humphrey, and Muskie all voted to continue American forces at their present level—twenty-seven years after the end of World War II...

...Clark concluded: "If, late in 1971, a man is still voting for that bombing, then I don't really think he's sensed yet—and that means he's an awfully slow learner—what the deep national anguish over the war in Indochina really is...

...His campaign speeches, like his record in the Senate, reveal an extraordinary amount of homework in digging for the causes of our crisis and in proposing a specific, hope-inspiring program to meet that crisis...

...Ramsey Clark, writing in the ADA World, pointed out that only last October Muskie and Humphrey voted against an amendment proposed by Senator Mike Gravel to prohibit bombing of Indochina (except where the President determines that such activity was directly related to safe withdrawal from Indochina...

...During the past two months, McGovern has shown that he commands a considerable following, especially among the progressive forces in the Democratic Party...

...Lindsay's face gazed from billboards across the state," but he won "only sixteen more delegates (out of 500 chosen to the state convention) than McGovern, who had no media campaign at all...

...On the issue of the Vietnam war itself, Senator McGovern, of course, has stood out in the pack of Senators seeking the Democratic Presidential nomination...

...I was voting consistently to reduce military outlays...

...In this month, in this year, the guy who tells the truth best is George McGovern from South Dakota...

...McGovern dares to speak truth to power, to challenge the forces of special privilege by advocating fundamental change...

...Some of our best friends are progressive Democrats and Independents and we have listened endlessly to their lament that McGovern "can't win...

...he is forever lighting candles to illuminate the progressive path he proposes to follow should be become President...

...But recent developments combine to expose the myth for what it is...

...The difference between his budget and the one presented by the Pentagon, McGovern emphasized, is that "between conservatism and paranoia," between a "buy-when-we-need" approach and a "wasteful arms race...

...Nixon's would merely provide new palliatives to the perpetually poor...

...We plan to review it in an early issue...

...Over the past year, he has researched and released a series of highly detailed blueprints for attacking the nation's problems...

...The contrast between the South Da-kotan and his primary campaign foes turned up in another vital area of foreign policy: the Mansfield resolution to reduce American forces in Western Europe by fifty per cent...

...What other candidate has bothered or dared to go beyond the most generalized comment on arms spending...

...But, as the Senator has emphasized, the entire cost could readily be financed by bringing the military budget down to the more sensible size he proposes...

...The overriding issue in this campaign divides those who would prop up the status quo and those who are committed to nothing less than the reversal of the nation's priorities...

...If this is so, why do some, indeed many, forward-looking Democrats and Independents who admire his record and share his convictions hold back from supporting the South Dakotan...

...We are summoned in this year of decision to choose whether we shall go on tinkering and temporizing in the face of the now not-so-distant rumblings of disaster—or whether we are prepared to harness all our resources and all our energies in a great national effort to achieve a society that provides equal opportunity for every American, and a society which seeks to improve the quality of life rather than mindlessly increase the quantity of goods, j Alone among the candidates, McGovern has come forward with a wide-ranging program of creative proposals designed to achieve this goal...

...His militant opposition to the war, indeed, antedated that of Senator Eugene McCarthy, who led and symbolized the peace forces in the Presidential primary campaign of 1968...

...Although there is room for disagreement with many of McGovern's premises and the conclusions drawn from them, he deserves credit for insisting on substance, for preferring blueprints to blurbs...

...McGovern has made it clear that much of the needed revenue could be obtained by his proposals to eliminate the multi-billion dollar layers of fat in the military budget, and by closing the tax loopholes which enable special interests to escape their fair share of the tax load...

...There are a lot of people who would like to start waking up in the morning and like the President of the United States...