The Chris Moeller Archives

Eugene McCarthy

The most heroic aspect of Sen. Eugene McCarthy's life (1916-2005), and his most poignant lesson for today's leaders, is that he always put the American people and his principles ahead of the well-being of his party.

To remember him this week as 'the Howard Dean of 1968' seems to me to be a pretty fair oversimplification. Just as in 2004, the Democrats of 1968 stood paralyzed with fear against a growing majority of its constituents that opposed a disastrous, unwinnable war. Unlike 2004, though, the incumbent President facing the voters in '68 was also a Democrat, and when McCarthy, the upstart, populist from Minnesota, scored 42 percent of the votes in the New Hampshire primary, the unthinkable happened-- a sitting president announced that he would not seek re-election to the office.

The rest is ancient history, though you'll recognize the plot outline from more recent elections. LBJ threw his support behind the bid of his pro-war Veep, Hubert Humphrey. Another opportunistic hatchet man, and the brother of the man who launched the war, Robert Kennedy, joined the race, and before the California vote could be recorded, McCarthy had been re-cast by party leaders a radical and a demagogue. He was accused of wanting to negotiate with the Vietcong, and of wanting to relocate black residents of Los Angeles to the white suburbs of Orange County. McCarthy would run for the Presidency four more times in his life, but never again with such influence, judged, by the hacks, to have threatened the party machinery. The candidate was terminally damaged, but his movement would be won. Opposition to the war was galvanized, and eventually, it stopped.

Unlike Dean, who fell in line behind the hawks to court Washington favor, McCarthy defiantly refused to ever 'take his medicine.' He became a passionate advocate for third parties. He treated both parties in power with equal disdain over the years, going so far as endorsing Ronald Reagan in 1980 in righteous anger over Jimmy Carter's disastrous tenure. During McCarthy's final campaign in 1992, with the media ignoring his efforts and his party reduced to the loose amalgamation of special interest groups it remains today, he quoted Plutarch, the ancient Greek historian, "They are wrong who think politics is like an ocean voyage or military campaign, something to be done with some particular end in view."

This is fundamentally the difference in political strategy between the two parties. Barry Goldwater was steamrolled in the Electoral College by Lyndon Johnson in '64. He was labeled a dangerous right-wing extremist during the campaign, and claimed just 52 electoral votes to Johnson's 486 in November. But did Republicans then demonize Goldwater's failure at the ballot, running from his principles in each subsequent election? No. They adopted his principles at both the grassroots and electoral level, and today, they have a monopoly of power over nearly all layers of American government.

Contrast this behavior with that of our Democratic operatives and leaders, who continue to turn their backs to the core party values of McCarthy, and even more specifically, George McGovern. The '72 party torch-bearer, McGovern, may have been forever labeled a loser after his landslide defeat (sometimes a candidate must give up his political life for the cause,) but he turned out to be damned right about the war. It is his voters who carry the privilege today of telling the world, "I told you so." Of course, they don't, by and large, and the South Dakota Liberal is routinely pilloried by both parties.

America owes a great debt of thanks to Eugene McCarthy upon his passing, not only for having turned "a movement of concerned citizens (in 1968) into a national political movement," as McGovern said on Saturday, but for a lifetime of thoughtful and responsible politics. His is a dying breed.

posted by CM @ 7:36 PM