RIP, George McGovern

In historical retrospect, the best!:

After running a textbook nomination campaign that perfectly exploited the new primary-based system that he and his staff understood much better than their rivals, McGovern’s general election campaign was a disastrous comedy of errors, beginning, of course, with the hasty choice of a running-mate who had to be discarded almost immediately, a fine acceptance speech that virtually no one saw (it was delivered between 2:00 and 3:00 AM EDT), and then the serial abandonment or repudiation of the ticket by a vast number of Democratic elected officials and interest groups.

Nixon, by contrast, capped a first-term record of almost systematic betrayal of everything he’d promised (or seemed to promise) to do by cooking up a phony peace offensive, deliberately inflating the economy, and making systematic raids on Democratic constituency groups. And oh, yeah, he also instigated and then covered up the series of nefarious activities later known collectively as Watergate. Whereas McGovern could not buy a break, Nixon got nothing but breaks, most notably the sidelining by attempted assassination of George Wallace, whose 1968 vote went almost uniformly into Nixon’s 1972 column.