The Liberals' Moment: The McGovern Insurgency and the Identity Crisis of the Democratic Party

About this book

When George McGovern lost the 1972 presidential election Richard Nixons landslide victory buried more than an insurgent campaign. In resurrecting the largely forgotten story of McGoverns remarkable presidential bid Bruce Miroff reveals how his crushing defeat produced an identity crisis for liberals torn between their convictions and the political calculations required to win elections-a dilemma for Democrats that has never gone away. Miroff follows the campaign from its surprising rise to its catastrophic fall to remind us how a dark-horse candidate captured the nominationand then disastrously chose a running mate with a hidden past. Drawing on interviews with dozens of participantsincluding McGovern himselfwho share a wealth of anecdotes and insights Miroff traces the insurgency to the political struggles of the sixties explores McGoverns ideology and assesses the Republican attack politics that linked McGovern to acid amnesty and abortion. Miroff shows how the transformative election of 1972 signaled a major shift in the Democratic basefrom urban blue-collar New Dealers to suburban issue-oriented activists (feminists and gay rights advocates among them)as the party shed its Cold War past and embraced an antiwar orientation. He also illuminates how the McGovern campaign mastered the new game of presidential primaries and explores the formative experiences of a generation of talented young political actors including campaign manager Gary Hart political newcomer Bill Clinton and future party strategists Bob Shrum and John Podesta. In excavating the 1972 landslide he follows the subsequent careers of the young McGovernites and describes the losss effects on later Democratic presidential campaigns. By tracing the transformation of American liberalism and sixties idealism from their political crash in 1972 to the muddled centrism of the twenty-first century The Liberals Moment shows what the McGovern insurgency has to teach us todayand identifies what Democrats must do in order to reassume the mantle of progressive change.