McGoverning
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I'm wondering about that, actually, because even if the lawyers, journalists, and historians see Watergate as the more significant part of that incident I can't help but think that to the average person the arson would make the ratfucking seem positively quaint. I mean, it's not implausible that "Watergate" would become the go-to term for a scandal, and "-gate" the go-to suffix, but it does strike me nevertheless.Well, it's really that "Watergate" (and I will point out now for anyone who missed it that via "Brookingsgate" the people of TTL are still stuck in a world where every major political scandal in the United States has a frigging "-gate" in it) happens in the ... dramatic and unavoidable (in terms of press coverage) way that it does.
Aww shucks...
Another thing I like about the results (I mean Nixon winning would be more up my alley...
I mean if you could get Fianna Fail to win the 1973 general election in Ireland, that would be nice.
I am envious of your stash
The only proper copy of FaL is a tattered old classic edition, where you can practically see the imprints from HST's portable typewriter keys. I love that part too, the whole account of the election itself and especially that whole stretch after where he interviews himself and McGovern and so on. One of the best bits of HST in print. He did have it in for Allot. I understand, even if I do not share, your loyalties here -- certainly Richard Milhous would have been an FF man all the way, that's the kind of cantankerous battler heritage he'd want to hold on to. Thank you for the compliment about the election also -- in AR it's really votes in the urban areas, that sort of break off from Wallace on both sides, to Nixon and to McGovern both, in the late stages just enough to give Nixon an edge because more Republicans happen to stay loyal there. It's a damned close run thing though.If you go back through the listiness in the other location you'll find that old Jack does in fact survive '73 even with the Arms Scandal, although it might just be Goodnight Charlie....
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I am going to hang on to "the arson would make the ratfucking seem positively quaint." That may show up later
Yes -- it's really the whole portmanteau term that holds on, but even then ITTL the name of the scandal matters less than the immense clustershag of convergent issues ramped up really quite a lot by having more elements come to light more or less simultaneously, and the added weight of the Chennault Affair at a point when it can really have an effect... there's not even a term that can really capture it in shorthand the way "Watergate" did IOTL. It is the weight of all that, that seems set to crash down with the election results even as a lot of folks are still at a point where they can't process it properly and take up in Nixon's defense.
What an update, what an update! Some fantastic prose there, really gets the tension going as it nears Election Day. Also, big ups for the demographic breakdown right afterwards, offers some nice outside analysis into the results.
I will say I'm surprised that the soft-spoken McGovern campaign greenlit that "Chess" ad; they were real PO'd about Chennault, weren't they?
Thanks! I appreciate the kind review. Things are much more... taut, much more focused, in many ways, after Bad Colson Make Brookings Go Boom. This is in fact immensely healthy for McGovern on several levels. He really was at his best in a crisis -- most people are not -- but the flip side of that is when things were more gradual, though they might reach the same bad end by a slower route, he was sometimes lackadaisical, tentative, given to assume that other people shared his principles, indeed more often given over to the streak of vanity in his principles, in there among their other good bits. Now one might turn around and say "that's all very well but what about Eagleton?" Well, Eagleton was a special set of circumstances, also one (the depression, the drinking, the rumors of suicide attempts) that really hit McGovern where he lived (given Eleanor's quiet history of depression and its more dramatic expression in two of McGovern's own kids who were both symptomatic and sometimes self-medicating by the time of the '72 campaign) that didn't hit him like a crisis but rather a huge moral dilemma, that he did indeed agonize over too long. But give him a straight-up "the fate of the nation is at stake right now" problem and he was on much firmer ground. And yes, they are very set off by l'affaire Chennault. It is worse even than they had imagined and the sheer awful makes them more amenable to Beatty's desire (expressed occasionally IOTL) to go for the throat. Beatty, who for all his faults was one of the hardest-working men in Hollywood in his heyday with an immense capacity for attention to detail, also tailors it very carefully to express McGovern's gut principles -- that bit he gets to read onscreen at the end of the ad -- in order to make it go down easier at campaign HQ.
I do not normally care for politically detailed timelines and i know next to nothing about the 70's but this had been a real edge of the seat story and i think you are very skilled as a writer. Please keep this up, it truly is amazing.
"This isn't my thing but I think it's great" is really one of the nicest compliments I could get, that sense of reaching a broader audience. Thanks so much.
While I was reading this latest update, I had my usual relaxing piano playlist running. But when I got to election night, that wondrous crescendo of hope and inspiration, the idea that Good can fight and triumph, there was only one song fit to blast while reading that beauty:
I say this every time, but this time perhaps above all others, bravo.
I say this every time, but this time perhaps above all others, bravo.
In the words of many a German mad scientist before me: In vich ve fuck about viss maps!!
But really this is just to draw attention to a few things with illustrations to match. The first backs us up and takes us into the realm of OTL. I call this option Maximum George. The principle in play here, which I have drawn on elsewhere to make similar kinds of comparisons, is what I like to call "the 45% solution." The idea is simple: take the states where a candidate received at least 45% of the vote IOTL in a presidential election and award them the state, on the basis that there's that level of general swing in the vote, a big but not utterly impossible shift especially before the Great Polarization really bit home by the late Nineties. Here I will do even more than that. I will "de-Eagleton" the numbers and restore that 2-3% of national vote that McGovern probably lost to that whole sorry business. So we've gotten rid of Eagleton, and there's been a significant shift perhaps to do with more of "Watergate" related issues coming together in the press and a substantive investigation underway, also maybe the Paris process starts to unravel faster, Thieu gets his game on more quickly, and Nixon is back to "bombing for peace" by the fall. We'll even add one more factor: let's bring the McGoverning ticket into OTL and have McGovern do what he really should have done (I just want to go back and shake them all by the lapels in that Miami hotel suite and say "ARE YOU NUTS? IT'S STARING YOU RIGHT IN THE FACE!!") which is put Phil Hart on the ticket if at all possible. That puts Michigan in play. Yes, I know there's plenty of historical evidence that the effect of VPs is minimal (among other things I think that ignores the ritual business of putting a Southerner on Democratic tickets pre-Great Polarization to help guarantee those electoral votes), but Michigan was already McGovern's eighth-best result IOTL, one of his states over 40% and he polled at least 4% better than his national average in Michigan. So if we've shifted these other factors, plus the very popular Senator Hart, in a Maximum George scenario Michigan could very much be in play. All right, then. Maybe not a Brookings bombing, but lots more "Watergate" revelations, a sense from the press and Congress that they are joined up in a culture of corruption around the executive, Paris is stalled out, McGovern makes fewer unforced errors and picks Hart who helps make him look good, or at least not worse, and they go on a tear. Maximum George IOTL. What does that look like?
Nixon/Agnew 465
McGovern/Hart 73
... ow? This is with McGovern in that territory of around 42-43% of the national popular vote, and concentration on states where he was doing well relative to his national numbers. It's not Mondale bad, sure, six states (hard to see little Rhode Island there) and DC is certainly better than that, but still an epic loss. The conservative coalition is A Thing. A stone-cold thing, and if Nixon can do anything at all to both maintain a semblance of his power and authority and go hard at McGovern's most vulnerable policy positions, even a surge like this one, a substantively better outcome for McGovern in a two-way race (not far off his PV total from McGoverning) is still a long way from home relative to victory.
Let's look from another angle. We'll ask a different question: what is "McGovern country" relatively speaking? Where does McGovern have more appeal than he does not? For this purpose I've simply taken his national PV percentage, and on the map just below awarded McGovern the states where he beat that national average at state level. Have a look, it's interesting:
You'll be interested to know that in 1972 numbers, that gives McGovern/Whoever exactly 269 electoral votes, or half the total. Also, look at that map. I didn't give him Montana which was right on the edge. Maryland was one of three states less than 1% below national average, largely because of the combo of Agnew and a larger-than-average number of Wallace voters in the state. The other two states less than 1% below plumb are Missouri and Hawaii (why overwhelmingly Democratic Hawaii, you ask? Well, the GOP was stronger there in those days, it was less a one-party state, and the major population center Oahu is home to bases for every single branch of the US military, faced with a candidate branded a limp-wristed peacenik hippie lover by Nixon's ad machine.) Visualize those states in the mix. Now, while you have that in your mind's eye, swap South Dakota for Vermont. Get rid of Missouri while you're at it. In the end there, you have something that's a really-not-implausible map for a Democrat in a presidential election any time in the last twenty to twenty-five years. (Actually, lose Missouri but also add in New Mexico.) Here is where we really see that in terms of electoral demographics the "McGovern Moment" is a foretaste of the Great Polarization. That may shake out a little differently ITTL, but there you have an interesting piece of evidence.
One more while I'm at it. In this one we're not talking Electoral College numbers, I just want to give you a sense of the map itself, of the pure geography. This takes the map of the states, and maps on the places where George Wallace won 10% or more of the vote in 1968, which you can be sure he repeated in McGoverning plus maybe one or two other states. See what that looks like:
(I wonder why that color scheme looks so striking....) Wallace in grey, as everyone can guess. I went ahead and added West Virginia and Arizona, which were very close in 1968 and for purposes of this map we can count as 10% or more in McGoverning. We do that because it helps tell us about one of the very important things about TTL. Or rather, it asks a very important question. That is: where are those Wallace voters going to go? Only four of those states -- Michigan, Ohio, Delaware, and almost-Maryland -- qualified on the previous map as "McGovern country" so we could properly call them battleground states I guess. The other one that's even in that ballpark is Missouri. Otherwise, and even in those "battleground" cases, you are looking at new centers of gravity for political transformation in the US, and at a pretty potent element in the mix of a party system very much in flux. Also, it does not hurt to state the obvious. What you have there is the Old South (everything below the Mason-Dixon including places like Maryland and West Virginia), border states that had both strong Confederate and Copperhead presence during the Civil War (KS, MO, IN, OH), a state whose rural voters blended with white Southern migration to the factories of Detroit (it wasn't just African Americans who came north) in Michigan, the three Western states probably most influenced by settlement of migrants from the Southern states -- Idaho, Nevada, and Wyoming -- and Alaska, which for a variety of odd but interesting reasons has also seen a fair amount of migration from Southerners in its late territory-early statehood days, or from those Western states in grey above. This is a dark and powerful magic indeed. Something to think on.
But really this is just to draw attention to a few things with illustrations to match. The first backs us up and takes us into the realm of OTL. I call this option Maximum George. The principle in play here, which I have drawn on elsewhere to make similar kinds of comparisons, is what I like to call "the 45% solution." The idea is simple: take the states where a candidate received at least 45% of the vote IOTL in a presidential election and award them the state, on the basis that there's that level of general swing in the vote, a big but not utterly impossible shift especially before the Great Polarization really bit home by the late Nineties. Here I will do even more than that. I will "de-Eagleton" the numbers and restore that 2-3% of national vote that McGovern probably lost to that whole sorry business. So we've gotten rid of Eagleton, and there's been a significant shift perhaps to do with more of "Watergate" related issues coming together in the press and a substantive investigation underway, also maybe the Paris process starts to unravel faster, Thieu gets his game on more quickly, and Nixon is back to "bombing for peace" by the fall. We'll even add one more factor: let's bring the McGoverning ticket into OTL and have McGovern do what he really should have done (I just want to go back and shake them all by the lapels in that Miami hotel suite and say "ARE YOU NUTS? IT'S STARING YOU RIGHT IN THE FACE!!") which is put Phil Hart on the ticket if at all possible. That puts Michigan in play. Yes, I know there's plenty of historical evidence that the effect of VPs is minimal (among other things I think that ignores the ritual business of putting a Southerner on Democratic tickets pre-Great Polarization to help guarantee those electoral votes), but Michigan was already McGovern's eighth-best result IOTL, one of his states over 40% and he polled at least 4% better than his national average in Michigan. So if we've shifted these other factors, plus the very popular Senator Hart, in a Maximum George scenario Michigan could very much be in play. All right, then. Maybe not a Brookings bombing, but lots more "Watergate" revelations, a sense from the press and Congress that they are joined up in a culture of corruption around the executive, Paris is stalled out, McGovern makes fewer unforced errors and picks Hart who helps make him look good, or at least not worse, and they go on a tear. Maximum George IOTL. What does that look like?
Nixon/Agnew 465
McGovern/Hart 73
... ow? This is with McGovern in that territory of around 42-43% of the national popular vote, and concentration on states where he was doing well relative to his national numbers. It's not Mondale bad, sure, six states (hard to see little Rhode Island there) and DC is certainly better than that, but still an epic loss. The conservative coalition is A Thing. A stone-cold thing, and if Nixon can do anything at all to both maintain a semblance of his power and authority and go hard at McGovern's most vulnerable policy positions, even a surge like this one, a substantively better outcome for McGovern in a two-way race (not far off his PV total from McGoverning) is still a long way from home relative to victory.
Let's look from another angle. We'll ask a different question: what is "McGovern country" relatively speaking? Where does McGovern have more appeal than he does not? For this purpose I've simply taken his national PV percentage, and on the map just below awarded McGovern the states where he beat that national average at state level. Have a look, it's interesting:
You'll be interested to know that in 1972 numbers, that gives McGovern/Whoever exactly 269 electoral votes, or half the total. Also, look at that map. I didn't give him Montana which was right on the edge. Maryland was one of three states less than 1% below national average, largely because of the combo of Agnew and a larger-than-average number of Wallace voters in the state. The other two states less than 1% below plumb are Missouri and Hawaii (why overwhelmingly Democratic Hawaii, you ask? Well, the GOP was stronger there in those days, it was less a one-party state, and the major population center Oahu is home to bases for every single branch of the US military, faced with a candidate branded a limp-wristed peacenik hippie lover by Nixon's ad machine.) Visualize those states in the mix. Now, while you have that in your mind's eye, swap South Dakota for Vermont. Get rid of Missouri while you're at it. In the end there, you have something that's a really-not-implausible map for a Democrat in a presidential election any time in the last twenty to twenty-five years. (Actually, lose Missouri but also add in New Mexico.) Here is where we really see that in terms of electoral demographics the "McGovern Moment" is a foretaste of the Great Polarization. That may shake out a little differently ITTL, but there you have an interesting piece of evidence.
One more while I'm at it. In this one we're not talking Electoral College numbers, I just want to give you a sense of the map itself, of the pure geography. This takes the map of the states, and maps on the places where George Wallace won 10% or more of the vote in 1968, which you can be sure he repeated in McGoverning plus maybe one or two other states. See what that looks like:
(I wonder why that color scheme looks so striking....) Wallace in grey, as everyone can guess. I went ahead and added West Virginia and Arizona, which were very close in 1968 and for purposes of this map we can count as 10% or more in McGoverning. We do that because it helps tell us about one of the very important things about TTL. Or rather, it asks a very important question. That is: where are those Wallace voters going to go? Only four of those states -- Michigan, Ohio, Delaware, and almost-Maryland -- qualified on the previous map as "McGovern country" so we could properly call them battleground states I guess. The other one that's even in that ballpark is Missouri. Otherwise, and even in those "battleground" cases, you are looking at new centers of gravity for political transformation in the US, and at a pretty potent element in the mix of a party system very much in flux. Also, it does not hurt to state the obvious. What you have there is the Old South (everything below the Mason-Dixon including places like Maryland and West Virginia), border states that had both strong Confederate and Copperhead presence during the Civil War (KS, MO, IN, OH), a state whose rural voters blended with white Southern migration to the factories of Detroit (it wasn't just African Americans who came north) in Michigan, the three Western states probably most influenced by settlement of migrants from the Southern states -- Idaho, Nevada, and Wyoming -- and Alaska, which for a variety of odd but interesting reasons has also seen a fair amount of migration from Southerners in its late territory-early statehood days, or from those Western states in grey above. This is a dark and powerful magic indeed. Something to think on.
Yay! Bernstein knew what he was doing with Shostakovich (Mahler and Bruckner too, but I don't think Lenny gets enough credit for his treatment of Shostakovich, especially his more epic stuff life this.) Thank you kindly. It will be messy, and imperfect, and there will be plenty hard or disappointing to go with the good, but that the good has a fighting chance is no mean thing. Thank you. In the present moment it felt like an important chapter to write.
I'm curious @Yes, how far does Hart go to dispel the suggestion that McGovern is the Triple A candidate? I also find it interesting that you had Nunn lose (I didn't realise that the GOP did decently there in OTL 1972), this might make the midterms in the south look somewhat similar to 1980, with the GOP perhaps holding Florida and doing well in other southern states (James D. Martin might finally win in Alabama for instance). Does Robert P. Griffin lose his position as GOP Whip during his brief spell outside of the Senate? If so I guess Norris Cotton is placed well to gain that position as he was RCC post-1973 OTL.
Ooh -- inside baseball, I like it. (To translate from Conversational Yank, that means "the actual inner workings of a particular system known to the au fait and a marker of who knows their stuff when they talk about it.") To take those in order:
- Hart does indeed help on triple-A, although among non-hippie Democrats Catholic voters were among the least concerned about the "amnesty" part of that equation, as some of them quietly backed dissident priests on the war and also had the general Catholic concepts of absolution and the making whole of communicants through the forgiveness of sin in mind. For the rest there are a few things in play. First, Phil Hart is a picture of what general liberal opinion in 1972 in America (inclusive of liberal and moderate Democrats and liberal-to-Rockefeller Republicans) wants to believe it is. The "they" there are sometimes kidding themselves, but Hart's the genuine article. He's a deeply principled man. By his own physical appearance he seems upstanding and familiar: before the beard he was the very model of a pleasant natured mid-20th-century American lawyer, with the beard he's everyone's favorite older professor at college. He was very deliberative, patient, and thoughtful, for example he took a good deal longer to come out against Vietnam than his dogged peace-activist wife did, but he respected their difference of opinion and when he came to agree with her people felt he'd thought things through beforehand. He also had both personal integrity and courage. Both physical and moral courage. He really did lead the way for frightened young GIs on D-Day even after he had an arm shattered by a German sniper's round until finally loss of blood meant he couldn't keep going. He also really did walk up to George Wallace once and ask the Mephistopheles of the Southern Strategy if Wallace thought Heaven was segregated. That's the kind of guy who does nothing but good for McGovern's image. Another thing here is that triple-A in and of itself, even if it's echoed in Nixon campaign mailings, takes more of a backseat when Chuck Colson blows up a goddamn building and when that conspiratorial rock gets turned over all manner of creepy-crawlies come out. Lastly there comes a point in the fall -- it's odd how many mechanisms and circumstances of the McGoverning' 72 presidential seem to echo OTL's 2016 presidential only skewed to the forces of good -- where mainline Democrats decide they need to hold McGovern up and keep him going for two reasons. Reason one is to bleed Richard Nixon as much as possible, weaken his standing and his political weight for battles to follow. Reason two is to bolster downticket candidates. So there's a touch of "will you lay off the triple-A joke, Tom, it was funny the first time and I might even think it's true but it's bad for the Party." Phil Hart, who is at once very much a liberal of the old school and very much a Party man, makes for a nice interface between the McGovern ticket and those other Democrats. For ordinary "Catholic ethnics," he helps hold up the proposition that there's something morally upstanding about McGovern even if you disagree with some of the policy proposals, you might think Congress can rein him in when he takes office and, as long as you don't think he's weak (there was Nixon's genius IOTL helped by the Eagleton farrago), say that at least we got a good man in the White House. On the rest McGovern's own opinions were closer to that anyway. He was a farm-state son of a Methodist minister. He was deeply in favor of amnesty on grounds of Christian forgiveness. But he wasn't in favor of a blanket right to abortion, because he saw it as morally irresponsible (though not really as blood-libelous baby murder.) He was also opposed to legalizing even marijuana, to the disappointment of many a young supporter. But they stuck with him because they thought he was a genuinely good man who would shake things up, and with the Phil Hart angle some Catholics are willing to think that way too, or at least to vote for the party that's been good to them on balance.
- It was a stronger year, a stronger candidate, and a stronger position generally for the Georgia GOP in that Senate race. But with no Wallace in the mix, Sam Nunn was able to run as a Democrat for Nixon and really pull away in the last month of the race. Here Wallace presents a dilemma, where the smart thing is to endorse him silently by not endorsing McGovern, but that gets to be an issue of party loyalty for the DNC leadership (even if they're willing to be pragmatic about established right-wing grandees like Eastland or, less extremely, Stennis.) So the Wallace voters are suddenly up for grabs and Fletcher Thompson can claim correctly that he's the candidate who is definitely against McGovern, and Nixon needs Republicans to be loyal to him so he has to be loyal in turn. That last means Nixon recants in some cases on his policy of non-interference with conservative Southern Democrats, and this would be one of those cases. Thompson pulls out the "who is least likely to get along with George McGovern" sweepstakes by a hair, because that is the standard for judgment in Georgia for this particular election.
- Martin may be a little far to the front of the curve to make it through, but at the very least he can have a substantial influence. Some interesting things will go on with the ALGOP in the near future and as an established figure Martin will certainly be in the mix.
- Yes Griffin does lose his job as whip. While Bill Milliken tosses him right back into the water it's a change of seat (from his original to Phil Hart's former seat) and thereby a change of Class and so any arguments about temporary interruption of service are void. Milliken wants an experienced Republican in the job and he's an obvious choice and Milliken's moderate nature leads him to think it's a kindness, but it is in some ways cruel for a former Senate Whip to come back as freshman-in-rank. Norris Cotton is indeed well placed. But he and Wallace Bennett are both beginning to think in terms of retirement -- that jump might be enough for Cotton to talk himself into another term but I suspect both John Tower and Howard Baker might make a play for it if Cotton talks himself back around towards retirement. There's an interesting situation shaping up in the House, too, where the surviving Hale Boggs remains Majority Leader but the more broadly liberal Tip O'Neill is right behind him as Majority Whip and more likely to make himself useful to the incoming administration. Both men know that Albert doesn't really have the stomach to stay on as Speaker for decades, so "eyeing each other warily" is probably putting it mildly...
John Farson
Banned
Like I said, Nixon's got nothing left to lose. The only question is whether Even Evil Has Standards applies to Nixon, or if he is spiteful enough and petty enough, and possibly psychotic enough, to turn Vietnam into a poisoned chalice that he would all-too willingly saddle McGovern with.
You get an extra, secret Like for the TVTropes move there
Nixon is very definitely torn between motives, although one lodestar "standard" to which he holds in all circumstances is that the outcome of his actions should prove that he's a great man and especially that he's Not Weak (it's just wonderful what an abusive father can do to a guy who's a basket of second-order mental health issues already....) Of course Nixon's not the only "evil" in the mix, and in his own administration not the only actor in the mix evil or not, and standards may vary. "Classically-trained Nixon Administration with 'roid rage" may be a good description of these coming months in that it will continue to reflect the dysfunctional dynamics that governed Nixon's whole time in office, only MOAR METAL. Also it could get interesting when a new and very different administration-in-waiting tries to get up to speed on what's going on when the outgoing bunch have ... very interesting ideas about executive privilege. "Shred faster, Mrs. Woods !!!" So is it How Dick Nixon Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb? Or Weekend With Henry? Or The Secret Life of Melvin Laird? Or Bob Haldeman committing seppuku in the Rose Garden while Herb Kalmbach loots Fort Knox? Or Dude, We're Totally Borked? Or does William Rogers rise up from Foggy Bottom like the statue of the Commendatore in Don Giovanni? Where have you gone, Pete Rodino? Time will tell ....
McGoverning: Images From Chapter 3
At the end of September, 1972, President Nixon appears with Governor Ronald Reagan (L) in Los Angeles, CA to announce the "Clean Sweep With Nixon" campaign slogan and Nixon's Attorney General-designate, Elliot Richardson (R)
Dirty laundry: Sen. John Sherman Cooper (R-KY) at the Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearings on the "Chennault Affair"; Cooper was one of the original recipients of copies of Lyndon Johnson's "X File" on the matter, and earlier had read the contents of that file into the Senatorial Record in an extended parliamentary maneuver
The unexpected President: Sen. George McGovern (D-SD) flashes the victory sign to crowds of supporters in Mitchell, SD shortly before dawn on Nov. 8, 1972, after confirmation of his Electoral College victory (and popular plurality) in the 1972 Presidential Election
A long, strange trip: in December 1972, Hunter S. Thompson (flanked by McGovern campaign boss and confidante Frank Mankiewicz) reflects on media coverage of the 1972 campaign at a public panel on that subject in New York
Hunter thought those were pinstripes....
ETA: Bah, humbug. It's not cooperating on that HST one. You'll just have to trust me that its a very Seventies shirt.
According to Nixonland, he was furious that he didn't win Massachusetts and get a fifty state sweep. So losing is probably going to be a lot worse on him mentally. I don't think, however, that the press ITTL have seen the last of Dick Nixon and they will have him to kick around some more.
I don't want to be seen to be cluttering the thread here, though I have to admit that that Hart is not someone I would immediately think of when trying to think of McGovern running mates (you've got Eagleton, Shriver, White, or perhaps Edward King) and I'll freely admit when first seeing the mock campaign poster in this thread my immediate thought was how in the hell did they get Gary Hart onto the ticket
. Though having read a bit more into him, it appears that (what I can infer from an obituary) he was a bit to the right of his wife on certain issues, and I presume he was like a typical Catholic liberal Democrat at this time, an orthodox Democrat, decent relations with labor and pro-life (like the suggested running mates I mentioned before, and Muskie, and initially Ted Kennedy).It is amazing that a worse GOP performance leads to some down ballot gangs. Its also amusing to see William B. Spong remain in the senate (perhaps he can finally introduce the Long Fong Spong Hong Kong Song Bill with Senators Russell Long and Hiram Fong!), while Jesse Helms still wins to his south. The reason I mentioned Martin was that I only recently discovered that he tried once again for the Senate in 1978 for the special election to Allen's seat, which he once again did remarkably well for a pre-1980 Republican in Alabama.
If Boggs is still alive, then I guess Begich is also still alive - which has important ripples for congressional Alaskan politics - you have a Democrat in Congress from Alaska who isn't Mike Gravel (who it should be noted sided with Southern Democrats on some issues in Congress in order to get noticed), that will potentially help the Dems a lot there once Gravel's issues come to the fray.
Anyways I'll stop clogging the thread up and just sit down and be quiet.
According to Nixonland, he was furious that he didn't win Massachusetts and get a fifty state sweep. So losing is probably going to be a lot worse on him mentally. I don't think, however, that the press ITTL have seen the last of Dick Nixon and they will have him to kick around some more.
I don't want to be seen to be cluttering the thread here, though I have to admit that that Hart is not someone I would immediately think of when trying to think of McGovern running mates (you've got Eagleton, Shriver, White, or perhaps Edward King) and I'll freely admit when first seeing the mock campaign poster in this thread my immediate thought was how in the hell did they get Gary Hart onto the ticket
It is amazing that a worse GOP performance leads to some down ballot gangs. Its also amusing to see William B. Spong remain in the senate (perhaps he can finally introduce the Long Fong Spong Hong Kong Song Bill with Senators Russell Long and Hiram Fong!), while Jesse Helms still wins to his south. The reason I mentioned Martin was that I only recently discovered that he tried once again for the Senate in 1978 for the special election to Allen's seat, which he once again did remarkably well for a pre-1980 Republican in Alabama.
If Boggs is still alive, then I guess Begich is also still alive - which has important ripples for congressional Alaskan politics - you have a Democrat in Congress from Alaska who isn't Mike Gravel (who it should be noted sided with Southern Democrats on some issues in Congress in order to get noticed), that will potentially help the Dems a lot there once Gravel's issues come to the fray.
Anyways I'll stop clogging the thread up and just sit down and be quiet.
Not at all, boyo, not at all. This is good stuff. Hart was indeed really just what they were looking for when they went for Shriver, and White, and Eagleton, but with more political experience than any of them (he'd been a Senator longer than Eagleton and Lt. Gov. of Michigan before that) and he ticked every box they were looking for in that respect. This is in part my feeling that if they'd asked more people, or looked more broadly, they could have hit on that.
Southern Democrats are... deeply confused this particular year. Of course most of them can't stand the "Nationals"' nominee, but what they do with the rest of their tickets in relation to the Democrats varies. Thompson pulls it off just barely in GA by winning the "who will hate McGovern more" sweepstakes. Jesse still makes it happen in NC because he'd been a registered Democrat until after the '65 civil/voting rights acts anyway and because voters see him first and foremost as a Wallace man so he gets hard-core Wallace Dems plus tribal Republicans with nowhere else to go which is more than enough for him. By the same token, in other areas there is a little more emphasis on the "no relation to Richard Nixon" vote among tribal Dems (when you're as far south as GA it's very firmly anti-McGovern first, a little farther north it's anti-Nixon and hope the McGovern "problem" will take care of itself) which leads to moderate-to-slightly-liberal Dems like Spong and Skipper Bowles get in because old habits die hard.
I am familiar with the Act of which you speak and wish I was brave enough to make it happen. That would be glorious.
Yes, the Begich thing is significant, one hopes he's not martyred politically rather than physically by McGovern Derangement Syndrome backlash. But it is inherently good for AK Dems to actually have options.
And feel free to say more. It's an open house to good comments
ETA: Forgot Martin! Yes, he will get some face time ITTL, and regardless of his own fortunes he holds an important kingmaker position in an ... evolving ALGOP.
@Yes I hope you don't mind, but I made these. The Senate numbers you gave threw me off a little bit as they didn't include the numbers for James Buckley (Con-NY) and Harry F. Byrd Jr. (Ind-VA), so I decided to try and calculate them manually - if they're wrong don't hesitate to tell me. I assume from the House results and a lack of an Independent victory that darling Louise won up in Massachusetts?
I assume from the House results and a lack of an Independent victory that darling Louise won up in Massachusetts?
