McGovern
I’m watching George McGovern on Fox News right now denouncing the Employee Free Choice Act. Some colleagues are surprised by this turn of events. In truth, it’s the inevitable outcome of a sad story. Back in 1972, McGovern became the only Democratic Party presidential nominee to not secure the AFL-CIO’s endorsement. What’s more, he didn’t miss the endorsement because of any failure to support the labor movement on key labor issues. He had a solid pro-labor record, and a very solid record of support for the concerns of working people. But the AFL-CIO leadership, including its disastrous president George Meany, was dominated by cultural conservatives and Cold War hawks who decided to screw McGovern over. It’s beneath a great progressive leader to let bitterness cloud his judgment on a topic like this, but that’s what’s going on.
Meanwhile, this is an aspect of American political history that’s not well-understood. McGovern would have lost the election no matter what. Frankly, nobody was going to beat an incumbent President amidst the strong economy of 1972. And you certainly weren’t going to do it by nominating an unusually left-wing candidate. But a big reason McGovern did so extremely poorly was that huge swathes of the progressive establishment — including organized labor — just flat-out refused to support him, often for very bad reasons. Under those circumstances, it’s just impossible to put up a respectable showing.
46 Responses to “McGovern”
Register
RSSLogin
Topic Cloud
ArchivesBlog RollAbout Matt YglesiasContact Me
Donate
October 14th, 2008 at 12:36 pm
It’s fun to take Matt’s last paragraph and make the appropriate substitutions: McCain for McGovern, bad economy for good economy, reactionary for progressive establishment, etc. Try it–good clean lunchtime fun!
October 14th, 2008 at 12:43 pm
McGovern was a terrible candidate and most of his ideas later found their way into law and such. The right wing is still fighting him, and it’s 36 years later.
So, who won in 1972?
October 14th, 2008 at 12:46 pm
Call me cynical but I think there is only one real reason people demand “open” voting – so they know whose legs to break.
Now instead of employees being pressured by Management, they will be pressured by Management and Union boosters. Great. Awesome. I love choosing between losing my job and having my co-workers beat me into a coma with bats.
Thats a great free-choice.
October 14th, 2008 at 12:50 pm
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Anyone who doesn’t think that unions use physical intimidation has never been to Philadelphia.
The current, cumbersome ballot process does give unfair advantages to management. But eliminating the secret ballot is not an acceptable solution.
October 14th, 2008 at 1:00 pm
Re libarbarian’s comment “I love choosing between losing my job and having my co-workers beat me into a coma with bats. ”
—————
Here in Philly, I think they still outsource the beatings to the Mob. Along with ..er..”waste management”.
October 14th, 2008 at 1:08 pm
Mr. Yglesias also neglects to mention the Eagleton affair where Senator McGovern one day said he was 1000% behind Eagleton and 2 days later dumped him from the ticket. His incompetent handling of that issue sent him from 20 points down to 35 points down in the polls. He eventually got back to 20 points down on election day. He would have lost anyway but probably not by nearly the margin he did.
October 14th, 2008 at 1:08 pm
Jbd is right. With an Obama administration and big Congressional majorities wouldn’t it be possible to to do a comprehensive overhaul of the union organizing laws to eliminate management’s advantages and still preserve the secret ballot? Real free choice for workers is a worthwhile and principled goal. Rigging the system to favor unionization to replace a system rigged to favor management, less so.
October 14th, 2008 at 1:30 pm
I’d say current events definitively prove Meany was correct that the disastrous McGovern was no friend to labor.
But richy-rich liberals like Matthew Yglesias miss no opportunity to slam lefties who think economics is important. See the 2008 Ohio Democratic primary for further evidence.
October 14th, 2008 at 1:30 pm
I think Matt is wrong that McGovern’s opposition to card check arises from what the AFL-CIO did or didn’t do to him 36 years ago.
Actually, McGovern became quite free-market and anti-regulation after his political career ended and he became a small businessman – in the hotel business as I recall. As far as I know he stayed progressive on social policy issues, but his anti-card-check position is definitely of a piece with the (reasonable) anti-regulation views he has espoused for the last 15 or 20 years.
October 14th, 2008 at 1:33 pm
You can actually find quotes where Meany refuses to endorse McGovern because he fears gay marriage and hippies.
Regarding EFCA, it only puts the process of forming a union equal to the process of disbanding one. “Card Check” and whatever accompanying intimidation exists already. Currently if 30% of a business’s employees sign a card, they get to petition for an election some weeks in advance. It’s during that time that the company applies pressure, often beyong legality. EFCA raises the percentage to 50% and eliminates the lag time. That’s all.
October 14th, 2008 at 1:34 pm
under the Employee Free Choice Act, workers can still request a secret-ballot election for union organizing. it’s just that the employer can’t demand it. right now the way the election process works, the employer can essentially veto the formation of a union. the Employee Free Choice Act just removes that veto.
October 14th, 2008 at 1:36 pm
Let’s be frank. The only reason McGovern lost is because he was bald. The last bald person to be elected president was General Eisenhower, and that’s only because the one thing Americans love more than a full head of hair is war.
October 14th, 2008 at 1:40 pm
And you certainly weren’t going to do it by nominating an unusually left-wing candidate.
You betray your age once in a while, Matt. McGovern was nominated precisely because he was supposed to be the “plain-spoken man from the Plains.” He was, in fact, a somewhat conservative Democrat and by no means “unusually left-wing.” You’re buying into the GOP meta-narrative here that got going in ‘72 and never really stopped.
October 14th, 2008 at 1:43 pm
Meanwhile, this is an aspect of American political history that’s not well-understood. McGovern would have lost the election no matter what.
Really? I thought it was common knowledge.
October 14th, 2008 at 1:44 pm
Matt brings up a good point about what McGovern’s stance should be, despite the experience, and it’s relevant to me because it reminds me what it was like growing up then. As just a kid, I came to think of unions as anything but a progressive cause. They were labor unions hugging Nixon and waging the culture wars. They were construction workers taking on peaceful antiwar protesters. (While the legendary spitting on soldiers never happened, that really did!) There was the continued exploitation of the white-collar vote by Reagan’s side ever since. I don’t as clearly remember the corruption of unions, but no doubt it factored into the equation.
When I saw Nathan Newman at TPM Cafe often seeking employee-based solutions to problems like health care needing universal solutions, it just seemed to remind me that the movement needs to look past its nose to help build a broad enough progressive base for success. And historians do sometimes distinguish early success of English and European labor parties by their ability to do so.
All the same, it’s good to be reminded that this is at best a partial view, and the rest of the left, people like me, should grow up, too.
October 14th, 2008 at 1:47 pm
My sense is that the unions which employ violence and such are generally not the ones that would be involved in organizing drives. They’re the well-established buildings trades type unions, who use violence when somebody tries to employ a non-union contractor to build stuff. These sectors are, so far as I’m aware, already organized everywhere where it’s feasible to do so, and on a very different model from what would be affected by the EFCA. (I.e., building trades workers don’t have permanent employers).
October 14th, 2008 at 1:52 pm
building trades workers don’t have permanent employers
Huh? Of course they do. There are contractors that are unionized, and contractors that aren’t. Nobody hires Union Local 1234 directly.
October 14th, 2008 at 1:59 pm
Mark – my sense was that the union contractors would hire from the union pool as necessary when they got business, and then when there wasn’t work, back to the union pool the workers would go. I admit that my familiarity with this isn’t as great as it might be, though, so I could very well be mistaken. I wasn’t trying to say there were no contractors, though, just that working for a contractor is not necessarily a permanent job.
October 14th, 2008 at 2:02 pm
I wonder how pleased Matt would be if we held elections for representatives, senators, and Presidents this way. Why is this hard? It’s not a good thing to allow pressure from management on a union vote, and it’s also not a good thing to allow pressure from pro-union representatives. Card Check voting opens the door to intimidation. I guess the left is just making its anti-democratic, “we know what’s good for you” mindset more public.
October 14th, 2008 at 2:19 pm
James Robertson: How would employees demonstrate their desire for a union other than by petitioning for one?
October 14th, 2008 at 2:21 pm
Matthew writes:
and
Um, isn’t Matthew being contradictory? Labor simply was not part of the “progressive establishment” at the time – it was, in fact, as Matthew points out, fairly conservative culturally and in respect of foreign policy. The reason McGovern lost wasn’t that swathes of the progressive establishment didn’t support him – it was that those swathes weren’t part of the progressive establishment at all.
October 14th, 2008 at 2:25 pm
In reading this I remembered reading a review in The Atlantic of Arthur Schlesinger’s “Journals 1952 – 2000.”
http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200712/schlesinger
Christopher Hitchens is the writer and inserts this little nugget into his review:
I think that says everything I need to know about Mr. McGovern.
October 14th, 2008 at 2:45 pm
Please do not forget that Richard Nixon picked McGovern to be his opponent. That was what Watergate was really about.
October 14th, 2008 at 2:46 pm
Max Hernandez – this is Chris Hitchens you’re talking about. I’d Google around for some backing evidence before you let that guy tell you “everything you need to know” about McGovern.
October 14th, 2008 at 2:53 pm
Sen. McGovern first admitted to voting for Gerald Ford on Larry King. He said he didn’t know a lot about Carter and he trusted Ford. He also said he was casting a vote for his good friend Bob Dole. I was pretty shocked when I heard about it.
He also said that he voted for Carter in 1980.
I do, however, agree that Christopher Hitchens shouldn’t be anyone’s primary source.
October 14th, 2008 at 2:56 pm
Actually, McGovern became quite free-market and anti-regulation after his political career ended and he became a small businessman – in the hotel business as I recall. As far as I know he stayed progressive on social policy issues, but his anti-card-check position is definitely of a piece with the (reasonable) anti-regulation views he has espoused for the last 15 or 20 years.
In the last several years, he has also co-signed a good number of pro-agribusiness editorials with Rudy Boschwitz, Minnesota’s conservative former senator.
October 14th, 2008 at 3:05 pm
Al (#21): Yglesias might have phrased that a bit better, but his essential point is correct. The unions played a big role in Hubert Humphrey’s 1968 campaign: They got the vote out for him and seriously reduced northern blue-collar support for George Wallace. The majority of union members may have been socially conservative but they were still wedded to economically liberal policies, and that’s what the Democrats promised.
October 14th, 2008 at 3:29 pm
McGovern’s putative bitterness is not even comparable to Gene McCarthy’s acrid embrace of The Reagan Revolution (sic). In light of what the Henry Jackson wing of the DNC did to him in ‘72 – one might even empathize with his current stance. After all, George had expressed a time or two the wild-eyed notion that the Palestinians may possess some human dignity. And by these people’s reckoning – that was Jew-hating heresy requiring them to stab their own party’s freely-elected Presidential candidate in the back. Why he’s not more bitter is the larger mystery.
October 14th, 2008 at 3:53 pm
petitioning for a vote is fine. Having the public petition be the vote leaves the door wide open to abuse – by anyone with an agenda in either direction.
October 14th, 2008 at 4:31 pm
Another alternative would be to require recognition of the union as the representative for those 30%+ union members who did sign cards. With closed shops illegal and the existence of “right to work for less” laws, the other employees don’t have to join the union. Only union members would have to pay union dues or “negotiating fees” analogous to union dues, unless an election was held and the union won a majority.
October 14th, 2008 at 4:42 pm
McGovern has turned sharply to the right on many issues besides EFCA.
He’s written op-eds defending the sketchy payday loan and check cashing industry. He’s also published a column defending Wal-Mart’s health care policies.
It would be an interesting interview to ask him why he changed his mind on basic economic justice issues.
October 14th, 2008 at 4:49 pm
He’s been interviewed on that. He got involved in business after he left politics, and ran head first into how his ideas and reality lined up.
October 14th, 2008 at 5:06 pm
The funniest thing about the Eagleton episode was that it was Eagleton himself who had coined the “Amnesty, abortion, and acid” smear against McGovern:
<blockquote[edit] “Amnesty, abortion and acid”
After McGovern had won the Massachusetts primary on April 25, 1972, journalist Robert Novak phoned Democratic politicians around the country, who agreed with his assessment that blue-collar workers voting for McGovern did not understand what he really stood for. On April 27, Novak reported in a column that an unnamed Democratic senator had talked to him about McGovern and said: “The people don’t know McGovern is for amnesty, abortion and legalization of pot. Once middle America – Catholic middle America, in particular – finds this out, he’s dead.” The label stuck and McGovern became known as the candidate of “amnesty, abortion and acid.”
Novak was accused of manufacturing the quote. To rebut the criticism, Novak took the senator to lunch after the campaign and asked whether he could identify him as the source. The senator said he would not allow his identity to be revealed. “Oh, he had to run for re-election… the McGovernites would kill him if they knew he had said that,” Novak said.
On July 15, 2007, after the source’s death, Novak said on Meet the Press that the unnamed senator was Thomas Eagleton. Political analyst Bob Shrum says that Eagleton would never have been selected as McGovern’s running mate if it had been known at the time that Eagleton was the source of the quote: “Boy, do I wish he would have let you publish his name. Then he never would have been picked as vice president. Because the two things, the two things that happened to George McGovern — two of the things that happened to him — were the label you put on him, number one, and number two, the Eagleton disaster. We had a messy convention, but he could have, I think in the end, carried eight or 10 states, remained politically viable. And Eagleton was one of the great train wrecks of all time.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_McGovern#.22Amnesty.2C_abortion_and_acid.22
October 14th, 2008 at 6:55 pm
McGovern has turned sharply to the right on many issues besides EFCA.
He’s written op-eds defending the sketchy payday loan and check cashing industry. He’s also published a column defending Wal-Mart’s health care policies.
It would be an interesting interview to ask him why he changed his mind on basic economic justice issues.
It’s been disappointing, to say the least. He was one of the very few politicians/public figures I trusted completely. Firedoglake suggests that his friendship with lobbyists -like Rick Berman – may have something to do with his recent worrisome statements.
http://firedoglake.com/2008/08/11/wal-mart-lover-george-mcgovern-throws-unions-under-the-bus-for-his-lobbyist-friend-rick-berman/
October 14th, 2008 at 11:03 pm
Actually, in 1965 George McGovern was one of the few Northern Democrats to oppose reform of Taft-Hartley modifying clause 14(b) which allows states to have “right-to-work” laws. This was a VERY big deal for organized labor at the time. It was their main labor law proposal the way card check is today.
I agree that Cold War concerns, social conservatism and also just turf fights within the Democratic Party were also important factors for Meany, esp. since McGovern eventually flipped in a pro-labor direction on 14(b), but McGovern’s untrustworthiness from a labor standpoint PREDATES his lack of support from Meany in 1972 and is not a product of Meany’s spurning him, as Matt suggests.
I also think that George Meany, while objectionable in many ways, (not exactly progressive on race or gender for example) looks better in retrospect on the Cold War than McGovern, who actually supported Henry Wallace and even opposed the Korean War.
October 15th, 2008 at 12:45 am
“And Eagleton was one of the great train wrecks of all time.”
My aunt Mary in those days worked as a legislative assistant and executive secretary for a series of Congressmen. That summer of 1972, she was back ‘home’ in Wisconsin, staying at our house. And I rememeber her sitting in our living room, watching the news that Eagleton was being dropped from the ticket, and her lamenting what was being done to him, with her saying what a lovely, gentle man he was.
He may well have been a train wreck as a VP candidate, but he was – according to my aunt – one of the good guys in Washington.
October 15th, 2008 at 8:02 pm
In support of FCSA and workers rights: 1. A worker of any type is a human who is offering his time,physical & mental resources for some kind of remuneration. 2. Essentially, his wage is the result of some kind of bargaining, either with an employer or with an organization, often a union. 3. Union representation in my experience of 72 years is spotty at best. 4. Goon activities may exist today but were vastly greater during the early 1900’s and later 1940’s. George McGovern either holds a grudge or has slipped a cogwheel and I for one am quite sorry to see his position against FCSA. I strongly support the card checkoff and hope its passed. I believe the modern corporation is so incredibly powerful that a nonunionized worker has little or no chance of being heard. This does not necessarily apply to large multinational corporations such as Toyota who seem to treat workers well.
March 1st, 2009 at 11:08 pm
cialis
Excellent site. It was pleasant to me.
March 22nd, 2009 at 7:42 am
tramadol
Great site. Good info
April 2nd, 2009 at 10:40 am
Very interesting site. Hope it will always be alive!
buy cheap viagra
April 8th, 2009 at 4:44 am
It is the coolest site,keep so!
viagra