POLITICS: Front and Center for George McGovern

• Share

(7 of 10)

Should McGovern get the Democratic nomination, politicians hostile to him argue, such a sweeping program could make him the Barry Goldwater of 1972: a candidate at the extreme of his own party (albeit the other extreme), beloved of the more intensely ideological partisans, but so wildly far from the national center as to be totally unelectable. Goldwater has not missed the point. He ran into Democratic National Chairman Larry O'Brien shortly after McGovern's victory in Wisconsin. Goldwater winked and said: "Where you fellas headed?" Others are predicting a rout, if not of Alf Landon proportions, at least as embarrassing as Goldwater's own in 1964.

One difference between Goldwater in 1964 and McGovern today is that McGovern is not widely known, and thus not widely recognized as an ultraliberal; if anything, his willingness to speak out against what he calls the "establishment center" has long been admired even where his views are unpopular. (The "establishment center" is McGovern's confusing phrase for the men who he thinks have kept American society from meeting the needs of the 1970s: the leaders of the military-industrial complex and the rigid hierarchies of business and government.) Allard Lowenstein argues that a pitch for making things better can succeed politically, even if some of the remedies are severe. Says Lowenstein: "That's what Robert Kennedy was doing in 1968, and it was working." McGovern makes his own plain-spoken distinction.

Says he: "Goldwater was outside the mainstream, and I think I'm moving with the mainstream of the country."

McGovern is vulnerable to the charge that he is admired by radicals; unsolicited endorsements last week by Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin of the Chicago Seven were embarrassingly conspicuous. Senator Henry ("Scoop") Jackson of Washington, a disappointed also-ran in the season's primaries, tore into McGovern viciously as "the spokesman for some of the most dangerous and destructive currents in American politics." Obviously President Nixon could give McGovern a hard time over his plan to cut defense spending; he could argue that McGovern's program would leave the U.S. naked before its enemies. He could also remind the nation of McGovern's adventure with Henry Wallace in 1948, as Jackson has done. However, Nixon himself has come a long way since 1948, as they must be saying in Peking and Moscow.

Antiwar voters, including the young, are important to McGovern's candidacy: in the TIME/Yankelovich Pennsylvania survey, two-thirds of the voters mentioned the war as the issue of greatest concern to them, and it was an issue that worked to McGovern's benefit. The President is at the mercy of his own Viet Nam policy: so, conversely, is McGovern.