George McGovern (July 19, 1922 – October 21, 2012)
George Stanley McGovern died after numerous medical complaints. He was the standard bearer of liberalism and is probably the archetypal liberal the right wing hate and demonise. Yet he was a gallant World War Two hero and was a thoroughly decent man, unlike those draft dodgers and bar room generals who are quite keen for other people to fight wars but would never think of doing it themselves.
He became the anti-Vietnam war candidate and was royally thumped by Nixon in the ballot box. He was later to get some satisfaction when the Watergate Scandal broke and Nixon had to resign for being a crook. It later came out that McGovern suffered greatly from the machinations of the Nixon/Republican dirty tricks and it seems that we are still getting the same treatment today (weapons of mass destruction in Iraq being the obvious one).
McGovern was one of those Christians who saw Jesus as a revolutionary socialist that wanted to make sure people had a good life and got good treatment if they were sick. Unlike the vocal Christians today who worry about tax policy for the rich and who is allowed to have sex with whom.
His one blot on his resume was that he picked Tom Eagleton, a manic depressive to be his running mate, only to later drop him when criticism of his decision grew loud. This was seen as fickle and weak by the US opinion formers and he never recovered from that. It has been claimed that Nixon had a hand in the disclosure of Tom Eagleton’s health problem.
Later on after the lose of the Presidential election in 1972, George McGovern went on a endless task of trying to cure world hunger and bring education to all children. He suffered further heartache when his daughter and son died in tragic circumstances which had alcohol at the root. He found the fact that he sacrificed his family life for politics a very high price to pay and later regretted doing this.
In the end he set out to change the World and in some ways he did. One of his campaign managers in Texas was a young guy called Bill Clinton who was a big supporter of McGovern’s agenda, and, later went on to do some big things. He too had problems with the Republican dirty tricks but managed to overcome them with the classic slippery use of the line ”…I did not have sexual relations with that woman….”, which was based on the Kenneth Starr definition of ‘sexual relations’ and did not include oral sex.