Sunday, October 21, 2012

Senator George McGovern Dies

By Douglas V. Gibbs

Anti-Vietnam War 1972 Presidential Candidate, and 3-term U.S. Senator, George McGovern, has died. He was 90.

A proud liberal, the South Dakota man joked that he had wanted to run for president in the worst way - and that he had done so.

The campaign in 1972 ran with the shadow of Watergate over it, but the scandal had not fully unfurled, and Republican President Richard M. Nixon continued as a commanding favorite for re-election.

McGovern went on to carry only Massachusetts and the District of Columbia, winning just 38 percent of the popular vote in one of the biggest landslides losses in American presidential history.

A decorated World War II bomber pilot, McGovern said he learned to hate war by waging it. In his disastrous race against Nixon, he promised to end the Vietnam War and cut defense spending by billions of dollars. He helped create the Food for Peace program and spent much of his career believing the United States should be more accommodating to the former Soviet Union.

"I am a liberal and always have been," McGovern said in 2001. "Just not the wild-eyed character the Republicans made me out to be."

-- Political Pistachio Conservative News and Commentary

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