#mcgovern

“The main problem in any democracy is that crowd pleasers are generally brainless swine who can go out on a stage & whup their supporters into an orgiastic frenzy - then go back to the office & sell every one of the poor bastards down the tube for a nickel apiece. Probably the rarest form of life in American politics is the man who can turn on a crowd & still keep his head straight - assuming it was straight in the first place.

Which harks back to McGovern's problem. He is probably the most honest big-time politician in America; Robert Kennedy, several years before he was murdered, called George McGovern "the most decent man in the Senate." Which is not quite the same thing as being the best candidate for President of the United States. For that, McGovern would need at least one dark kinky streak of Mick Jagger in his soul . . .

Not much, & perhaps not even enough so people would notice at lunch in the Capitol Hill Hotel or walking down the hallway of the Senate Office Building - but just enough to drift out on the stage in front of a big crowd & let the spectacle turn him on.

That may be the handle. Maybe the whole secret of turning a crowd on is getting turned on yourself by the crowd. The only candidate running for the presidency today who seems to understand this is George Wallace which might at least partially explain why Bobby Kennedy was the only candidate who could take votes away from Wallace in '68. Kennedy, like Wallace, was able to connect with people on some kind of visceral, instinctive level that is probably both above & below "rational politics." (page 127)

“McGovern's brain-trust, though, had come up with the idea that the Wallace vote was "soft” - that the typical Wallace voter, especially in the North and Midwest, was far less committed to Wallace himself than to his thundering, gut-level appeal to rise up and smash all the "pointy-headed bureaucrats in Washington" who'd been fucking them over for so long.

The root of the Wallace magic was a cynical, showbiz instinct for knowing exactly which issues would whip a hall full of beer-drinking factory workers into a frenzy - and then doing exactly that, by howling down from the podium that he had an instant, overnight cure for all their worst afflictions: Taxes? Nigras? Army worms killing the turnip crop? Whatever it was, Wallace assured his supporters that the solution was actually real simple, and that the only reason they had any hassle with the government at all was because those greedy bloodsuckers in Washington didn't want the problems solved, so they wouldn't be put out of work.

The ugly truth is that Wallace had never even bothered to understand the problems - much less come up with any honest solutions - but "the Fighting Little Judge" has never lost much sleep from guilt feelings about his personal credibility gap. Southern politicians are not made that way. Successful con men are treated with considerable respect in the South. A good slice of the settler population of that region were men who'd been given a choice between being shipped off to the New World in leg-irons and spending the rest of their lives in English prisons. The Crown saw no point in feeding them year after year, and they were far too dangerous to be turned loose on the streets of London - so, rather than overload the public hanging schedule, the King's Minister of Gaol decided to put this scum to work on the other side of the Atlantic, in The Colonies, where cheap labor was much in demand.

Most of these poor bastards wound up in what is now the Deep South because of the wretched climate. No settler with good sense and a few dollars in his pocket would venture south of Richmond. There was plenty of opportunity around Boston, New York, and Philadelphia - and by British standards the climate in places like South Carolina and Georgia was close to Hell on Earth: swamps, alligators, mosquitos, tropical disease . . . all this plus a boiling sun all day long and no way to make money unless you had a land grant from the King.

So the South was sparsely settled at first, and the shortage of skilled labor was a serious problem to the scattered aristocracy of would-be cotton barons who had been granted huge tracts of good land that would make them all rich if they could only get people to work it.

The slave-trade was one answer, but Africa in 1699 was not a fertile breeding ground for middle-management types . . . and the planters said it was damn near impossible for one white man to establish any kind of control over a boatload of black primitives. The bastards couldn't even speak English. How could a man get the crop in, with brutes like that for help?

There would have to be managers, keepers, overseers: white men who spoke the language, and had a sense of purpose in life. But where would they come from? There was no middle class in the South: only masters and slaves and all that rich land lying fallow.

The King was quick to grasp the financial implications of the problem: The crops must be planted and harvested, in order to sell them for gold - and if all those lazy bastards needed was a few thousand half-bright English-speaking lackeys in order to bring the crops in . . . hell, that was easy: Clean out the jails, cut back on the Crown's grocery bill, jolt the liberals off balance by announcing a new "Progressive Amnesty" program for hardened criminals . . .

Wonderful. Dispatch royal messengers to spread the good word in every corner of the kingdom; and after that send out professional pollsters to record an amazing 66 percent jump in the King's popularity . . . then wait a few weeks before announcing the new 10 percent sales tax on ale.

That's how the South got settled. Not the whole story, perhaps, but it goes a long way toward explaining why George Wallace is the Governor of Alabama. He has the same smile as his great-grandfather - a thrice-convicted pig thief from somewhere near Nottingham, who made a small reputation, they say, as a jailhouse lawyer, before he got shipped out.

Indeed. With a bit of imagination you can almost hear the cranky litle bastard haranguing his fellow prisoners in London's infamous Hardcase jail, urging them on to revolt:

"Lissen here, you poor fools! There's not much time! Even now up - there in the tower - they're cookin up some kind of cruel new punishment for us! How much longer will we stand for it? And now they want to ship us across the ocean to work like slaves in a swamp with a bunch of goddamn Hottentots!

"We won't go! It's asinine! We'll tear this place apart before we'll let that thieving old faggot of a king send us off to work next to Africans!

"How much more of this misery can we stand, boys? I know you're fed right up to here with it. I can see it in your eyes - pure misery! And I'm tellin' you, we don't have to stand for it! We can send the king a message and tell him how we feel! I'll write it up myself, and all you boys can sign it . . . or better still, I'll go talk to the king personally! All you boys have to do is dig me a little tunnel under the wall over there behind the gallows, and I'll . . . “

Right. That bottom line never changes: "You folks be sure and come to see me in the White House, you hear? There'll be plenty of room for my friends, after I clean house . . . but first I need your vote, folks, and after that I'll . . . “

George Wallace is one of the worst charlatans in politics, but there is no denying his talent for converting frustration into energy. What McGovern sensed in Florida, however - while Wallace was stomping him, along with all the others - was the possibility that Wallace appealed instinctively to a lot more people than would actually vote for him. He was stirring up more anger than he knew how to channel. The frustration was there, and it was easy enough to convert it - but what then? If Wallace had taken himself seriously as a presidential candidate - as a Democrat or anything else - he might have put together the kind of organization that would have made him a genuine threat in the primaries, instead of just a spoiler.” (pages 274 - 278)

Newsweek magazine