George McGovern has died.

The first presidential candidate I voted for, in 1972, the year I turned 21. He was 90 years old.

A slender, soft-spoken minister’s son newly elected to Congress — his father was a Republican — Mr. McGovern went to Washington as a 34-year-old former college history teacher and decorated bomber pilot in World War II. He thought of himself as a son of the prairie as well, with a fittingly flat, somewhat nasal voice and a brand of politics traceable to the Midwestern progressivism of the late 19th century.

ADDED: More, from the linked NYT obituary:

The Republicans portrayed Mr. McGovern as a cowardly left-winger, a threat to the military and the free-market economy and outside the mainstream of American thought. Fair or not, he never lived down the image of a liberal loser, and many Democrats long accused him of leading the party astray.

Mr. McGovern resented that characterization mightily. “I always thought of myself as a good old South Dakota boy who grew up here on the prairie,” he said in an interview for this obituary in 2005 in his home in Mitchell. “My dad was a Methodist minister. I went off to war. I have been married to the same woman forever. I’m what a normal, healthy, ideal American should be like.

“But we probably didn’t work enough on cultivating that image,” he added, referring to his campaign organization. “We were more interested in ending the war in Vietnam and getting people out of poverty and being fair to women and minorities and saving the environment. It was an issue-oriented campaign, and we should have paid more attention to image.”

"McGovern/Eagleton."

Seen in Madison, Wisconsin, just now:

Ron Paul's new anti-Newt ad.

That's hardcore. But is it unfair? Fair or unfair, it's what's coming if Newt is the nominee.

In that vein, here's Erik Tarloff in the Atlantic:

In my lifetime, I can recall only two presidential candidates who were patently anathema to their respective parties' establishment: Barry Goldwater and George McGovern. In both cases, the system sputtered and malfunctioned. Otherwise, the more extreme contenders have all been derailed before they could pose much of a threat.

My prediction is, that's what's going to happen to Newt Gingrich. He may have the wind at his back right now, but one way or another, he will be brought down. Opposition research will be leaked to compliant news outlets. Devastating anti-Gingrich commercials will be produced by campaigns that have no chance of winning. 

Like Ron Paul?!

People who have served with and under Gingrich will trash him in public. Personal scandals will be revisited, with new and uglier details provided. Reputable conservative newspapers and magazines will run editorials questioning his fitness. Much of this has already started to happen, and I'm willing to wager we ain't seen nothin' yet.

Okay, but Ron Paul is on his own. He's at least as "patently anathema" to the establishment as Newt.

Also in the Atlantic, from Elspeth Reeve: "Newt Gingrich's Women Problem":

There's a group of Republicans eager to nominate a Not Romney candidate but having trouble embracing Newt Gingrich: conservative women who don't like his history of adultery....

Former Mississippi Sen. Trent Lott told Politico that while Romney might have a hard time selling himself to southerners, when he gets in a room with them, he can win them over. Lott "recalled that Romney had successfully worked the room during recent campaign stops in Mississippi: 'The ladies loved him.'"

Oh? But Erik Tarloff says "there's something positively repellent about" Romney.

He combines a sort of feigned bonhomie with an air of profound, pervasive superciliousness.  His public self in fact mirrors his politics, opportunistic and inauthentic.  He's always reminded me of a very specific type peculiar to American educational life, one familiar, I should think, to most American males of a certain age:  The Boys' Vice Principal.  The one who pretends to be a regular guy, who kids around in the halls and sometimes permits himself the odd "Damn!" or "Hell!", but will bully you into doing something you don't want to do with a false smile of feigned friendship, and who will cheerfully, and with a little too much zeal, deliver stinging corporal punishment on your ass when he deems it appropriate.

Uh... okay. Well, that seems to be some wacky "male" perspective. The ladies loved him.

Studying with babies.

Have you ever had a baby by your side when you were studying for a law school exam? I had one -- out of the frame -- when I posed for this photograph. The baby -- my older son, John -- was less than 2 months old, so he took no interest in my ordeal and went about his baby-business as usual.

But maybe you are studying with a baby who's a little older, like this one, who, I'm told, spontaneously dug the Constitution out of a schoolbag and started reading it:



Good luck to all the law students who are studying with babies!

ADDED: A few months later, John did take an interest:



IN THE COMMENTS: Skyler says:

My daughter liked to study for the patent exam.

Some serious cuteness at the link. Plus, the daughter is named Elle.

Mcg said...

Somewhere I've got a picture of my infant daughter and [me] watching the dittocam. If I wasn't interested in preserving a modicum of anonymity on this forum I'd post it.

But I am, so I won't.

Instead, I'll post a link this hilarious blog mocking pictures of cute animals.

Forgive me for correcting your grammar, but you Arne Duncanned.

As a Rush Limbaugh fan, you may be horrified to learn that when I created a tag for your pseudonym, Blogger tried to autocomplete "mcg" to "McGovern." But -- who knows? -- maybe you are McGovern. Who knows what celebs lurk behind these pseudonyms?

As for that blog -- Fuck You, Penguin -- I love it. Don't say "fuck you" in front of babies, but I'm totally on the same page as the Fuck You, Penguin blogger: what does this asshole think he is doing?

Democracy and the secret ballot.

Here's George McGovern opposing the "card check" bill, which Obama and many Democrats support, on the ground that keeping one's vote private is fundamental to democracy:



Via Gateway Pundit, via Mickey Kaus.

Interestingly, Obama is the Democratic nominee precisely because of the lack of private voting. His winning strategy was all about the caucus states, where your friends and neighbors see where you stand.

Hey, Eagleton meme-pushers. You know McGovern said "If had it to do over again, I’d have kept him."

Last year.

"Perhaps Governor Palin, realizing that and trying to minimize her own humiliation in coming days, should withdraw before she is nominated..."

The "that" is.... Well, what is the "that" there? The previous paragraph in this Garry Wills NYT op-ed -- "McCain’s McGovern Moment" --- is:

Perhaps Senator McGovern should not have deserted Tom Eagleton. Perhaps Senator McCain should stick by Governor Palin. But if he does soldier on with her by his side for a while, will he end up having to call another midget convention like the one that had to be cobbled together to nominate Sargent Shriver? That is hardly in his best interests.

So Palin -- perhaps -- ought to realize that McCain perhaps may find it hard and perhaps need to oust her in the end. Quit now before you embarrass yourself and hurt poor old John McCain, Garry Wills says.

This Eagleton meme is everywhere. Over at the Atlantic, Joshua Green has a piece called "The 'Eagleton Scenario'":

Barring a dramatic reversal, Sarah Palin will formally become the Republican vice presidential nominee Wednesday night. Since Friday, when the pick was announced, news surrounding Palin has been almost uniformly negative....

Is that evidence of what a terrible idea it was to choose her or of how horrified the media are to see the McCain campaign electrified?

Here in St. Paul, talk of Palin has dominated the Republican convention—even more so than cable news—and by Monday night discussion among Republican operatives and reporters had turned to whether Palin would survive or become the first running mate since Thomas Eagleton in 1972 to leave a major-party ticket.

Oh, so the discussion among Republican operatives and reporters has turned to whether Palin is the new Eagleton? Why is that? Because the reporters are asking Republican operatives about it? What slithery language you have there, Joshua!

With reporters and opposition researchers crawling through Alaska...

Slithering....

... and with the McCain campaign having dispatched its own team of lawyers to re-vet Palin....

So now defending yourself in the face of attacks is "re-vetting"?

... Republicans are wondering what shoe might drop next.

The expression is "waiting for the other shoe to drop." People have 2 shoes. This is an expression to be used when one thing has happened in a context where you expect one more thing to happen. You live in an apartment and you hear, from upstairs, a shoe drop. You therefore conclude that your neighbor is taking off his shoes and rationally expect to hear the second shoe. There's no expression "what shoe might drop next." There's no rain of multiple shoes. There's no concept that if there's one shoe, there are probably a whole lot of other shoes out there.

Sorry, I got sidetracked. That just annoys me. The random intrusion of inapt shoe metaphors.

But yeah, so, obviously Green wants us to think that the Republicans upset about Sarah Palin. But who is pushing the Eagleton meme? Who wants her out?

You know, I remember the McGovern campaign. I was a big supporter of McGovern's, and I hated Nixon, as did all of my friends. And the scenario then was completely different from what you are seeing now. We were never excited about Eagleton in the first place. We just wanted McGovern to win. Eagleton didn't infuse new energy into the McGovern campaign or jazz up am important subset of voters. He was just some boring Senator that got slotted in. And then he brought nothing but trouble and distraction as the news came out that he'd been hospitalized for depression 3 times and had receive electroshock treatments. It wasn't just that there were a couple of old political controversies or a family member was less than perfect. We were getting significant new information about his brain, the brain that we might need to rely on to make presidential decisions. It was simply not acceptable, especially since he'd also withheld this information from McGovern, which showed some really poor character.

The Palin candidacy has virtually nothing in common with the Eagleton scenario, and the people who are saying it does are displaying their desperation. Obviously -- I'm not the first to say this -- if you want McCain to lose and you think she's so terrible, you should be happy to see Palin as the VP nominee. It will help defeat McCain.

Jeralyn Merritt is comparing Sarah Palin to McGovern's disastrous selection, Thomas Eagleton.

She's taking bets on what day Palin will drop out:

Did John McCain just repeat George McGovern's fatal mistake? How long will Palin stay on the ticket? Will McCain recover any better than McGovern?

It had nothing to do with Eagleton's particular problems, but how McGovern came to choose him, failed to adequately vet him, and then waffled when the problems arose, effectively costing him the election.

Eagleton cost him the election? McGovern lost by an awful lot. But, certainly Eagleton damaged him badly.

Anyway:

John McCain picked Sarah Palin to get the enthusiastic support of the evangelical, radical right. He didn't think it would matter that she has no national experience because he perceived he could argue Obama didn't either.

Or he thought it would work as a magnet for attacks that could be turned around onto Obama. But Merritt doesn't see it that way because:

Obama presented himself for 17 months to the American people, they heard him debate more than a dozen times, they made their own decision that he was ready for the job and the Democrats voted him their nominee.

Did they? I remember early excitement, among Democrats, followed by months of difficulty fighting back Hillary Clinton, who had let the nomination slip away by failing to do the math early on and to take the caucus states seriously enough. The Obama campaign figured out a clever strategy. Was this really the public vetting him? He pulled off a surprise early on, got some people very excited, and ultimately edged out the more qualified contender. How was that a decisive test? When the testing really got serious, Hillary surged. But it was too late.

Obama wasn't unilaterally appointed by a party's nominee in a transparent play for the evangelical and female vote. As if Sarah Palin could fill Hillary Clinton's shoes by virtue of her gender. As if women wouldn't see that Sarah Palin is the antithesis of Hillary Clinton on issues. As if anything would evoke Palin's lack of qualifications more than to compare them to Hillary's.

Yes, the VP selection process is different and more nearly unilateral. But the person chosen must be accepted by the Party, and the position is VP, where at least there will be some time for seasoning. And as for Hillary, Obama's qualifications looked weak next to hers and yet he won. Nor can you say that all of the support for her was because of her qualifications -- that weren't that strong -- and her policies -- they weren't all that popular. The fact is that she pushed the idea that she was a woman and she'd be the first woman President, and some people responded to that. For them, Obama's failure to pick her for VP -- or even to vet her -- is perhaps rather irksome. Meanwhile, Palin is something new and different, and disaffected, shunned women may feel the pull.

As I'm typing this, Obama is being interviewed by Anderson Cooper about Gustav. Anderson's last question was how he would answer those who say that Gov. Palin, as mayor of a small town and Gov. of Alaska, has more experience than he does. He didn't miss a beat. He smiled and said Palin's town of Wasilia, Alaska had 50 employees. His campaign has 2500. The town's budget is about $12 million a year. His budget is 3 times that per month. He cited the legislation he's passed on emergency management post-Katrina and that many recommendations he made were adopted and are being put in place as we speak.

It's true that Obama's biggest accomplishment is his success (thus far) in running a Presidential campaign. But isn't this a bit absurd? One qualifies to run for President by the very activity of running for President? I'm glad to hear that he smiled when he said that, because I don't think it's an argument you can make with a straight face.

"Because of a recent string of hurtful and absurd lies in a tabloid publication...."

We've gone over 200 comments on the Edwards post, which doesn't make it impossible to comment, but only makes the comments hard to find. (Click on "post a comment," scroll to the bottom of the page, then click on "newer" — ridiculous, no?) So this is another Edwards post. Carry on here.

Let's look at the statement published at Kos under the name of Elizabeth Edwards:

Our family has been through a lot. Some caused by nature, some caused by human weakness, and some – most recently – caused by the desire for sensationalism and profit without any regard for the human consequences. None of these has been easy. But we have stood with one another through them all. Although John believes he should stand alone and take the consequences of his action now, when the door closes behind him, he has his family waiting for him.

John made a terrible mistake in 2006. The fact that it is a mistake that many others have made before him did not make it any easier for me to hear when he told me what he had done. But he did tell me. And we began a long and painful process in 2006, a process oddly made somewhat easier with my diagnosis in March of 2007. This was our private matter, and I frankly wanted it to be private because as painful as it was I did not want to have to play it out on a public stage as well. Because of a recent string of hurtful and absurd lies in a tabloid publication, because of a picture falsely suggesting that John was spending time with a child it wrongly alleged he had fathered outside our marriage, our private matter could no longer be wholly private.

So he wasn't at the hotel with the child? Or he was there with the child that he didn't father? Blah. Did you watch him on "Nightline." I didn't. I never watch "Nightline."

UPDATE: A partial transcript of the "Nightline" interview. Excerpts:

[BOB] WOODRUFF:& How long did it last and when exactly did it end?

JOHN EDWARDS: [refuses to answer.]...

WOODRUFF: I know this is a very difficult question, but were you in love with [Rielle Hunter]?

EDWARDS: [Answers in the present tense that he is "in love with one woman," his wife Elizabeth. Woodruff doesn't figure out that he should insist on an answer to the question that was asked in the past tense.]

WOODRUFF: Your wife, Elizabeth, is probably the most admired and beloved person in this country, she's had enormous sympathy because she's also gone through cancer, how could you have done this?

Probably the most admired and beloved person in this country.... Where did that come from? Woodruff is a ninny. "How could you have done this?" is a pretty silly question anyway. Why doesn't he just slap Edwards in the face and shout "you beast!"? Edwards gives a long answer that boils down to the fact that he was selfish and egomaniacal — and running for VP can do that to a man.

Woodruff asks about the picture of Edwards holding the baby, and Edwards goes on about how he can't say what that picture is. Woodruff has the wit to ask him, "But are you saying you don't remember holding that child of Miss Hunter?" Edwards, tellingly, goes back to the photograph:

EDWARDS: I'm saying you asked me about this photograph, I don't know anything about that photograph, I don't know who that baby is. I don't know if the picture has been altered, manufactured, if it's a picture of me taken some other time, holding another baby -- I have no idea. I was not at this meeting holding a child for my photograph to be taken I can tell you that.

Pay attention here. He does not say he didn't hold the child. He only says he didn't pose for a photograph and is refusing to authenticate the photograph. This has a real smokescreen feeling to it that to me this suggests that he did hold the baby.

Woodruff follows up:

WOODRUFF: You did say you did meet her at a hotel in California.

EDWARDS: She was there, Mr. McGovern was present, and that's where the meeting took place.

WOODRUFF: But you don't remember a baby being there?

EDWARDS: No.

Finally, cornered, he says "no." A lie?

The Bob Dylan song that turned on Jimmy Carter is the one that Barack Obama calls a favorite.

I found it odd — and blogged about it here — that Barack Obama named "Maggie's Farm" as his favorite Bob Dylan song. So I sat up and took notice today, watching the movie "Gonzo" — the documentary about Hunter S. Thompson — when they got to the incident in 1974 when the idiosyncratic journalistic was sitting bored out of his skull trying to ignore a Jimmy Carter speech and this line got him all excited:

I grew up as a landowner's son. But I don't think I ever realized the proper interrelationship between the landowner and those who worked on a farm until I heard Dylan's record, "I Ain't Gonna Work on Maggie's Farm No More." So I come here speaking to you today about your subject with a base for my information founded on Reinhold Niebuhr and Bob Dylan.

In my old post I wondered why Obama had come up with "Maggie's Farm":

Do you believe "Maggie's Farm" is one of his favorites, or do you think they just tried to find a political song that had some appropriate rhetoric? The character in the song is perceiving what's wrong with the farm (the country) and is looking for a change.

A commenter over at Expecting Rain — a Dylan fan site — made the Obama connection too:

Hunter Thompson covered the 72 campaign and championed McGovern. After McGovern dropped the ball by choosing that sweaty Eagleton guy for his running mate, Thompson was disillusioned for years until he saw Jimmy Carter make an early campaign speech to Ted Kennedy and a bunch of lawyers, brazenly criticizing the American legal system.

Thompson was rejuvenated. In the speech, Carter quoted a Dylan song, Maggie's Farm, which Obama is citing now. Maggie's Farm is a metaphor for transcending the political system. Dylan plugged in and played it for the acoustic folkies at Newport Folk Festival to say, "I'm not a symbol of the right or the left, I just want to rock and roll."

I don't know whether this means Obama and Carter are soulmates or Obama is cribbing from Carter's playlist or Obama reads Hunter S. Thompson or it's well known among Democratic campaign advisors that you can push some useful buttons by invoking "Maggie's Farm" or what. I'm just noting the linkage.

And I wanted to tell you I saw the movie "Gonzo." Watch the trailer. You will get an accurate impression of the film from this:



It was a bit long and rambling, but a pretty good documentary about a very interesting writer and his wild life and times. Recommended if you like documentaries and can deal with some heavy-handed comparison of Bush to Nixon and Iraq to Vietnam.

IN THE COMMENTS: Palladian writes:

Just once I'd love to hear a politician who would say something like:

"You know, I don't think I've been the same since I heard the 14th unfinished fugue of J.S. Bach's "Art of the Fugue", specifically the point where Bach inserts as a countersubject the notes corresponding to the letters of his own name. It was that moment that I felt a profound connection between humanity and the universe, between numbers and metaphysics. It was that moment, listening to the ailing old Bach's assertion of his selfhood, coded into his own complex and beautiful system, that I felt truly alive and driven to spend my life devoted to the advancement of civilization and humanity."

But no. It's "Maggie's Farm". Fleetwood Mac. Wyclef Jean. You can't be elected if you actually like music anymore.

George Carlin died.

What a terrible loss. You know I thought he was the best living comedian. We were just talking about that here — last April. I've loved him since the 1970s. There are decades-old routines that spring to mind immediately as the most brilliant comic riffs I've ever heard — the one about all our "stuff" and the comparison between football and baseball (and golf).

"That's the whole meaning of life: trying to find a place for your stuff."



And here's the football/baseball one:



When someone dies, maybe you think about religion and the afterlife. Here's what George Carlin thought of such things:



Now, George Carlin has a special place among comedians because he's got a Supreme Court case about him — FCC v. Pacifica Foundation. You can read the case, and you can watch his 7 Dirty Words routine:



He elaborated on that over the years:



The text of the Supreme Court case includes the FCC's transcript of the version that got played on the radio:

The big one, the word fuck that's the one that hangs them up the most. [']Cause in a lot of cases that's the very act that hangs them up the most. So, it's natural that the word would, uh, have the same effect. It's a great word, fuck, nice word, easy word, cute word, kind of. Easy word to say. One syllable, short u. (laughter) Fuck. (Murmur) You know, it's easy. Starts with a nice soft sound fuh ends with a kuh. Right? (laughter) A little something for everyone. Fuck (laughter) Good word. Kind of a proud word, too. Who are you? I am FUCK. (laughter) FUCK OF THE MOUNTAIN. (laughter) Tune in again next week to FUCK OF THE MOUNTAIN. (laughter) It's an interesting word too, [']cause it's got a double kind of a life - personality - dual, you know, whatever the right phrase is. It leads a double life, the word fuck. First of all, it means, sometimes, most of the time, fuck. What does it mean? It means to make love. Right? We're going to make love, yeh, we're going to fuck, yeh, we're going to fuck, yeh, we're going to make love. (laughter) we're really going to fuck, yeh, we're going to make love. Right? And it also means the beginning of life, it's the act that begins life, so there's the word hanging around with words like love, and life, and yet on the other hand, it's also a word that we really use to hurt each other with, man. It's a heavy. It's one that you have toward the end of the argument. (laughter) Right? (laughter) You finally can't make out. Oh, fuck you man. I said, fuck you. (laughter, murmur) Stupid fuck. (laughter) Fuck you and everybody that looks like you. (laughter) man. It would be nice to change the movies that we already have and substitute the word fuck for the word kill, wherever we could, and some of those movie cliches would change a little bit. Madfuckers still on the loose. Stop me before I fuck again. Fuck the ump, fuck the ump, fuck the ump, fuck the ump, fuck the ump. Easy on the clutch Bill, you'll fuck that engine again.

Hey, I love the "[']." Try to do a Carlinesque riff on [']. Not easy, is it?

And God bless Justice Brennan, who dissented in Pacifica:

My Brother STEVENS, in reaching a result apologetically described as narrow, ante, at 750, takes comfort in his observation that "[a] requirement that indecent language be avoided will have its primary effect on the form, rather than the content, of serious communication," ante, at 743 n. 18, and finds solace in his conviction that "[t]here are few, if any, thoughts that cannot be expressed by the use of less offensive language." Ibid. The idea that the content of a message and its potential impact on any who might receive it can be divorced from the words that are the vehicle for its expression is transparently fallacious. A given word may have a unique capacity to capsule an idea, evoke an emotion, or conjure up an image. Indeed, for those of us who place an appropriately high value on our cherished First Amendment rights, the word "censor" is such a word. Mr. Justice Harlan, speaking for the Court, recognized the truism that a speaker's choice of words cannot surgically be separated from the ideas he desires to express when he warned that "we cannot indulge the facile assumption that one can forbid particular words without also running a substantial risk of suppressing ideas in the process." Cohen v. California, 403 U.S., at 26.

They don't write them like that anymore. They don't even say "My Brother Stevens" anymore. They couldn't bring themselves to say "My Sister O'Connor," I guess, so they had to stop saying "My Brother Stevens."

Was Carlin political? Here's what he said back in 2004 when Tim Russert (of all people) asked him "Do you vote?":

No, I don't. No. I voted up to McGovern. I feel, actually, a little purer, a little more detached emotionally from it. I really have no stake. If you dropped me from an airplane, I would come down left of center, because I believe more in humans than I do in property. But in terms of the minor machinations and the way they put these things together, I've no interest.

He was on Russert's show promoting his book "When Will Jesus Bring the Pork Chops?" On the longest 1-day solo drive I ever took — from Austin, Texas to Madison, Wisconsin — I listened to Carlin read "When Will Jesus Bring the Pork Chops?"

I have a problem with the Ten Commandments. Here it is: Why are there ten? We don't need that many. I think the list of commandments was deliberately and artificially inflated to get it up to ten. It's clearly a padded list...

When these guys were sittin' around the tent makin' all this up, why did they pick ten? Why ten? Why not nine, or eleven? I'll tell you why. Because ten sounds important. Ten sounds official. They knew if they tried eleven, people wouldn't take them seriously. People would say, "What're you kiddin' me? The Eleven Commandments? Get the fuck outta here!"

I'm really sorry to see this man go. He worked long and hard so many years, making us laugh, bringing us enlightenment:

Mr. Carlin is constantly scribbling notions down in a notebook or recording them on a small voice recorder, and he spends most of his time typing, organizing and reorganizing his ideas in a library of 2,300 files he keeps on his computer — raw material he may someday forge into actual jokes, monologues or material for his books. And as soon as he has recorded a new HBO routine, he begins cycling in fresh material, so that over the course of two years, his entire routine is replaced, and he's ready to record another.

"It's like a sock," Mr. Carlin said. "I darn the sock so much that none of the original material is left. It's the same sock — it's my show — but the old material is gone."

"I have no hobbies and I have no leisure activities," Mr. Carlin added. "My greatest joy is working at the computer with my ideas."

RIP.

"The Next McGovern."

John B. Judis frets:

[I]f you look at Obama's vote in Pennsylvania, you begin to see the outlines of the old George McGovern coalition that haunted the Democrats during the '70s and '80s, led by college students and minorities. In Pennsylvania, Obama did best in college towns (60 to 40 percent in Penn State's Centre County) and in heavily black areas like Philadelphia.

Its ideology is very liberal. Whereas in the first primaries and caucuses, Obama benefited from being seen as middle-of-the-road or even conservative, he is now receiving his strongest support from voters who see themselves as "very liberal." In Pennsylvania, he defeated Clinton among "very liberal" voters by 55 to 45 percent, but lost "somewhat conservative" voters by 53 to 47 percent and moderates by 60 to 40 percent. In Wisconsin and Virginia, by contrast, he had done best against Clinton among voters who saw themselves as moderate or somewhat conservative.

Do you think it's odd that "somewhat conservative" voters are more inclined to vote for Obama than moderates? It doesn't really fit Judis's "Next McGovern" theory.

The primaries, unfortunately, are not going to get any easier for Obama. While he should win easily in North Carolina, where he benefits from a large African-American vote and support in the state's college communities, he is going to have trouble in Indiana, Kentucky, and West Virginia, where he will once again be faced by a large white working class vote.... [I]f Obama doesn't find a way now to speak to these voters, he is going to have trouble winning that large swath of states from Pennsylvania through Missouri in which a Democrat must do well to gain the presidency.

"Republicans are out to crush Barack by painting him as a leftwinger..."

Headlines the TimesOnline. The text of the article features these quotes from Grover Norquist and Newt Gingrich:

Grover Norquist, an influential conservative tax reform lobbyist, said: “Barack Obama has been able to create his own image and introduce himself to voters, but the swing voters in a general election are not paying attention yet. He is open to being defined as a leftwing, corrupt Chicago politician."...

Newt Gingrich, the former Speaker of the House and Republican guru, recently described Obama as the “most leftwing candidate to run since George McGovern”...

This article is collecting a lot of blog links. Firedoglake is just laughing at the lameness of those 2 geezers saying what they always say about Democrats. Buck Naked Politics also thinks the part about leftiness is the same old thing, but frets about the ticking time bomb that is the Rezko real estate deal. But in the rightosphere, they're perceiving Hillary Clinton's fingerprints all over this. Protein Wisdom writes:

Bob “The Prince of Darkness” Novak reports:

Strategists for Sen. Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign believe it is imperative to identify her high-flying opponent, Sen. Barack Obama, with the “McGovern wing” of the Democratic Party — but they want to keep their candidate’s fingerprints off the attack.

Presumably, leaking it to Novak would be considered counter-productive to that sort of secrecy.

Now that her cover is blown, perhaps Clinton ought to be more overt about comparing Obama to McGovern.

She can say that the Right is going [here, Protein Wisdon links to the same TimesOnline article] to compare Obama to McGovern — and the Clintons cut their teeth in national politics working for the McGovern campaign — which compels her to raise the subject.

She knows better than most the story of how Edmund Muskie was the “inevitable” nominee in 1972, only to have the more anti-war McGovern campaign surge past Muskie to capture the Democratic nomination. She can talk about how McGovern did this by winning caucuses in normally Republican states — just like her good friend Barack is doing now....

She could point out that nominating the most dovish candidate, even during an unpopular war, generally does not win elections....

Aptly put.

Anyway, how big of a lefty is Barack Obama? I know there's this theory he's whatever you want him to be:

"I would like today to announce a tentative decision — I’m still thinking about it — to endorse Barack Obama,” [Rush Limbaugh] said, his head cocked slightly toward his 18-karat-gold-plated microphone, his hands spread wide like the wings of his sleek G4 jet.

Mr. Limbaugh then listed nearly a dozen qualities he said he found admirable in Mr. Obama. “Barack Obama is pro-life,” he began. “Barack Obama is a tax-cutter extraordinaire.”

If neither statement was descriptive of Mr. Obama, a liberal Democrat, nor was there much hope for what followed. “Barack Obama will establish a college football playoff, once and for all,” Mr. Limbaugh said. “Barack Obama will offer free-beer Fridays.”

His point, Mr. Limbaugh said, was that Mr. Obama represented “a blank canvas upon which anyone can project their fantasies and desires.”

But — and you know I'm trying to write a post called "Why I'm voting for Barack Obama in the Wisconsin primary" — I'm thinking he's less of a lefty ideologue — less left and less ideologue — than Hillary Clinton. So I focused on this part of the TimesOnline article, close to the bottom:

... Obama’s chief economics adviser, Austan Gools-bee, a professor at the University of Chicago, is a supporter of the free market. Obama has also been endorsed by Paul Volcker, the former chairman of the Federal Reserve.

Robert Wolf, the chief executive of UBS Americas, the financial group, is a big donor. “When I sat down with him, I found him to be unbelievably refreshing and smart and thoughtful,” he said.

Am I just projecting? "Refreshing and smart and thoughtful" resonates with me.

Come on, everybody, pay attention to Wisconsin.

Ours — on the 19th — is the next big primary. The Cap Times marshals the historical evidence of the importance of the Wisconsin primary:

• As upstart contender Franklin Roosevelt did when he beat previous party nominee Al Smith in the 1932 Wisconsin Democratic primary.
• As Willkie did with his audacious but failed 1944 bid.
• As backers of Gen. Douglas MacArthur did when they tried unsuccessfully to build a boomlet for the Milwaukee native with an unsuccessful Republican primary bid in 1948.
• As backers of Dwight Eisenhower did when they upset the campaign of conservative Robert Taft in the state and created an opening for the general to enter the contest for the Republican nomination of 1952.
• As Massachusetts Sen. John Kennedy did when the state put him on track for the party nod in 1960.
• As Minnesota Sen. Eugene McCarthy did when his anti-Vietnam War challenge to President Lyndon Johnson forced the incumbent to quit on the eve of Wisconsin's 1968 Democratic primary.
• As South Dakota Sen. George McGovern did when the state gave him a critical Democratic primary win in 1972.
• As liberal Mo Udall did when he narrowly failed to derail Jimmy Carter's bandwagon in the Wisconsin Democratic primary of 1976.
• As liberal John Anderson and moderate George H.W. Bush did when they tried to block conservative Ronald Reagan's candidacy in the intense Republican primary of 1980.
• As Mike Dukakis and Jesse Jackson did when they fought the essential battle of the 1988 Democratic nomination race in Wisconsin.
• As Bill Clinton did when he used a slim win in the state to prevent challenger Jerry Brown from threatening his "comeback kid" status in the campaign for the 1992 Democratic nomination.

If you need something to fill your empty hours as you wait for the 19th, may I recommend the documentary "Primary," which shows John F. Kennedy campaigning here in Wisconsin in 1960, fighting off his rival Hubert Humphrey. This is a very low key but highly-regarded film by Robert Drew. It's nowhere near as fun as "The War Room" and "Journeys with George," but it's specifically about a primary, and it takes place in Wisconsin and it's got John F. Kennedy.

ADDED: A test to see if you know your blogger: Is Althouse voting in the Wisconsin primary? If so, will she choose to vote in the Republican or the Democratic primary? If she votes in the Republican primary, who will she vote for? If she votes in the Democratic primary, who will she vote for?

AND: Another question. Assume you're a filmmaker, making a documentary about one of the candidates in the 2008 election season. Which one do you wish you'd picked? That is, knowing what you know now, which campaign would have yielded up the footage for your idea of the best documentary?

Why were the polls so wrong? Did people lie about voting for Obama?

Was it "the Bradley effect"?

ADDED: Mickey Kaus considers the Bradley effect + 3 other theories:

2. Lazio Effect. No ganging up on the girl! First, Edwards turns on her in the debate. Then Obama says she's merely "likeable enough." Then the press disparages her anger, mocks her campaign and gloats over its troubles. They made her cry! And then that mean macho John Edwards goes and says the crying makes her unfit to be president...

And she was also mocked — I heard it on Rush Limbaugh — for trying to get the Lazio effect going. Which would be a veritable Lazio vortex.

3. Feiler/Skurnik Effect: ... The familiar Feiler Faster Thesis holds that voters are comfortable processing information at the vastly increased speed it can come at them. Jerry Skurnik's "Two Electorate" theory holds that voters who don't follow politics are much less informed than they used to be, which causes polls to shift rapidly when they do inform themselves. Put these two together...

The Feiler/Skurnik Effect magnifies the significance of any events that occur in the final day or two of the campaign.

If this theory is true — or even if the campaigns think it's true — look out! (Good for blogging, though.)

4) The Congestion Alert Effect: I remember when the Southern California transportation authorities installed a state-of-the-art series of electronic signs alongside the freeways to give motorists instantaneous warnings of traffic delays. The signs don't do that any more. Why? It turned out that when you warned drivers of congestion on Route A, they all took Route B, leading the latter to become congested instead of the former. Similarly, independent voters in N.H. were told by the press that the Democratic race was a done deal--so they voted in the closer, more exciting Republican race....

A primary is not an election, so this kind of funny business is always part of the mix. I remember when my father voted for McGovern. He was damned pleased about it and assured me that's what everyone was doing. And here's the final electoral map for 1972. I was crushed. How dishonest!

“If had it to do over again, I’d have kept him. I didn’t know anything about mental illness. Nobody did.”

Said George McGovern last year, referring to his rejection of Tom Eagleton back in 1972 -- when supposedly no one knew a damned thing. McGovern chose Eagleton as his running mate after Eagleton had assured McGovern's aide Frank Mankiewicz that he had nothing unusual in his background:

He did not tell Mr. Mankiewicz that he had been hospitalized three times for depression and that his treatment had twice involved electroshock therapy.

But rumors began circulating among politicians and journalists. Mr. Eagleton ultimately held a news conference on July 25 in Custer, S.D., where he had just briefed the vacationing Mr. McGovern over breakfast. Mr. Eagleton told reporters that he had been treated for “nervous exhaustion.” But in response to questions, he acknowledged that the treatment had included psychiatric counseling and electric shocks.

That day Mr. McGovern said, “I think Tom Eagleton is fully qualified in mind, body and spirit to be the vice president of the United States and, if necessary, to take on the presidency on a moment’s notice.” A few days later, as objections to Mr. Eagleton began to mount, Mr. McGovern insisted that he was “1,000 percent for Tom Eagleton.”

But the pressure from party leaders, campaign contributors and members of McGovern’s own staff was unrelenting. On July 31, the candidates met again, this time in Washington, and Mr. McGovern forced him to withdraw. Mr. Eagleton stepped down after 18 days as the nominee, saying he had done so for the sake of “party unity.”

R.I.P. Thomas P. Eagleton.

Clearly, it was Eagleton who made the mistake. Even today, do we really know so much more about mental illness? And, if we do, would we say that someone who had been hospitalized three times for depression should be Vice President? It seems to me that McGovern would have rejected him if he'd known, as would any other competent presidential candidate then or now, and Eagleton's failure to disclose that information to Mankiewicz was an entirely separate reason to reject him. It was horrible when McGovern said "1,000 percent" and then got rid of him, but the biggest mistake there was saying "1,000 percent" instead of figuring out what to do quickly and accomplishing it diplomatically. Why does McGovern now say that he should have kept him? It must just be that he doesn't like his name associated with hostility toward persons with mental illness. Why not be kind and compassionate now that nothing is at stake?

It's me and Mark Schmitt...

...on Bloggingheads! Topics:

Ann's rock-star aura of coolness

Mark wants outrage over income inequality

Hillary Clinton calculates a central position

Those impulsive, irrational women

How Obama has entered our space and organized our thoughts

Who wants to join the peace march? Not Mark and certainly not Ann

How George McGovern made us fat

Nutritionism, the ideology that has replaced food.

Michael Pollan writes about how we got so twisted up about nourishing ourselves (as opposed to eating). He pinpoints the start of the problem. In 1977, a Senate Select Committee on Nutrition -- led by George McGovern -- told people to cut down on red meat and dairy products, then, caving to pressure from the red meat and dairy industries, revised the advice to: "Choose meats, poultry and fish that will reduce saturated-fat intake."

A subtle change in emphasis, you might say, but a world of difference just the same. First, the stark message to "eat less" of a particular food has been deep-sixed; don’t look for it ever again in any official U.S. dietary pronouncement. Second, notice how distinctions between entities as different as fish and beef and chicken have collapsed; those three venerable foods, each representing an entirely different taxonomic class, are now lumped together as delivery systems for a single nutrient. Notice too how the new language exonerates the foods themselves; now the culprit is an obscure, invisible, tasteless — and politically unconnected — substance that may or may not lurk in them called "saturated fat."

Pollan adds that the head of the Committee, George McGovern lost his next Senate election:

[T]he beef lobby helped rusticate the three-term senator, sending an unmistakable warning to anyone who would challenge the American diet, and in particular the big chunk of animal protein sitting in the middle of its plate. Henceforth, government dietary guidelines would shun plain talk about whole foods, each of which has its trade association on Capitol Hill, and would instead arrive clothed in scientific euphemism and speaking of nutrients, entities that few Americans really understood but that lack powerful lobbies in Washington. This was precisely the tack taken by the National Academy of Sciences when it issued its landmark report on diet and cancer in 1982. Organized nutrient by nutrient in a way guaranteed to offend no food group, it codified the official new dietary language. Industry and media followed suit, and terms like polyunsaturated, cholesterol, monounsaturated, carbohydrate, fiber, polyphenols, amino acids and carotenes soon colonized much of the cultural space previously occupied by the tangible substance formerly known as food. The Age of Nutritionism had arrived.

Did you know the politics of why we're so fat and sickly? It's McGovern's fault! Everyone started scarfing down Snackwell’s and pasta. Later, reacting to that disaster, everyone freaked out about carbohydrates and went on the Atkins diet.

By framing dietary advice in terms of good and bad nutrients, and by burying the recommendation that we should eat less of any particular food, it was easy for the take-home message of the 1977 and 1982 dietary guidelines to be simplified as follows: Eat more low-fat foods. And that is what we did. We’re always happy to receive a dispensation to eat more of something (with the possible exception of oat bran), and one of the things nutritionism reliably gives us is some such dispensation: low-fat cookies then, low-carb beer now.

In the end, the advice is to eat real food and to eat less. Actually, he's got 9 points of advice at the end -- well worth reading -- but it's mainly eat real food and eat less.

***

Interesting idea: "the Okinawans practiced a principle they called 'Hara Hachi Bu': eat until you are 80 percent full." Funny! I don't think Americans could even grasp the concept of identifying the 80 percent point. It's hard enough for us to notice the point at which we are full. We don't even know how to be put off by the gross portions that are set down in front of us in restaurants.

When I go to steakhouses here in Madison, I always order the smallest size -- "petite" -- and it's 6 ounces. I never want to eat the whole thing, and then I feel silly bringing home a 3 ounce portion. But, you know, 3 ounces is considered -- by some official standard -- to be one portion of meat. So I go to a restaurant, order the dinky size, and it's a double portion. It's very hard to develop common sense about how much to eat under such conditions. If you pay $30 for a steak, you don't want to leave $15 worth of it! You push yourself to eat even though you aren't hungry, and it becomes second nature.

George McGovern voted for Gerald Ford.

I wonder if Ford ever knew. And what exactly was it about Jimmy Carter that rubbed him the wrong way?

"Our long national nightmare is over."

I woke up to the long-familiar words in the familar voice of our long-lived former President, Gerald Ford. NPR was reporting what I already knew -- someone knocked on my door to tell me in the middle of the night -- Ford had died. He was 93.

I liked him. I voted for him, even though I'd voted for George McGovern four years earlier. He had the distinction of being President without ever having been elected President or Vice President, which was one of the things I liked about him. Lacking a national vote had to mean he didn't deserve to be President, especially since the constitutional process by which he became President involved appointment by a man -- Richard Nixon -- who was disgraced into resignation (soon after the Vice President slot opened because Spiro Agnew was disgraced into resignation). What I liked was the fact that he hadn't presumed to seek the presidency. I have always instinctively resented anyone who thinks he should be President, and that has the overwhelming tendency to include everyone who ever runs.

I was all set to vote for Jimmy Carter in 1976. I'd voted for Carter in the New York primary when he was still a face in a crowd of candidates. But the day before the election, I saw a TV interview in which a reporter asked Carter what he would do if he didn't win. He said he'd go back to his peanut farm. This answer -- does it seem innocuous to you? -- gnawed at me overnight, and, as I was walking to my polling place, I sat down to talk about it with someone who was also planning to vote for Carter, and the two of us changed our vote to Ford. It wasn't so much Ford. It was Carter. I'd decided he was a small man. He didn't fit the Presidency. Did Ford? But Ford was already President. In truth, no one deserves to be President. But Ford did not select himself as President. He had only selected himself to represent one legislative district. I found that appealing.

When Ford became President, I was living in New York City. I wanted to be an artist -- I was presumptuous enough to select myself for that -- but I was working at a day job in a market research firm, doing a job that consisted of reading and classifying the articles in magazines. I remember the cover of Newsweek -- or was it Time? -- when Ford came in. It was a cartoon of Ford in the Oval Office with housecleaning implements -- maybe a feather duster and a vacuum cleaner, perhaps with extra hands and even more implements. There was an article inside about how the cartoonists -- so used to Nixon -- were going to draw Ford. Nixon offered the cartoonist such rich material. Now what were they going to do? Ford looked so normal. And he didn't mean anything to anyone yet. Nixon not only looked weird, he had come to mean so much over the past two decades, and the meaning seemed to burst out of those weird features. We had been talking about his weird features in connection with his character traits for so long. Shifty eyes! Five-o-clock shadow! Ski-jump nose! One cartoonist cited a general principle of cartooning: You have to decide on one feature to exaggerate. Trying to decide on the spot, he said -- maybe this is verbatim: It looks like his chin is giving birth to a golf ball.

I remember watching the speech in which President Ford pardoned Nixon, and I remember thinking -- before I heard all the indignant outcry from my friends -- that he was doing the right thing. I believed his asserted reason: Let it be over. Let's not drag ourselves through the further torment of a criminal prosecution of the man. Let's not dwell on the past. Let's look to the future. He was right about that, wasn't he? Did he throw away his chance in 1976 because he pardoned the man who made him President? I knew a lot of people who considered that unforgivable. They needed to get even farther from Nixon than Ford could take them.

Stuart Spencer, his campaign manager, said that polling data about the pardon had made it clear that “it cost him the election.” He said 7 percent of Republicans had either voted for Mr. Carter or stayed home because of the pardon, and it hurt with Democrats and independents, too.

The NYT obituary (linked above) has this quote:

"It was an hour in our history that troubled our minds and tore at our hearts," he said. "Anger and hatred had risen to dangerous levels, dividing friends and families. The polarization of our political order had aroused unworthy passions of reprisal and revenge. Our governmental system was closer to stalemate than at any time since Abraham Lincoln took that same oath of office."

We might do well to think about that today.

It's a long obituary. There was that Daily News headline: "Ford to City: Drop Dead." I remember seeing that on the stands.

As president, he was quick to assert to Congress, in a play on words that nobody misunderstood, “I am a Ford, not a Lincoln.” If it was true, as was often said, that the Oval Office shaped the occupant, Mr. Ford resisted the temptation of the imperial. On an early trip as president to South Korea, he called American enlisted men “sir.” His prose was so pedestrian and his tongue so unreliable — he referred on one public occasion to the noble American “work ethnic” and on another to the disease of “sickle-cell Armenia” — that he became a favorite target of comedians.

(And then Jimmy Carter replaced him and went around saying "nucular" and got terrorized by a swimming rabbit. Everything was terrible but funny in the 70s.)

John Hersey, after spending a week in close observation of [President Ford] wrote in The New York Times Magazine of April 20, 1975: “What is it in him?”

“Is it an inability to extend compassion far beyond the faces directly in view?” Mr. Hersey wrote. “Is it a failure of imagination? Is it something obdurate he was born with, alongside the energy and serenity?”

The answer seemed to be a belief — one Mr. Ford was schooled in if not born with — in the essential dignity of human struggle. “Everything didn’t turn to gold just because I did it,” he remarked. “I had this foundation, and I had been brought up with the training that — and this is an oversimplification, but I think it’s indicative — the harder you work, the luckier you are. And whether it was in such things as the Boy Scouts or athletics or academics, I worked like hell.”

There were those who contended, as did Richard Reeves, the author of a critical biography, that Mr. Ford had a “tragic gap” in his understanding of such crucial matters as the Vietnam War and the Watergate scandal. More common was the assessment of Mr. Ford as “innately decent.”

Mr. Ford disputed the notion that it required forceful, even harsh, character to meet the tests of the White House. He was asked once if a nice guy should be president, and answered: “Those who allege that you’ve got to be a mean, sinister, devious person to be president are just dead wrong. I don’t see how a president in his conscience could be that.”

He, too, could be forceful. He resented the accident of fate that had made him president as the nation watched South Vietnam and Cambodia — where so much of America’s human and economic treasure had been spent by three predecessors — fall to the Communists in 1975. Rebuffed by Congress when he sought a last-minute $972 million in aid to Saigon, Mr. Ford made it possible for 130,000 or more refugees to come to the United States.

When the Cambodian Communists seized the American merchant ship Mayaqüez in May 1975, Mr. Ford reacted with uncharacteristic emotion, sending United States military forces to recapture the ship.

The order was motivated in part by concern for national image. “We had just pulled out of Vietnam, out of Cambodia,” Mr. Ford said later, “and here the United States was being challenged by a group of leaders who were bandits and outlaws, in my opinion, and I think their subsequent record has pretty well proved it. And it was an emotional decision to tell the Defense Department we had to go in there and do something.”

Mr. Ford’s economic policies were traditional for Republican conservatives. He proclaimed, amid considerable White House ballyhoo, a campaign to “Whip Inflation Now,” complete with “WIN” buttons. Scarcely had it begun than mounting joblessness and the worst recession since the 1930s caused Mr. Ford to abandon the anti-inflation program and propose tax cuts to stimulate the economy instead of tax increases to dampen it.

Congress, meanwhile, reflected its dominance by the Democratic Party in a steadily increasing number of spending programs and expansion of the federal deficit.

"Whip Inflation Now"... how we mocked him for that... for everything. At least the NYT obituary spares him the mention of the name of Chevy Chase, who in the early days of "Saturday Night Live" ridiculed him by doing little that had anything to do with him. Chase just acted like an idiot and took endless pratfalls.

We even laughed at the two assassination attempts:

On one of those trips, to Sacramento on Sept. 5, he narrowly escaped an assassination attempt by Lynette (Squeaky) Fromme, who had been a follower of the convicted killer Charles Manson. Mr. Ford was moving through a crowd in Capitol Park, shaking hands and waving, when a Secret Service agent saw Ms. Fromme’s arm and the pistol. She was subdued, and it turned out that while the gun was loaded there was no bullet in the chamber. She was convicted of attempted murder and sentenced to life in prison.

The other attempt, by Sara Jane Moore, took place in San Francisco. A former Marine, Oliver W. Sipple, knocked a pistol out of Ms. Moore’s hand as she fired.

These were only absurd because they failed. Gerald Ford went on to live to be very old, mostly out of our view. And now he's gone. R.I.P.