As Steve notes, Joe Biden can’t even handle his cue cards and calls to dump the Delaware Democrat are surging by the day. That recalls events from the summer of 1972, another crucial election year.
The incumbent president was Richard Nixon, hated by the left for his role in exposing Stalinist spy Alger Hiss (see Perjury: The Hiss-Chambers Case). In 1972, the Soviet Union still controlled Eastern Europe under the Brezhnev Doctrine. For the American left, defense of the USSR was the primary task and in 1972 they had the candidate they wanted.
After WWII, George McGovern opposed President Truman’s “aggressive anti-Soviet policy,” which he considered “dangerous.” In 1948 McGovern supported Henry Wallace and the Progressive Party, a front for the Communist Party. In 1972, McGovern’s position on “arms control” was essentially the same as the Soviets. America is to blame for the Cold War, McGovern believed, so the Soviets must arm and America must limit.
Nixon retained vice president Spiro Agnew, former governor of Maryland. McGovern picked Sen. Thomas Eagleton, a Harvard law grad and devout Catholic who opposed abortion and the war in Vietnam. McGovern backed Eagleton “1000 percent,” but then came an anonymous call.
On three occasions during the 1960s, Eagleton had been hospitalized for depression and undergone electroshock treatment. After only 18 days, McGovern dumped Eagleton for Eunice Kennedy’s husband Sargent Shriver, who had never run for office. Nixon bagged 60.7 percent of the popular vote to McGovern’s 37.5 and in the electoral college Nixon topped McGovern 520-17. The South Dakota Democrat carried only Massachusetts and the District of Columbia.
“McGovern would have lost anyway to an incumbent Nixon,” notes Victor Davis Hanson, “but the margin of defeat in one of the greatest landslides in presidential history was often attributable to the sheer chaos of changing a vice presidential candidate so late in the campaign.”
In 2024, with chaos on every hand, Democrats seek to dump the addled Biden. As this plays out, Kamala Harris proves capable of rivaling Biden in sheer incoherence. As Trump likes to say, we’ll have to see what happens.
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