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Democrats are beginning to realize that, for the time being, the history of the 2020 elections is likely to end with the election of Joe Biden to the presidency.
It's far from saying that Biden is a sure thing. The first in the group have a good chance of becoming the party's presidential candidate, as Hillary Clinton did four years ago. But Democrats can rely on their own past to find a legendary example of a favorite who was perceived as a "moderate" consensual candidate who fell into flames.
This happened during the tumultuous elections of 1972, when Richard Nixon was a candidate for reelection. It seemed beatable, thanks to a weakened economy, accusations of corruption (though the Watergate scandal did not begin to make headlines) and persistent civil unrest. On the other hand, Nixon had important achievements in foreign policy: he ended the war in Vietnam and opened diplomacy with China, which would lead to his famous handshake with Mao Zedong.
In the year leading up to the election, Senator Edmund Muskie of Maine – a laconic and harmless general public democrat who had been Hubert Humphrey's vice-presidential candidate in the 1968 election – was conducted most of the primary polls and tended to fight Nixon one-on-one. confrontations. Muskie was considered acceptable by most factions of the Democratic Party, with the exception of the far left: he was liberal but not radical; he favored the end of the war in Vietnam but was a convinced anti-communist. His nomination seemed assured and a victory over Nixon was at least plausible. Muskie became the next president.
According to election sources, they all moved quickly south after Muskie was perceived as crying while talking to reporters on a snowy day in New Hampshire. This incident could be described as an artefact of that era, of heteronormative expectations or the thirst for media sensationalism, but none of it says anything. As noted by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Theodore H. White, "The Making of the President – 1972" was the emergence of George McGovern.
A bomber pilot who became a South Dakota "grassland populist" senator, McGovern vehemently opposed the Vietnam War and inspired a broad, passionate, grassroots movement of the left that snatched the bid for Muskie and took control of the Democratic Party. It's not that Muskie has lost; McGovern won. He put forward an ambitious platform of social justice at home and military de-escalation abroad that was more convincing for Democratic primary voters than Muskie's argument that he was the most likely gambler. sure to beat Nixon.
Much of the democratic establishment despised McGovern, including the leaders of major unions and political machines in big cities. Humphrey was slow to embark on the primary campaign to try to stop him, but when that did not work, party leaders tried to convince congress delegates to pick somebody up. # 39; other. McGovern won the nomination after a series of protracted fights – and made his acceptance speech at 3 am, when most viewers were asleep. The end of history is well known: Nixon got 61% of the vote and 49 member states in one of the largest electoral landslides ever recorded.
There is one lesson here, and not the most superficial one, that the Democrats should have chosen Muskie because McGovern was too far left to win a general election. In fact, neither Muskie nor McGovern understood their political strengths and weaknesses, nor what the Democratic Party needed during this election year.
Muskie did not realize that even if the Democrats wanted to win, they were also eager for a candidate they could believe in. McGovern was not an opponent of Nixon's "dirty tricks" campaign and allowed his opponent to shape the story of the election, which was McGovern was a dangerous radical that could not be trusted . He made a lot of noise with his unfortunate choice of Vice President, Senator Thomas Eagleton of Missouri, who turned out to have a history of serious mental illness. Eagleton was removed from the bill a few weeks after the Democratic Congress, a catastrophic blunder that probably sealed McGovern's fate. In the end, Nixon wiped it off the map, not because McGovern's political ideas were bad, but because he had lost control of his own story.
This is the real lesson of 1972 that Democrats must learn in 2020, whether they choose the modern version of Muskie (which would be Biden) or one of the two McGovern progressives, Elizabeth Warren. and Bernie Sanders. (Or someone else.)
If Biden wants to apply this lesson, he should pay attention to a recent chronicle of a conservative Republican, believe it or not. John Podhoretz, a former speechwriter for Ronald Reagan and George HW Bush, recently observed in the New York Post that the press "went crazy" after a single poll showing Biden statistically, even with Sanders and Warren, after months of survey clearly showing that Biden was clearly ahead.
Podhoretz then mocked Sanders, Warren and other less likely alternatives, but then went on to say: "Joe Biden is leading the national rankings with an average of about 10 points in the poll. He is leading in the first four states – Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada and South Carolina. "Podhoretz concluded that Biden had been making these uninterrupted remarks since at least April, and this is not the kind of reporters and dramatic editors. "It's boring, but it's the story, the other stories are not stories, they are acts of desperate fulfillment of wishes."
I do not share Podhoretz's policy nor his contemptuous attitude towards non-Biden candidates, but he is right on two important points: if the status quo is maintained until 2020, Biden will get the nomination because his current story concerns a candidate on the alert. to win – not just the nomination of course, but to defeat Donald Trump next year. Most polls consistently show that Biden beats Trump with large margins, usually larger than any other major democrat. This is the strategy of Ed Muskie, which could have ended, with some slight historical changes, with Muskie in the White House in 1973. That's what he has been able to do so far, and if he continues in this way, he will probably be our next President.
But Muskie's strategy has obvious pitfalls, and it is certainly possible that Warren or Sanders play the role of McGovern in this campaign. If one of them really defeats Biden, the next task will be to control the narrative, setting their ambitious reform agenda as optimistic and urgent, as there is no doubt that Trump will present it as a "dangerous" experience of "socialism". They will also have to attack Trump as corrupt, destructive and incompetent – exactly what the Democrats had to say about Nixon in 1972. Finally, they will have to avoid the kind of nonsense that can easily sink an insurgent candidate, the Eagleton fiasco sank McGovern .
Polls suggest that Warren and Sanders are less likely to beat Trump than Biden, but that certainly does not prove that they could not get away with it. Whoever becomes a Democratic candidate must learn the lessons of history. Joe Biden may be our next president when he learns the lessons of Ed Muskie's defeat. Warren or Sanders could be our next president if they learn the lessons of George McGovern's defeat. Those who do not learn the lessons of history … well, you know how that goes.
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