A Brief History of RINO'S and DINO'S And Why The Way Each Side Uses The Term Reflects How They Approach Politics

 

 

So much of the time when I tried to criticize some of the more extreme views on this site, I was accused of being a MAGA. When I explained I was a registered Democrat and had been one since I was old enough to vote, the insults almost always switched to something that those involved actually  considered worse: DINO or Democrat in Name Only.

This term has only started to come into common slang in the last few years. It's political equivalent on the other side of the aisle – Republican in Name Only or RINO – has been around slightly longer and has been used more professional, usually by Trump ever since he entered politics. Like so much else in American discourse the only new thing about either of these terms is the acronym: variations on either have been going around for decades with new words coming into existence with each new generation. But they're both saying the same thing and it's about who says them rather than their targets.

Basically it's a version of: I, who have been a member of this political party for basically ten minutes now, am more qualified to know what all people in this party have always wanted far more than elected officials who have been there for years if not decades. Because they have either been corrupted by 'the system' or have failed litmus tests we just created, these elected officials are a disgrace to the party and must be removed to make room for others who share my way of thinking.

These ideological shifts are not new in politics and basically came to their earliest form in both political parties, unsurprisingly, during the 1960s. In both political parties, it always refers to the newest and most extreme members who've grown dissatisfied with the Old Guard's complacency. But there's a huge difference between how each generation chose to deal with it and it's worth talking about it because it's another in the endless line of illustrations of why the extremists in both parties are just mirror images of each other, one has been endlessly more effective in turning their vision into reality.

The modern conservative vision was founding during the campaign for Barry Goldwater in 1964. Goldwater's movement was launched by the so-called Young Republicans who had become despairing of the dominance of the so-called Eastern Establishment of the Party, at that time represented by Nelson Rockefeller. The divide had been simmering since before World War II but ever since 1940 the Eastern Establishment had managed to thrust their more moderate wing of the party as their Presidential Candidates over those in the Midwest. Sick of this during the leadup to the 1964 campaign the Young Republicans worked to put Goldwater as their nominee even before he agreed to run for President.

The result was a victory for the conservatives and an electoral disaster. Goldwater came across as dangerous before the primaries were even over and he would lose in what was the biggest landslide in the popular vote with LBJ taking 61 percent of the vote to Goldwater's 37 percent.  With Goldwater defeated the Old Guard swept back in.

But when Watergate happened the conservative wing waged another battle, this time with Ronald Reagan as their standard bearer. In 1980 he would win the Republican nomination for President and then in an electoral landslide over Carter followed by a 49 state reelection over Mondale four years later. After Reagan's win nearly every ten years a new wave of Conservatism would take root in the Republican Party – Gingrich's Contract with America in 1994, the Tea Party in 2010 – and in each case gain huge majorities in the House and in the former case, control of the Senate for the next twelve years. Each time the shifting of the borders of what a Republican won was buttressed by the fact that it had gained immense political power for the GOP.

In that sense Trump's 2016 campaign and MAGA was just the most recent variation on it. In fact Trump's campaign slogan 'Make America Great Again', so derided by the left as bigotry, was simply part of Reagan's acceptance speech before the Republican convention in 1980 and had been used by both parties ever since. (Clinton had used it during his 1992 campaign for President.) Historians would eventually unearth that fact but the left, rather then conclude that all Trump was doing was campaigning, chose instead to make it all about how Trump didn't have an original bone in his body.

The reason that Trump and his predecessors were able to use terms like RINO  - previous derivative terms had included 'Me Too" for Republicans like Dewey and Eisenhower who accepted the New Deal as written law – is because it was done with the idea of gaining political power. Everything the GOP does when it comes to pushing the Overton Window on what it means to be a Republican and what one isn't is done with the sole purpose of winning elections and consolidating their political power in either Congress or the White House. This has been, for the record, enormously effective considering their track record since Goldwater's electoral disaster. They would win five of the next six Presidential elections in the 20^th century and then went on to win the next two in the 21^st. It gave them control of both Houses of Congress from 1994-2006 and they've controlled the House for eighteen of the first 26 years of this century and the Senate for twelve.  People may be repulsed by how they do it – I myself have my issues with it - but if you simply view it as a means to political power, you can't deny its been effective.

Though that, of course, is exactly what the far left has been trying do for my entire lifetime.

Just to be clear when it comes to election denialism everyone associated with 2020 has nothing on the far left. I'm not talking about 2016 or even 2000. I mean that they've spent a huge amount of the time and energy trying to deny the entire conservative revolution.

They've denounced the Southern strategy as racist which is immoral and therefore that Republicans use it makes their wins illegitimate. They've torn apart everything Nixon did in 1968 and 1972 while denying any role they had in either election (oh, we'll get to that). They'll do everything to say Reagan manipulated the hostage crisis to keep Carter from winning and Bush Senior was lying about his involve in Contra-Gate. They'll say how the Fairness Doctrine created talk radio and Fox News which has, of course, been brainwashing the electorate for thirty years. They'll accuse Republicans of every conceivable crime and immorality. None of this can disguise the fact that they've spent more time and energy in the last half-century 'proving' the immorality of Republicans rather than doing anything to try and similarly take over the Democratic Party.

The 'highpoint' of the left's takeover of the party – the one they will always sing about – is when they marched in the streets and took over college campuses and completely righteous actions in Chicago. And they did have political power: they managed the insurgency campaign of Eugene McCarthy, which forced LBJ to not run for reelection in 1968 and they helped McGovern win the Democratic nomination in 1972. The fact that in the former they all but guaranteed Nixon's election and that the McGovern campaign was an exercise in political ineptitude has always been negated in their minds by Watergate. They believed then  that because they were on 'the right side of history' America should follow their path. They've never gotten over the fact that after losing 49 of fifty states the Democratic Party decided they wanted to win elections.

So ever since then they've essentially thrown shade on the few major Democratic victories that have happened because of that. Carter was regarded as a failure by the liberal wing at the time, was challenged by Ted Kennedy in the primary, and was regarded to political obscurity among Democrats for the remainder of the 20^th century. By the time Democrats in the 1980s and 1990s were winning political office – Clinton being the most successful – the left had adopted the argument of 'no difference between the two parties' and called them all 'neoliberals'. This was these leftists saying to the Democrats: "How dare you abandon the principles of the party just because the electorate had chosen to reject them?"

That's the biggest different between the far left and the far right: the far right hates the Democrats because they are imposing a radical socialist agenda on America when they have power and the far left hates them because they're not doing that. The far left thinks the Republicans all monsters but that's never made them loyal to Democrats. In their minds a Democratic candidate if he campaigns to the left must when he achieves office govern further to the left. Every election of a Democrat to the White House is a mandate for the progressive agenda whether he campaigned on it or not. The voters themselves can't be trusted to know what's best for them. Half of them vote for Republicans, after all. How smart can they be?

Most of the left's sniping was purely at an academic level ever since 1972. Then Bernie Sanders – who isn't even a Democrat in Name Only – ran in the 2016 primaries on a platform that for all its 21^st century terminology was reheated McGovernism. Sanders lost the primary to Hilary Clinton – and yet somehow everyone in the left immediately made the assumption that the failed campaign was the gold standard for every Democratic official going forward.

One of the ironies the Justice Democrats arguing that everyone who isn't them is a DINO is that many of them aren't Democrats themselves but Democratic Socialists who are running as Democrats. The relative few who have won office have been very open about their membership in the Democratic Socialist party which barely fits on the borders of the Justice Democrats platform. And unlike the Tea Party, their movement has not in five elections been able to take a majority in either house of Congress, something the movement's founders have admitted but the membership has ignored.

The few that are here and the activists among them will call every Democrat who isn't Bernie or AOC a DINO. Which is insane. Bernie isn't a Democrat; AOC and the Squad have been in the House for eight years and none of them have ever managed to defeat a single Republican who holds elected office in Congress, let alone at a state level.  If anything I'd argue the burden is on them to prove they're not DINOs. And part of being a Democrat is not just not being a Republican. It's being a good public servant. In that I find no difference between the behavior of Lauren Boebert or Paulina Luna one the right or AOC and Rashida Taib on the left.  They have many interests, some good, some bad, but none of them have to do with best serving the institutions they've run for and are elected too.

At this point  I think one of the biggest differences between a member of the Freedom Caucus and a Justice Democrat candidate is that the Republicans  usually has the common sense to wait until after they're elected to make it clear they won't compromise with anyone, not even the leaders of  their own party. The Cori Bushes and Ilhan Ohmar's of the world basically make it part of their campaign speeches. They can say Republicans believe in power and don't have any principles and I'd be willing to grant the truth of that with many in my lifetime. The problem is it's been very clear that the left means that they think principles are far more important then having political power – and they genuinely can't comprehend why the Democrats have refused to embrace that as a campaign strategy. It's also why, not at all coincidentally, they don't have the kind of  political power that the  extreme right  has managed in the Republican Party.

 

Now I agree the left should have a voice in the Democratic Party. There is a demand for it and I agree with many of  their principles. But there's a difference between a voice and speaking for their entire party. And that I'd argue is the major difference between who uses the terms RINO and DINO.

Because here's the thing. When Trump calls someone a RINO he's just using the standard that every insurgent movement from the Goldwaterites to the Tea Party did. Once you have the numbers and the power you have the freedom to make being a Republican any definition you want. AOC and Bernie and their followers don't have either the numbers or power behind their movement: all they have is the same moral self-righteousness they've always had. But having the moral high ground doesn't mean you get to define what an institution's positions are: you have to have some kind of power to back it up. Until that wing of the party had that and not before, as far as any Democrat is concerned 'the Squad' are the DINO's, not the other way around.

And for those who want to call me names or will: speaking as someone who is a registered Democrat and has voted for them almost every election up and down the ballot (which ones I haven't are none of your business) who has been studying American politics since he was a teenager and probably read more book about American History before he was 18 then today's activist has read in their entire lifetime, as someone who knows the long and complicated history of the Democratic party as well as America, and who keeps informed about every aspects of politics by reading journals and publications as well as online articles, I think I'm more qualified to talk about what it means to be a Democrat then someone who follows AOC on Social media and therefore thinks they know everything about every aspect of American life and certainly what it means to be a Democrat. That may be a minority opinion, but hey I'm a Democrat. That's usually the only kind we've been able to have in my lifetime.

How 4 Groundbreaking TV Shows Paved The Way In Gay And Lesbian Representation, Part 2: How The Journey Of David Fisher On Six Feet Under Was One of The Most Quietly Groundbreaking Arcs of The New Golden Age

 

There's a difference between being drawn to a show because of who's in the cast and knowing that an actor is born to play the lead in a TV show.  Much of my TV viewing as an adult has been based on the former; we all know there are certain actors who will never let us down. But the latter is far rarer.  Let's not kid ourselves, if you thought that the dad from Malcolm in the Middle had the stuff to be the center of Breaking Bad when you first saw the ads for it, you're lying to yourself. I don't think anybody believed it until Bryan Cranston won his first Emmy.

One of the few times in my long career of watching television when I saw the promos for a show and I just knew the lead actor was perfectly cast was when I saw the first ads for Dexter on Showtime. When I saw the premise and I saw Michael C. Hall was playing the title role I said to myself: "This is a role Hall was born to play."

Consider who Dexter Morgan is: his day job is working for the police department which means he gets paid to be regularly confronted by blood and gore on a daily basis. He wears a very public face to his co-workers and even his family and at the start of the series they all completely accept him for who he is. But he has a dark secret that he dares not share with the world, something so dark and deviant he can only express it in ways that he knows in his soul are completely horrific, that if the world finds out about them, he will be marked as a pariah or worse.  And yet his first words in the Pilot are: "It's going to happen again and again."

Aside from the fact that he's not a serial killer this pretty much describes David Fisher when we first meet him in Six Feet Under – and as we know throughout the first season David actually thinks that his acts are as corrupt and monstrous as anything Dexter will do. For the record we'll later see he doesn't judge killers any worse or better than their victims. It's part of his job.

I've written in a previous article that I never felt Six Feet Under got the respect that the holy Trinity of HBO Dramas – The Sopranos, The Wire and Deadwood – have from critics of the time. Which is rather strange because it did far better at the Emmys that the latter two shows did. It won 9 Emmys and was nominated for a total of fifty three, including Best Drama three times and multiple acting nominations for nearly every actor in the cast. It won the Golden Globes for Best Drama in 2002 the SAG Award for Best Dramatic Ensemble in 2003 and the  Peabody Award.

I've written part of the reason has to be compared to everything other HBO drama and indeed almost every other drama that was on their air during its five year run Six Feet Under was far closer to a dramedy than anything else. For a show in which every episode opened with the 'corpse of the week' this show by far took the most lighthearted approach to character death than any other series on TV.  None of the conflicts on the show were at the level of what was going on in Jersey, Baltimore or the camp in South Dakota. This was a series where none of the characters could be classified as antiheroes or even difficult people. It was the journey of a family and the funeral home they owned. Life and death was part of the job but not in the way it was on all those other HBO dramas. It was allowed to be fun in a way that no HBO drama was doing at the time and honestly in a way very few afterwards have. The Fishers were far more fun to be around then the Roys ever were and while Claire was an angsty teen with a drug habit she was always more put together than any of the kids on Euphoria.

 And maybe it's a sign of how much better life generally is for the LGBTQ+ community that we no longer see David Fisher as the kind of prototypical gay man he was when we met him in 2001. Alan Ball made it very clear Six Feet Under was an autobiographical show with elements of his own life present in many of the Fisher family. And this was particularly true of David, a man who has spent his entire adult life terrified of what will happen if the world finds out that he's gay. To that end his professional front as the funeral hall director of Fisher and Sons is very much one he can live with: he puts up a face of dignity and decorum in front of everyone around him and never wants to show his real face to anyone, especially not his family. When he introduces Keith to them in the Pilot – after he gets him to track down Claire, whose out high on crystal meth – he makes it very clear that he knows Keith from playing racquetball. It's only later that episode we learn they're sleeping together and Keith has been trying to convince David to come out of the closet for their entire relationship.

None of this would have worked without the brilliant performance of Michael C. Hall as David, a performance that has understandably eclipsed by his work as Dexter Morgan, who is by far one of the greatest characters in TV history. But I could make an argument that that Hall's work as Fisher was almost iconoclastic in a way that the nearly twenty years he's been associated with Dexter isn't quite.

By the time Six Feet Under was on the air we were well into the age of the antihero. During its five year run the Best Actor in a Drama category was filled with some of the greatest in TV history, not just  James Gandolfini but Kiefer Sutherland's Jack Bauer, Michael Chiklis's Vic Mackey on The Shield and Ian McShane for playing Al Swearengen. These four actors would dominate the awards show circuit during this period with all deservedly  winning Emmys and Golden Globes (McShane only won the latter). By the time Hall started playing Dexter on Showtime audiences were ready to root for a serial killer who thought his only merit was that he killed other serial killers.

Hall's work as David, like so many of the characters on Six Feet Under, would become far scarcer and less recognized by the Emmys during the next twenty years: basically good people who are trying to make their way forward in a complicated world. (Peter Krause, who memorably played Nate, has made a career in the twenty years since playing essentially that sort of role in brilliant network series like Parenthood and 9-1-1 and has gotten a similar lack of recognition from the Emmys for it.) David's greatest struggle throughout the series is with himself, trying to accept that he is a gay man because he has been raised to think it is perverse and disgusting. This is, sadly, a far more relatable struggle and consequently less fun to appreciate that seeing all of the characters I mentioned above – Dexter among them – killing people every week and getting away with it.

Yet I'd argue the arc he did in the first season in particular is one of the most important ones in at least the first decade of 21^st TV. In an era where 'don't ask, don't tell' had been put into law by a Democratic President  who famously had no use for marriage between one man and one woman having the lead character on TV be a gay man was a big deal. And all the more so because the type we were used too in the few examples we were getting in popular culture: there was none of the over-the-top feminine campiness we got with most gay characters or the blatant, angry type we were getting on Showtime series like Queer As Folk. David Fisher had lived his entire life in the closet and he was terrified of coming out, even if it turned out that the people who loved him has always known.

One of the many, many great stories of the first season of Six Feet Under was that David was the good son. He'd stayed behind to work with his father rather than go to law school because his big brother was the more free-spirited one and Claire was already the problem child. It was clear during the Pilot how much David seethed and Nate's contempt for what he did for a living and that spilled out during the funeral. One can never forget David's reaction after Nate spewed how plastic and packaged the funeral business is: "You didn't spend last night stuffing you're father's ass with cotton soaked in formaldehyde so he wouldn't leak."

David is infuriated when the will is read and Fisher and Sons has been left to him and Nate jointly. To him, this is the ultimate sign that everything he put into the family business was never appreciated by his father, perhaps Nathaniel never even trusted him to carry it on. He mocks Nate's laissez-faire attitude to sell the business to Kroner, then changing his mind. Much of the first season is about the two brothers rebuilding their relationship – and in part that means David coming out, subtly, to Nate first. Nate to be clear is so stunned he has to tell Brenda: Oh my God, I think David is gay!" Brenda's reaction is different: "I think David is lucky, did you get a look at that guy he was with

The thing is, for much of the first season David is still struggling with the burden he's carried all his life. Sometimes it's humorous: there's a female family friend who keeps trying to hook up with him all through the season and he keeps putting her off. Sometimes he shows it during the conversations with the corpses of the week. The most hysterical one is when a famous porn star, who died when she knocked her electronics into a bubble bath, says to him as he looks at her breasts: "So these tits do nothing for you?" David is delicate even with the dead. "Well, I can appreciate that they're beautiful in their own completely artificial way." Of course this conversation comes back to something else:

"You think God cares that you're gay?"

Then David becomes a little mean. "You think God cares you f—ed thirty guys at once?

But the more serious story comes when Ruth asks David to take her to the family church in place of her husband.  Religion is an important part of David's professional life but growing up in the era of Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson talking about the evils of homosexuality in televised sermons having to attend a church as a child has clearly played a huge role in making him ashamed of who he is. Even after he's named a deacon the fact that he embraces the church's typical conservative stance of homosexuality is to the straw that causes Keith to break up with him during Season 1.  David is used to taking everything stoically but its clear having to carry this along with all the other upheavals in the aftermath of his father's death does much to crack his façade.

This all comes to a head during the final two episodes of Season 1. A Private Live, the penultimate episode, is the highest ranked by imdb.com by the fans of the entire first season and while much of it no doubt has to do with the conflict between Brenda and Billy which boils over into him attacking her and her finally committing him, much of it has to do with the funeral.

The death of the week is one of the most shocking. In the opening a pair of young gay men are attacked and Marc Foster, Jr is killed. Clearly meant to parallel the murder of Matthew Shephard, this is one of the most toxic funerals the home's dealt with: there's immense media coverage and much of it has to do with the 'morality or immorality of the situation'.

David has never felt more discomfort about his identity and this is very clear when Rico, who as we've seen in Season 1 has an almost casual homophobia, comments:

Ok Cinderella. We're gonna have to work overtime to get you ready for the ball, because men don't make passes at girls with big gashes.

David has mostly sat in silence. This time he actually says: "How would you deal with it if you worked for a fag? Because I am one."

Rico is shocked and doesn't immediately respond. Its rarely talked about directly in the aftermath but his homophobia doesn't disappear. Later in the series he will find his brother-in-law having sex with another man and punch his brother-in-law in the face first.

He has several conversations with 'Marc' and Marc spends a lot of time telling David that he deserved what he got. This is was people like him deserve. The confrontation explodes at the funeral where a group of gay protestors and fundamentalist come and Keith is there to try and keep trouble apart.

This leads to David finally having a confrontation with a Fundamentalist.

Fundamentalist: God killed Marc Foster, and I'm here to celebrate.

David punches him in the face.

God just shoved your stomach into your lungs, and I'm here to celebrate!

At the end of the episode David finally manages to say something he's wanted to tell Ruth all his life. But the thing is Ruth has probably suspected for just as law. Earlier in the episode she has an awkward conversation with a gay florist about when he first knew.

Ruth is upset because she can't understand why David never felt secure enough to confide in her such a secret. This could sound selfish in the wrong hands but Ball has gone out of his way to make it clear Ruth has been finding her own way forward as a widow and has been learning that everyone in her family has spent their lives keeping secrets from her. The Fishers have clearly spent their lives not talking.

And sadly at the end of the episode David feels no better for confiding. Marc is still attacking him telling the worst. In a moment that has to rank as one of the great scenes in the entire series the episode ends with David kneeling and saying: "Please God, take this pain away."

This is an extraordinary moment for Hall and incredibly the season finale tops it.

During the season at David's church one of the major characters is the new priest Father Jack. David has spent much of their time together assuming Jack is gay and is shocked he isn't. However when it becomes public knowledge that Father Jack has presided over a lesbian marriage the deacons start a fight over whether to keep him. David is forced to make the tie-breaking vote.

So at the end of it he goes before the pulpit and tells the congregation – and in a sense, God  - his true sexual identity, that he's not ashamed of it and if God is everything they say, he loves him too. Hall does so without lecturing or preaching, he just calmly and silently says this to those assembled. And it's not a denunciation of the church or the worshippers: Hall never raises his voice during his speech. Yet in the subtle, soft-spoken way Alan Ball and his writers did it's nearly as revolutionary as Tony Soprano killing Fabian Petrullo or Jack Bauer's first interrogation at CTU (which was going to happen a few months after this episode aired).

There's no anger in David's stand the same way we saw in the previous episode but there's also no shame. Inevitably he's asked to step down as a deacon and Father Jack is still fired. But David is fine with that in a way he wouldn't have been at the start of the season. It doesn't matter if the rest of the world doesn't accept his being gay ; he now does.

And notably he doesn't leave the church going forward. He'll leave that one obviously but he'll still spend much of the series religious, eventually joining the Gay Man's Chorus at the church he and Keith live close too. We know that he will be close to Father Jack for the rest of the series and even beyond that and from this point forward he's more accepting of some of Nate's more Eastern religious beliefs then he was before.

Its completely understandable, by the way, that Hall only received a single Emmy nomination for his work on the series. (He was nominated in 2002, critically during a period The Sopranos was on one of its extended hiatuses and ineligible for Emmys that year.) This was a cutthroat field with all of the great actors I mentioned and that's without including Martin Sheen who was nominated just as often for The West Wing. I'm kind of amazed Peter Krause managed to get three nominations during this same five year period. Hall's performance was a master class but it was almost always one of restraint where he rarely got the chance for the kind of emotional highpoints we get from the kind of performances that typical earn nominations or awards. In that sense Dexter Morgan gave him far more opportunities to hit those kind of high notes.

But don't kid yourself. Hall's work as David Fisher was in its own way as groundbreaking for gay and lesbian roles in dramatic series as Will and Grace and Ellen were for comedy.  And we'd start seeing it in the most unexpected way just a few months after Season 2 of Six Feet Under.

In the next article I get to The Wire and what its like to be gifted, black – and openly gay.

Jeopardy Season 42 Update: Caleb Groen, Fighting For The Bye Finds His Thirteenth Appearance As Unlucky for Him As It Was For Adam Remsen

 

It was déjà vu all over again.

On June 26^th Adam Remsen had managed to win his eleventh game in impressive fashion with a $50,000 payday.. More importantly with that victory he had broken his tie with Tristan Williams for the third most wins in Season 42 and guaranteeing himself a bye into the semi-finals of the 2027 Tournament of Champions. The producers must have breathed a sigh of relief thinking this would put them off the hook for making a hard decision if Tristan and Adam had tied.

Then not even three weeks later they were facing the exact same scenario. Because now Caleb Groen had won twelve straight games. In Caleb's case it actually seemed like it would be a more clear cut decision because by this point Caleb had won considerably more money that Adam. Indeed with $346,968 he was actually slightly ahead of Harrison Whitaker at this same period in his run. Another win might very well put him in second place in money won behind only Jamie Ding in Season 42.

But on Friday's game things had not been nearly as easy. He did manage another impressive game with 36 correct responses and only 3 incorrect ones. However two of them had been the Daily Doubles he'd found and they'd cost him $6000. And as a result Andy Strange had managed to keep him – just barely - from getting his seventh consecutive runaway victory. He'd needed to respond correctly on Final Jeopardy to win and he did.

And it wasn't like Final Jeopardy had been his great strength throughout his run. In last Tuesday's and Thursday's games he'd responded incorrectly on Final Jeopardy and his opponents had responded correctly. It hadn't mattered either way – both games had been runaways – but after twelve games he had gotten 7 Final Jeopardys correct and 5 incorrect. To this point it still hadn't cost him – but the emphasis was on 'still.'

Now here Caleb was in the exact same place that had proven fatal for Adam Remsen a little more than three weeks earlier.  Adam had faltered on Final Jeopardy for that game and it had brought him down. Would Caleb be in the same position Adam was or as Harrison Whitaker before him and Scott Riccardi on this same day one year earlier would he live to fight another day?

So on the last Monday of Season 42 Caleb faced off against Tatiana Chichilla and Sam Ryan in his thirteenth appearance. And unlike Adam's thirteenth appearance it became clear remarkably quickly that things weren't going to go as well for Caleb as the previous twelve.

In the Jeopardy round Sam got to the Daily Double first and early in TIPPLES IN LIT. He bet the $1400 he already had:

The title of this Kurt Vonnegut novel doesn't mean a Wheaties slogan – its how a cocktail waitress in the book refers to martinis.

Sam knew it: "What is Breakfast of Champions?" Ken said that was correct, then reminded us it was a correct response not a correct breakfast.

From that point Sam never relinquished the lead. He had $6800 at the commercial break to Caleb's $2400 and finished it was with $9200 to Caleb's $5400 and Tatiana's $1800.

Tatiana had her moment early in Double Jeopardy when she found the Daily Double on her first in 18^th CENTURY EUROPE. "1714 saw the birth of this royal house in Britain when George I succeeded to the crown." She knew it was Hanover and gained $1500. She'd actually move to second place when she got the first three correct responses in Double Jeopardy. Then she started going backwards and Caleb and Sam started going back and forth.

Then Sam got to the other Daily Double ahead of Caleb still in the lead with $16,400. He had a decision to make and he wagered $6400 in POP CULTURE ANAGARAMS:

'Torchwood, an anagram of and spin-off from this BBC show, added 'Children of Earth' as a subtitle for Season 3. Sam instantly responded: "What is Doctor Who?" and jumped up to $22,800. He would finish the round with $24,000 and because Caleb blundered on two $800 clues – including one where he reversed Fletcher Christian's name to Christian Fletcher –  he became the second super-champion this season to lost his title in a runaway with Sam finished with $24,000 to Caleb's $11,400 while Tatiana finished with a very respectable $6900.

But even had he been in a place to contend it wouldn't have made a difference.  With another set of synchronicity Caleb's career on Jeopardy ended the same way it began – with another triple stumper. The category was ANNUAL EVENTS:

It celebrated its 40^th edition in 2026; the first one featured Jimmie Dale Gilmore and Jimmy Carl Black.  

No one was close to the correct answer. It was South by Southwest. (As Ken told us Gilmore and black are both Texas musicians, and the clue referred to the famous Austin music festival." Caleb was good natured in defeat: he wrote down: "What is Congratulations, Sam" as Sam dethroned Caleb with a $23,000 payday.

Now the inevitable question, just how good was Caleb? Well in twelve games he did win more money then Ryan Long did in his sixteen game run and nearly as much as Adriana Harmeyer did in her fifteen game run. And he's clearly a much better player than Adam Remsen was in his twelve games. As to the rest let's compare him to all the players who managed to win at least twelve games in the post-Trebek era at that point in their runs (aside from the one I listed immediately above):

 

Matt Amodio: $394,600

Amy Schneider: $483,000

Mattea Roach: $271,282

Cris Panullo: $380,881

Ray Lalonde: $354, 300

Scott Riccardi: $312.501

Harrison Whitaker: $330,000

Jamie Ding: $314,440

Caleb Groen: $346,968

That Caleb was doing so much better than Mattea Roach didn't shock me; that he was doing better than Jamie did slightly.  As to the other two players who won exactly 12 games he clearly did far better than Seth Wilson's $265,000 but wasn't nearly at the level of Austin Roger's $411,000.

Caleb is a lot harder to classify as a super-champion then his predecessors this year.  When he was good, he was incredible but his track record with Final Jeopardy was worse then most of the super-champions I've seen during the last five years. He finished with 7 correct and six incorrect and there's a good argument the only reason he managed to get as far as he did was because his first two games were triple stumpers. There are at least five or six potential Second Chance Tournament entries in his first four games alone and it wouldn't shock me if Tatiana ended up being included as well. (It may depend how well Sam does.)

As to whether Adam or Caleb gets the bye into the semi-finals based on money won Caleb deserves to. He did win more than Adam's $306,415. But I have no doubt this is the kind of scenario the producers were hoping to avoid going into the 2027 TOC though perhaps in the opening months of next year someone will come along who wins thirteen games and makes the decision irrelevant.

I'll be back this weekend with my official wrap-up of Season 42, with a complete roster of whose qualified for the next Tournament of Champions this season and some educated guesses on who we might see in some of the Second Chance and Wild Card Tournament. (For once the former has a lot more valid choices then the latter.)

 

 

Decision 2026 Justice Democrats Edition, Part 4: Do Patterns From A Previous Generation of Far-Left Candidate Hold True With The Justice Democrats?

 

In several previous articles I have highlighted Theodore White's landmark Making of the President series in regards to show how both political parties have, in many ways, not changed in their philosophies during the five Presidential campaigns he covered as an observer. This is true no matter which side of the aisle you're on and how you view the opposition as being 'worse then you ever remember it'.

In my most recent entry in regard to what White referred to as 'The Movement' –  which was mostly fueled by outrage over the Vietnam War but still holds many doctrines true half a century later – he writes in his early chapters how by 1970 The Movement took over several state Democratic conventions and many 'Peace candidates' won at gubernatorial and Congressional level. However he adds that many of them would lose districts and states that had been held by Democrats for years and those who won their primaries, such as Bella Abzug and Ronald Dellums, would overwhelmingly win their primaries but in their first election dramatically underperform the previous Democratic incumbents in the previous general election.

So as a student of history I asked the obvious question: is there a similar parallel with those among the Justice Democrats who have managed to successfully primary Democratic incumbents and then fail to perform as well in the general election that immediately followed.

To this point in the history of this updated version of 'The Movement', there have been relatively few case studies to look at. In the first four election cycles of their existence to date four members members of 'The Squad' have successfully primaried Democratic incumbents and then went on to win the general. Alexandria Ocasio Cortez in 2018, when she successfully  primaried Joe Cowley in the New York 14th, Jamaal Bowman in 2020 when he successfully primaried Eliot Engel in the New York sixteenth and Cori Bush who would successfully primary Lacy Clay in 2020 in the Missouri 1^st and Marie Newman that same year who successfully primaried Dan Lapinski in the Illinois 3^rd.

So far this cycle two incumbent Democrats have also been primaried but since the general has not happened yet I shall omit them. However in one case I'm going to go in depth because it has a direct parallel to White's book.

What I shall do very briefly is provide a record of how in each seat the previous incumbent did in their last election prior to be defeated in their primary and contrast it with the margin each Justice Democrat in their first general election. And because all but Ocasio-Cortez are no longer in Congress, I'll explain how each one lost their seats in a subsequent election and how their opponents did in the one that followed.

 

Joe Cowley, 2016 general election results: 70.13 percent over Republican's 13.6 percent

 Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez: 2018 general election results – 78.17 Percent to Republican Candidate's 14 percent

Until fairly recently this was the most famous success the Justice Democrats had with AOC successfully primarying a man who was not only one of the most progressive members of the House but also very highly placed in Congressional Leadership. Many believed Cowley had a chance to become Speaker when Pelosi retired.

And indeed AOC is very much the exception that would seem to prove the rule: she did far better in the general election in 2018 than Cowley did two years earlier. Furthermore one can't rule out the possibility she could have improved her margin had Cowley not continued to run on the Working Families Party and taken 9 percent of the vote away from AOC.

 

 

Dan Lapinski, 2018 general election results 73 percent – 25 percent for Republican

Marie Newman, 2020 election results – 56.37 percent to 43 percent for Republican Mike Friclione

 

Here we have to go into more detail. Dan Lapinski was one of the members of the surviving members of the  Blue Dog Democrats which by now referred to a Democrat who had won in a fairly conservative district. He'd held that seat since 2004.

In 2018 Marie Newman made an attempt to primary him, running to Lapinski's left. Many more conventional Democrats endorsed her including Kristen Gillibrand and Luis Guiterrez and Jan Schavosky of Illinois. Despite all that Lapinski defeated her narrowly with 51.2 percent of the vote to her 48.8 percent and then went on to win a landslide

Two years later she ran again, this time endorsed by many more progressives among them AOC and the new Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot. Many progressive women's groups endorsed her even further because candidates they'd endorsed in Texas has lost primary races. She narrowly managed to defeat Lipinski by a little more than 2.5 percent of the vote. But her margin over Republican Mike Friclione was far smaller than Lapinski in his win.

And the following year the Illinois legislature passed a new congressional map that radically changed her district. She therefore chose to switch districts and challenge Democrat Sean Casten in the redrawn 6^th. In that district 41 percent of the voters were from Newman's former district and 23 percent were from Casten's former district . Despite that Newman would lost to Casten in a landslide, receiving just 29 percent of the vote to Casten's nearly 68 percent. For the record Casten's district is more conservative and he managed to win by 9 percent of the vote over his Republican opponent.

 

 

 

Eliot Engel, 2018  general Election results - Unopposed

Jamaal Bowman: 2020 general election results -84.17 percent

I've discussed Bowman's electoral history several times but its worth going into detail from this perspective.

Engel was so popular in his district that in his previous three elections he had run unopposed in the general. When Bowman managed to successfully primary him in 2020 it was basically the same story, although a Conservative nominee did run and got 16 percent of the vote. (The Conservative Party has existed in New York since the late 1960s and is sometimes separate from the Republican Party.)

After the 2020 election New York drew a new set of Congressional maps, which now included Southern Westchester County and the Northern Bronx. Bowman was challenged by Westchester County legislator Vedat Gashi and Catherine Parker. Bowman survived his primary and won in the general – but with only 64 percent of the vote versus his Republican challenger Miriam Flisser.

In 2024 Bowman was successfully primaried by George Latimer. He would run against Flisser and win with 71 percent of the vote to her 28 percent.

Based on Bowman's complete electoral history it seems safe to argue he was underperforming in his district compared to his predecessor and successor.

 

Lacy Clay, 2018 General Election Results: 75 percent to Republican 19percent

Cori Bush, 2020 General Election Results -78.78 percent to Republican 19 percent

Bush's history is by far most complicated. Like Marie Newman in 2018 she attempted to primary a Democratic incumbent Lacy Clay. Clay defeated her easily by nearly a twenty point margin and then went on to destroy his opponent in the general.

Two years later Bush managed to successfully primary Clay with much of the same progressive organization that had backed Newman and won by a somewhat larger margin in the General then Clay's last win.

Two years later Bush was primaried by Steve Roberts, who was endorsed by Clay. Bush trounced Roberts in the primary and won in the general but by a somewhat smaller margin over Republican Andrew Jones receiving  73 percent to Jones 24 percent.

During the last election cycle Bush was primaried by Wesley Bell. Bell won over Andrew Jones by 58 percent, a far larger margin that Bush's over that same candidate two years previous.

Of course the saga of Cori Bush is not over. In less than a month she will attempt to primary Bell and try to regain her seat.

 

Given the complete electoral history of these four candidates it would seem to give credence to the argument that the Justice Democrats do have a history of underperforming in the general election compared to their predecessors – and in some cases, their successors.

And we are going to get more evidence to that fact one way or another no matter how the remaining primaries turn out. Because two Justice Democrats this cycle have managed to successfully primary Democratic incumbents – and one in particular has historical evidence of things to come.

In 1970 Bryon G. Rogers, who had represented the Colorado 1^st since 1950 was successfully primaried by Craig S. Barnes, a peace candidate. In that race he was defeated by his Republican opponent Mike McKevitt, largely because Rogers's more conservative supporters would throw their support to him in the general election. (The following year he was defeating for reelection by liberal Democrat Pat Schroeder.)

Now 56 years later in that very same district Melat Kiros, one of the Justice Democrats, managed to successfully primary 15 term incumbent Diana DeGette.

Eight years earlier in their first cycle Saira Rao attempted to do so but only received 31.75 percent of the vote. Kiros succeed where Rao failed – but it remains to be seen just how well she will do in the general. DeGette despite flagging support from the left in her district still managed to win by nearly 55 percent of her Republican opponent in 2024.

And it is not as those Kiros has been immune to the kind of demagogic statements of others in the Squad, past and present, all of which could be a problem in a district that basically comprises much of Denver. While it is highly unlikely in this age of hyper-partisanship that DeGette supporters will cross party lines to vote Republican, while running in the primary Kiros made several statement that her opponent will easily be able to use as negative ads. The most notorious was an interview she gave on the eve of the primary in which a Colorado broadcaster asked to comment whether last year's attack in Boulder – a firebombing that led to the deaths of several Jews – was a hate crime. Rather than give a direct answer Kiros gave the kind of deflection I've come to associate more with Republicans in recent years, saying there was no way to know what was in the mind of the attacker. Republicans have made meals of Democratic candidates for decades by running TV ads playing their comments out of context. It will take a lot of work for Kiros to walk this comment back in the general election, though I'd still be stunned if she lost.

In his chapter on The Movement White referred to the Liberal Doctrine as having three major core tenets: war is always immoral, diversity can never be wrong and money will solve every social problem. He also memorably said that to candidates who ran as part of this movement: "What was morally right, they felt, must be politically sound." George McGovern would win the Democratic nomination for President in 1972 as a candidate who would advocate for all of these tenets with that moral certainty – and the result was by far the biggest electoral defeat for a Democrat at the Presidential level in electoral history.

Nearly half a century later Bernie Sanders and his acolytes have run on a platform that, for all of the 21^st century changes to it, essentially is little more than a much more radical version of everything The Movement stood for, both in terms of the core tenets of the Justice Democrats platform, all of which essentially argue for one of these three beliefs and their decisions that all of these things are morally right. And tellingly even after nearly four decades of a Republican Party that has become more conservative with each new President and Congressional Leadership, the electorate as a whole has no more appetite for it then they had for the Movement in the 1970s. It is essentially only popular with the same people it was half a century ago: college students and young, rich, mostly white people. And while the candidates may make up a more diverse membership then half a century ago, in terms of race and gender, those who have voted for them are, at their core, no different than those who campaigned for McGovern. The multi-racial coalition that has been the center of the Democrats ever since the Civil Rights Act of 1964, by and large, has never supported these candidates with the same fervor of their predecessors: they certainly haven't come out in numbers to put them into office in the last four election cycles and much of this one.

Many on the left have spent much of the last half century focusing not on making their policies more acceptable to the masses but rewriting history to put forth a narrative to the faithful,  to essentially turn Liberal Theology into a kind of Progressive Fundamentalism. In their narrative the idea of liberalism are still immensely popular with the masses, regardless of the results of any election to the contrary. It is the system that has failed, the institutions that are corrupt, the political parties that have sold out, the masses have been brainwashed by the conservatives. It is as impervious to reason that any election denier or MAGA candidate in the last decade: our approach is correct, it's the electorate that is either too stupid or too unenlightened to see the truth.

In this relating of  the failures of the Justice Democrats that I've illustrated in previous articles – their inability to win statewide office, to flip Republican districts at any level, increasing diminishing returns in recruiting candidates to run each cycle and their overall failure to achieve more than a few wins in the House -  are cast aside. They don't see the nearly 100 elections they've lost in the last eight years as a sign that the masses don't want what they're selling; they see the seats they've won as a sign that victory is inevitable and that their movement will prevail. The danger is not that it has any chance of succeeding but that the Democratic Party as a whole will choose to buy what the Justice Democrats are arguing and the media's narrative, fed entirely by the Justice Democrats themselves, is buttressing.

This narrative falls apart when one gives more than a surface look at the Justice Democrats actual electoral history. Their underperforming their predecessors and successors in that history is another critical part in deconstructing the façade they've carefully built. Their core belief is no different then the Movement: what is morally right is politically sound. That was not true in the 1970s and its no more true today and it is imperative that they be called on this as often as possible for the sake of the Democratic Party's future.

 

 

Lessons From Theodore White:Part 1: How The Left's First Attempt To Take Over The Democratic Party Ultimately Led to Failure

 

Theodore White was a brilliant writer because despite being an old school liberal he remained objective. As I've written indirectly in previous articles White believed that what he referred to as 'The Liberal Theology' – the philosophy involving governing during the Great Society combined with the antiwar movement led to a formation of the left which he referred to as The Movement. He summed up their philosophy simply in his 1972 volume of Making of the President:

"a: War is bad -and the American military was almost, if not quite a criminal institution, wasteful and profligate of life and treasure, patriotism is the last refuge of scoundrels, and the adventure in Vietnam immoral.

b) Black is good – and the demands of blacks on the general society must become, in the revision of priorities that would follow after the war, priority number one

c) since money comes easily under the modern managed economy, the believe that Money Solves All Problems is the rhetoric of hope…

Thus, out of such thinking, there developed in the years between 1968 and 1972 a formless but very powerful action group within the Democratic Party that can only be called The Movement…

Like so much regarding Theodore White its striking how much of the basic tenets of nearly half a century ago are still relevant today. Everything that White wrote about in 1972, with certain details changed for time, be considered doctrine of the left wing thinking of the Democrats today.

White was more than willing to admire their strengths particularly in regards to African-Americans as well as the cause of what women in politics. But he was also very clear of their weakness and one of their biggest true today as it was fifty years ago was about 'big city life':

The old Liberal Idea of the sixties had provoked many experimental approaches to city problems, most had been passed into legislation – and most had failed…By the early 1970s it was clear that the Liberal-inspired ideas of the Great Society had failed the cities; they had been based on a political misreading of how those cities functioned, and what communities in those cities needed for community survival. What had actually happened in the great cities of America in the 1960s, and was continuing to happen as America entered the seventies, mocked all the billions of dollars spent on programs to 'save' them,

All the programs had been advanced by Democratic thinkers practicing the best doctrine of the day but theologians put doctrine above experience. The Movement insisted on more of the same for the seventies – and in the big cities, where the Democrats get their core votes, more of the same frightened too many of the communities who were being driven from their home.

In the revisionism thinking of the left today this has been phrased as 'white flight' and dismissed under the label of racism, just as White said was gospel among the left as early as the 1960s. To this day the overwhelming majority of progressive thinkers still embrace the Liberal Doctrine and choose to argue whites fleeing the city and voting Republican as 'proof' of that fact and therefore absolves them of looking closer at their flaws. What was clear as the seventies began was that the Movement was hoping to use this as a force for political power.

White wrote that it was difficult in 1970, particularly for the Democrats, to see how the country was changing. He correctly points out the rise of the New South during that period and how moderates were winning the fight there. He also points out several major spokesmen for the peace movement were winning critical governors Democratic primaries. Jessie Unruh in California, Sander Levin in Michigan, John Gilligan in Ohio, Patrick Lucey is Wisconsin and Milton Shapp in Pennsylvania.  Unruh would be trounced by the incumbent Governor Ronald Reagan  and Levin would lose to William Milliken but the other three candidates did win election. There were also peace candidates winning in notable Congressional primaries – in Manhattan, Berkley, Denver and Newton-Cambridge.

He also points out how the forces of this movement could do in states whose conventions and politics rested on the caucus system. Critical was one in Oklahoma in which an anti-war county chairman packed his convention with anti-war activists:

His convention wrote a party platform calling for legalized abortion, a timetable for withdrawal from Vietnam and reduced penalties for possession of marijuana. One candidate warned that they were murdering candidates for the Senate and the House in the hawk and bible state. Replied a liberal candidate "Any candidate we murder, let him be murdered."

More than any other statement in White's book this makes it clear how little the Movement cared about winning elected office rather than making a point.

It was clear the Movement held tremendous weight within the party itself but as White points out the average voter was not swept away. In 1970 the Movement would sweep over the Washington state convention and endorse a primary challenger to Henry Jackson, one of the most conservative Democrats in the Senate. Jackson would win his primary with 84 percent of the vote and then crush his Republican opponent by nearly five to one in the general election. And as for the most colorful members of the new theology won primaries but their votes totals in the general fell off. Bella Abzug and Ronald Dellums would win election to the House and be faces among the far left of the party for the decade to come. But Robert Drinian in the Massachusetts fifth would only win by two points in tight three way race. Craig Barnes the Democratic nominee in the first would lose in the general to Mike McKevitt the first time, flipping the district to the Republicans. And in Connecticut Reverend Joseph Duffey had led an insurgent campaign to primary the Democrat Thomas Dodd. Dodd would run as an independent as a result Lowell Weicker would be elected to the Senate – a position he'd hold for the next eighteen years.

"The new politics," White wrote, "could mobilize for caucuses and win primaries within the party – but it lost force in the strangest of ways, whenever it penetrated the hearts of the cities. He adds:

The Liberal Theology drew new lines – men of morality must take over the party, politics was too important to be left to the craftsmen of accommodation. The theologians saw no riddle in the contrary dictates of morality and reality. Life must conform to the highest principles – what was morally right, they felt,  must be politically sound."

I underlined those last two words because it is incredibly clear to outside observers that today the  Bernie Sanders-AOC wing of the Democratic party agrees with that theology one hundred percent. They believe that this is absolutely true and underperformance, if not outright rejection, from the voters has done nothing to diminish their certainty.

And  its worth a reminder of  what happened when George McGovern tried to harness The Movement to become President of the United States.

 

Both the implosion of the Nixon Presidency and multiple academics (many of whom are left-wing) have done much to rehabilitate McGovern's failed candidacy that it is worth remembering many of the failures at the time which White himself recorded. They reveal many ironies that those who choose to see McGovern as a martyr or prophet overlook.

The first is the most surprising. It is well known that after the 1968 convention McGovern himself sponsored a commission that would draft new reforms for the Democratic nominating process four years later and that have been part of any nominating process going forward. Many have suggested McGovern rigged the game so that he could get the nomination four years later and that is utter nonsense.

What is ironic is that these reforms were meant to allow the voters more of a choice when it came to nominating their candidate for President then they'd had before. And as the primary votes demonstrated very clearly they did not want George McGovern.

Much of this was due to McGovern's strategy which meant only competing in a certain number of primaries and leaving many of the others to other candidates. But it doesn't change the fact that as late as May 15^th McGovern was running a distant third in the overall count of primary voters, more than 1.1 million votes behind George Wallace and nearly half a million votes behind Hubert Humphrey. (Wallace would withdraw after the attempt on his life on May 15^th.) And by the time the primary process was over McGovern still had earned exactly 25 percent of all primary voters which was still behind Humphrey. 

And when it came to competing in the states that would be electoral prizes McGovern's track record was worse. He basically left Illinois to Edmund Muskie, finished third in Pennsylvania behind Humphrey and Wallace, lost Ohio in a close vote to Humphrey, finished a distant third to Wallace in Michigan (it was a crossover state and Wallace received nearly 800,000 votes) and barely contested Texas which Wallace won easily. By New York the race was over and his victory counted for little. Only in California did he win a competitive primary and he did in the aftermath of a series of debates in which Humphrey skewered him so badly that his once insurmountable polling lead turned out to be less than five points – and did enough damage to him nationally that his campaign never recovered.

McGovern's campaign was successful for much the same reason Goldwater's was eight years earlier: his organizers has spent the last year and a half doing great work at a caucus and state level getting all delegates to committed to him so that none of the other candidates knew what was happening until it was too late. Wallace admitted it was impressive that he'd managed to get the most votes but only had 324 delegates pledged to him by May 15 while McGovern, who had far fewer votes, had 560. In other words the game was just as rigged as four years ago: the only difference was it was the Left doing it rather than the establishment.

McGovern's beliefs were very much the theology of the left. He had in a sense always been a Progressive: he'd worked for Henry Wallace as a young man and had been a delegate to his Progressive Party Convention in 1948, a convention that in hindsight might well have been a model for what McGovern's own convention turned out to be nearly a quarter of a century later in terms of diversity, left wing viewpoints – and complete chaos in the eyes of a viewing audience. As White put it in an interview: "In George McGovern's mind the polarity was that of Good and Evil. He was a virtuous man, he knew what was right and wrong."

This no doubt made him appealing to The Movement who thought along those exact lines. But as White pointed out after multiple interviews you came away with conversations with McGovern with no idea what the man was thinking.

After a while, those who saw him frequently came away wondering what George McGovern thought himself. Eugene McCarthy made the cruelest comment. "Talking with George McGovern is like eating a Chinese meal. An hour after its over, you wonder if you really ate anything."

Because McGovern was the peace candidate that was more then enough for those who organized for him, those who followed him and those who listened to him on college campuses. McGovern said he was in favor of all the issues that were prominent to the left at the time: abortion, amnesty, busing of African-Americans, legalization of marijuana. McGovern did this because he needed to mobilize these forces to win the nomination and control of the party. But as White pointed out:

Yet what he said and spoke in the spring months could not be limited to audiences of his choosing. On the college campuses, within the circle of his faithful, he might be cheered as the voice of the future ; in the tormented cities of America, however, after a decade of similar, high-minded proposals, he sounded like the voice of the past – more of the same, and frightening.

As White reports McGovern's candidacy was not taken seriously until after the Massachusetts primary when he was officially the frontrunner for the Democratic nomination. Now that he was the candidate, the voters needed to know what McGovern stood for.

Ending the Vietnam War was by far his strongest issue but White pointed out that McGovern's view of it frequently made him sound like a demagogue, as bad as Nixon or Wallace at times. White quotes him:

Our government would rather burn down schoolhouses and schoolchildren in Asia than build schools for Americans at home…The Nixon bombing policy on Indochina is the most barbaric action that any country has committed since Hitler's effort to exterminate Jews in Germany…He's playing politics with the lives of American soldiers and with American prisoners rotting in their cells in Hanoi."

These were exactly the kind of statements that appeal to the Left then and now, which is no doubt why that get a pass from academics in a way that the more conservative demagogues do not.  These statements would no doubt work on a college campus; to more conservative voters it was always going to be a challenge. And that argument was McGovern's greatest strength as a candidate.

One of the biggest flaws in a campaign that had too many to count was his economics program. Designed in August of 1971, it was so broadly socialist that an eyewitness was outraged that McGovern went along with it without even once challenging them on their findings. It was released in a speech during the leadup to the Iowa caucuses which White describes as 'a long loose ramble which McGovern presented not as a blueprint but rather as suggestions or options… It proposed sweeping tax reforms that would close all loopholes gut the rich, comfort the middle class and sustain the poor." Two took on a life of their own: a new taxation of inheritance which no individua would be able to receive half a million dollars in gifts from their families during their lifetimes or after their deaths and a program that would give a way $1000 a year to every man, woman and child. This was not entirely unheard of but McGovern gave no idea of how he would pay for it.

Those who might be inclined could say that ideas such as this would evolve into many aspects of the beliefs of left-wing candidates like Bernie Sanders or Andrew Yang. But in an era far less polarized it was universally greeted by Democrats, Republicans and all forms of media as completely ridiculous and was an absolute gift to Republicans for rich donors.

It was statements like this that made the Democratic establishment certain that if McGovern was the Democratic nominee they would be headed for electoral disaster in the fall – a prophecy that turned out to be accurate, of course. Which meant they were determined to do anything in their power at the Democratic Convention in Miami to stop McGovern from getting the nomination.

George McGovern, for all his morality, was not naïve when it came to politics. Having attended the 1968 convention as a last-minute nominee for President, he knew the only way for him to win was to have the party unite behind him at the convention. But that was always going to be impossible. For even if the old guard had been willing to get behind him as White makes very clear, McGovern's own people had no interest in it.

Their thinking on politics was not unlike the slogans of the activists: they were here and the rest of America would have to get used to it. This convention was about them first and everyone else would have to bow to them. They didn't listen to the old guard, they didn't care what the electorate watching on TV thought, they barely gave lip service to what the candidate himself wanted. The 1972 Democratic Convention is the clearest example of what happened when the left took over a major party – and White makes it very clear what a shitshow it was.

He shows how the delegations had almost none of the Democratic elected officials on the convention floor that Democratic voters in those states had seen in previous conventions are on TV. He shows how the delegates engaged in seating delegations that would hurt any chance they had of winning states like Illinois a few months down the road. He shows how the delegates pushed their choices for chairman and vice-chairman of the McGovern campaign over the head of McGovern and the people who'd helped get him the nomination. He shows that they voted on a platform so radical that McGovern himself didn't agree with it – and then spent so much time and energy clowning around by nominating Archie Bunker and Mao for Vice President that he couldn't give his acceptance speech clarifying his views until 3 AM when the entire country was asleep. And he illustrates that by taking out any professionals who could successfully vet a Vice Presidential candidate it laid the groundwork for Thomas Eagleton's candidacy which sunk any remote chance McGovern had of winning in November.

And as White illustrates in the final chapters the people running McGovern's campaign were completely clueless on how to run a national campaign. I will deal with this in a later article but White points out by September it was clear the campaign McGovern was planning had nothing to do with his campaign planners. There was no head of the campaign per se to take orders from, McGovern had no idea how to delegate a campaign. No one was coordinating the themes of the campaign, its ideas, its television, its travel plans. The headquarters itself as White illustrates became filthier, with mail not being delivered, the Xerox machines being clogged, and obscenities being regular shouted. No one wanted to talk to anyone who had anything to do with politics, dismissing anyone who had a history of even being part of the JFK campaign as being a freak.

They regularly turned down anyone who might be able to help them in the general election. As one state Democratic Chairman said: "They felt they owned George McGovern, they had him long before anyone else and by God, they weren't going to share him." And that wasn't just politicians: the headquarters was mostly white with very few black faces and almost no women. They truly believed that McGovern winning primaries was the same as the general. "They were angry when we pointed out what the working man was resented was us."  They couldn't come up with a theme for their campaign until the final months, finally focusing on the corruption and Watergate. And this just made him look increasingly inept. By October White quotes one Democratic leader as saying: "The only way to save the party is to lose big."

Watergate and Nixon's presidency imploding less then two years after the election would do much to make many members of the candidate claim that Nixon had only won because of corruption and cheating. But as White points out as early as mid-May the Nixon campaign was sure of victory and all they cared about was building a landslide.  As White points out after the Democratic convention Nixon had 57 percent of the vote to McGovern's 34 percent – and that was before the Republican convention.

The McGovern campaign would later say that a list of 600,000 donors to their campaign – considered the most 'significant legacy of it' – was lost after the campaign, with some McGovernites arguing that new chairman Richard Strauss destroyed it in an act of vengeance. Given the incompetence of the McGovern campaign that White lays forth in great detail, I'm more inclined to side with Strauss when he says he never received it. If they couldn't deliver mail within the campaign, I find it more than believable that someone could have accidentally thrown it out after election day, saying they wouldn't need this anymore. And more to the point, it ignores a very real question. Having given their money to a campaign in which Richard Nixon had won with an unprecedented 60.7 percent of the popular votes and 49 out of fifty states why would anybody who gave money to McGovern want to make any political donations ever again?  And considering that the campaign was radically underfunded from day one, any Democrat worth their salt wouldn't trust them for helping fund a local party campaign, much less a Presidential one. They got what they paid for.

 

 

The Movement, in the form it represented, would break down in the aftermath of McGovern's defeat combined with the end of the Vietnam War in January of 1973.  Many of those who as part of it, such as Abzug and Dellums would remain in Congress and major liberal causes for the rest of their careers but they would be outliers as those who had been part of it chose to return to the activism that they had been loyal to during the previous decade.

Others from the McGovern campaign were prominent figures in Democratic politics in the decades to come. Gary Hart, McGovern's major campaign strategist, would win election to the Senate in Colorado two years later. Two members of the Arkansas delegation, a young couple named Bill and Hilary Clinton, would become active in Arkansas state politics with Bill first winning the office of  attorney general in that state in 1976. And at that convention the current governor of Georgia, Jimmy Carter had attended and had made a play to be McGovern's running mate.

All of them would be derided by former McGovernites as neoliberals who sadly seem to have taken the exact message that White would consider the greatest possible mistake: "Had they known the truth (about Richard Nixon after Watergate, they would have turned (him) out. In fact McGovern's own campaign workers took a very different perspective – arguably the correct one.

Ted Van Dyk, McGovern chief speechwriter, would actually say before election day, "The Republican Party is the place where people go when they want to go slow, and I think they want to go slow now." After that 49 state landslide, there's an argument that all those Democrats who enjoyed success in the aftermath had learned that lesson. Indeed for the rest of the 20^th century and well into the first decade of the 21^st  both political parties would sharply go to the right because of the 1972 election – the Republican Party was already heading there and the Democratic Party knew the only way to be competitive was to whittle away from the territory the GOP was co-opting. 

Patrick Caddel, McGovern's pollster would have a similar reaction after the election: "American is not geography, it's an idea. Watergate fouled up that idea."

In the final chapter White sums up what the 1972 election taught him:

The idea that prevailed was that America should go slow. Go slow abroad, go slow in the cities, go slow with power wherever it interfered where a child grew up, where she went to school, or where he was sent to die…The Americans were for slowing the pace of power and they chose Richard Nixon.

In the years that have followed many academics from that error have made the argument that the liberal theology was successful until the conservative revolution killed it. White – writing nearly a decade before Reagan's election – would argue the opposite: the conservative revolution happened because the liberal theology had failed. The struggles that take place today may very well be happening because the Movement, either then or now, has never accepted that message. But that is to be expected because as we shall see in later articles, those among the Movement had language for those who chose to give any alternate views to theirs – and McGovern's defeat had been failed spectacularly because their candidate had failed to understand it.