Regular visitors here may recall that I've been writing about historical parallels between our time and the 1960s for some time. Since The 1966 Game, I have traced parallels between those times and this one, seeking a new set of assumptions to drive our politics, finding parallels to the hippies in right-wing causes, hopefully providing some thoughtful entertainment along the way.
In this alternate universe President Barack Obama takes the position Richard Nixon once had. His policy assumptions are popular, but untested, and the man himself is personally reviled by those whose ideas he overthrew.
So who's George McGovern now?
Those with just a casual knowledge of history know McGovern was the most hapless Presidential nominee in a century, losing 3-2 despite the smoke of Watergate, Had that scandal not happened, had Nixon not let his demons consume him, the 1974 Democratic landslide and Jimmy Carter's 1976 election would likely not have happened.
The real tragedy, for conservatives, was that Watergate was unnecessary. Nixon had the people with him. But the validation Nixon sought would be given to Ronald Reagan instead. It's Reagan conservatives have made their political god, as Democrats made FDR a god in Nixon's time.
But that time has ended.
What's most interesting is how a political movement, once rejected, always doubles down on what liberals today have called The Crazy. McGovern himself is a shining example, but Republicans threw up the Hooveresque Alf Landon I 1936, with similar results, and William Jennings Bryan himself was the Democrats' choice in 1900.
It's sort of the way it is. When your entire world view collapses, you hang on to it all the tighter. In the modern vernacular you double down on The Crazy.
Even a Washington pundit can see the comparisons between the Mitt Romney of today and the Ed Muskie of yesteryear.
Romney is the natural heir, the next in line after Bush. Never mind that McCain's VP nominee in 2008 was Sarah Palin, not Romney. McCain was trying to jump ahead in history's book. It would have been like Humphrey, knowing he was behind, deciding to get the full force of the Left behind him by nominating, say, Abe Ribicoff, or McGovern himself, in Chicago. The hippies would have loved that, but my guess is the loser in that case would have been George Wallace, whose voters would have been well-and-truly scared back into Nixon's camp by such a move, as Democrats united behind Obama and Biden.
So who's George McGovern now?
It's important to note here where McGovern came from. While some still insist he was the product of Richard Nixon's imagination, the man he wanted all along, McGovern was in fact the man who headed the Democratic Party's re-appraisal itself after 1968. It was McGovern who led the creation of the rules under which he was nominated, with fewer politicians given sure seats, with more seats guaranteed to blacks and women and other trod-upon groups, and with proportional representation schemes that made coming to a consensus so hard he didn't give his own acceptance speech until 3 AM.
McGovern was a product of what we'd now call the Tea Party, the true believers within the party who demanded Democrats become truly leftist, confronting Nixon, rejecting suburban conformity, supporting real socialism. Just as today's Tea Party demands adherence to its political ideology, so the McGovern Democrats were certain that only total victory could hope to save America from itself.
And in the first election after a Thesis' rejection, such movements get what they want. You've got to get real drunk, and get the full effects of a hangover in the political wilderness, before you ever sober up from the heady aromas of political absolutes.
So the answer to our question becomes pretty clear.
It's Michele Bachmann.
Like McGovern, Bachmann is a candidate of beliefs, someone who has lived her politics, read all the great books that define her (unlike Palin), and someone who is beloved by the movement that spawned her.
(Anyone notice how all these people — Bryan, Landon, McGovern, and Bachmann — come out of the Midwest farm belt? I don't think it's a coincidence.)
Minnesota's 4th CD was carved specifically to elect a conservative, just as South Dakota's prairies were, a generation ago, designed for a liberal populist like McGovern. Michelle Bachmann has never had a truly competitive race, but she got into this one because she felt the ground shifting beneath her feet – her district will likely be eliminated in 2012.
When Tea Party people are pushed to pick someone who's actually running for President, they run from Romney and run toward Bachmann. Since they're going to dominate the Republican grassroots in 2012, she's the most likely nominee. The Tea Party will think that, by putting a woman at the top of their ticket they will magically attract women to vote against their own interests.
Which is sort of my point. Delusion needs to confront reality, it needs to be completely and thoroughly rejected, before the next set of political assumptions can find validation.
So make it Bachmann-Perry 2012.
