The Underdog Democratic Senator from a Small State

Pushing the Democratic establishment candidate with idealistic aims to make revolutionary change that appeal to and motivate young people and attract celebrity endorsements.

No, not talking about Bernie.  Talking about George McGovern who startled the Democratic establishment and ended up pushing aside Edmund Muskie, the presumptive Democratic nominee in 1972.  

In 1972 the Democrats had controlled both houses of Congress for 17 years. But in the general election McGovern got clobbered 60.5% to 37.5% in the popular vote.  McGovern's idealistic liberal views, coupled with Nixon's southern strategy (backing away from active civil rights enforcement to swing southern whites, solidly democratic since the Civil War, over to supporting Republicans) laid the groundwork for a new Republican coalition that has dominated politics since.  By 1980 the Republicans grabbed the momentum and by 1996 Republicans took control of both houses of Congress and held it for 12 years, power that had eluded them for 66 years in the middle of the Twentieth Century (other that one session where they rode the coat-tails of Dwight D. Eisenhower when he was first elected). 

The times are different, the issues are different and Bernie Sanders is not George McGovern.  But the Bernie campaign reminds me in so many ways of George McGovern's idealistic campaign.  Bernie is idealistic and uncompromising in his progressive prescriptions for what ails us as a country.  I like Bernies vision of what this country should be better than what the decades of Republican  dominance have bequethed us.  But getting from where we are to where Bernie wants to be is a little like turning an aircraft carrier around in a bathtub.  Not surprisingly Bernie talks a lot about goals and ambitions and not so much about how to achieve them.

I feel like the Republicans are spent, out of ideas, burdened by the fact swing voters are aware of the Republican legacy of Iraq, the financial collapse and the last 5 years the most do-nothing Congress in modern history.  Their primary has been a spectacle of nonsense and name calling.  This is a significant opportunity to begin moving the country away from the Republican ideology that enriches the powerful and punishes the most vulnerable.  But leftish idealism has a poor history in this country as a formula for winning elections.  I don't want to see the country lose the opportunity because the Democrats can't resist overreaching.