Nixon and The McGovern Commission: How The New Women and Pansy Ass Men Left Was Created And Served the Right
Masculist
sabotage which caused McGovern caused him to get nominated in '72.
The extent of Nixon's conspiracy, known as "Watergate", to get
McGovern nominated is much greater than people know. The new book
"Nixonland" shows a broader conspiracy.
It also should be noted that it was Nixon who laid the groundwork for
much of the "New Left" through environmental, women's and youth
(lowering the voting age) legislation.
All of this ultimately killed the unions, except government unions
natch, and social programs which has produced what we see now...a Left
indistinguishable from the Right except on social issues which the
Right ignores. Economic Rightists should thank Nixon and Leftists
should now be seen as the dupes of Nixon, not vica versa as they
thought. Good people everywhere lost.
Tom
http://www.boston.com/news/globe/ideas/articles/2003/11/23/primary_colors/
Primary colors
How a little-known task force helped create Red State/Blue State
America
By Mark Stricherz, 11/23/2003
ONCE, OUR TWO MAJOR political parties were thought to represent the
haves (Republicans) and the have-nots (Democrats). But now they
increasingly represent either "Red" or "Blue" America. According to a
new study by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, the
country is evenly but sharply divided by region and culture. This
confirms that the color-coded electoral map of the 2000 presidential
election -- in which Democrats won the "blue" states on the coasts and
upper Midwest while Republicans won the "red" heartland and the South
-- was no fluke. Indeed, note the study's authors, in their 16 years
of measuring voters' attitudes, there has never been a wider gap
between church-attending, socially conservative Republicans and
relatively sermon-free and liberal-minded Democrats.
There have been a number of attempts to explain this growing divide.
In their 1991 book "Chain Reaction," Thomas and Mary Edsall argued
that the Democratic Party's embrace of the civil rights movement,
followed by Nixon's Southern Strategy, caused many working-class
whites to desert their ancestral party in favor of the GOP. In 1991,
E.J. Dionne Jr. extended the argument in his book "Why Americans Hate
Politics," contending that Republicans "were able to destroy the
dominant New Deal coalition by using cultural and social issues --
race, the family, 'permissiveness,' crime -- to split New Deal
constituencies."
But both explanations are overly broad and incomplete. If region and
culture divide the parties, it is not simply the legacy of the
upheavals of the 1960s. It is also the legacy of a forgotten 28-member
body called the Commission on Party Structure and Delegate Selection
(1969 -- 72), better known as the McGovern or McGovern-Fraser
commission.
The McGovern commission, chaired first by Senator George McGovern and
then Congressman Don Fraser of Minnesota, ended the old boss system of
choosing presidential nominees and helped create the modern
presidential primary system. This led to a class shift in each party,
as affluent liberals gained more power in the Democratic Party while
working-class conservatives won more say in the GOP.
Perhaps most importantly, the commission changed the rationale for
choosing presidential nominees: Picking a candidate who was likely to
win became less important than choosing one who represented the views
of primary voters and special-interest groups. Today the legacy lives
on in the insurgent candidacy of quintessential "blue-state" candidate
Howard Dean.
* * *
Wisconsin governor Robert LaFollette created the first direct primary
(for statewide offices) in 1904. But presidential primaries didn't
become especially important until '56, or decisive until '72. Before
then, from 1832 to 1968, each party chose its nominee with the help of
party bosses.
While the aim of the boss system was to reward candidates who appealed
to all wings of the party, in practice it was often abused. In 1968,
the Democrats nominated Hubert Humphrey, even though many Democrats
abhorred his muddled position on the Vietnam War and he hadn't entered
a single primary.
Party reformers, associated mostly with antiwar candidate Eugene
McCarthy, were outraged. They proposed studying the delegate selection
rules, and their cause got an enormous lift from the famously
disastrous Chicago convention, where tens of thousands of young people
battled the police in the city streets. On Aug. 27, the second night
of the convention, Democratic delegates voted for a commission that
would seek to ensure that "all Democratic voters have had full and
timely opportunity to participate."
By early 1969, this appropriate and modest goal would be abandoned.
For a variety of motives, mostly having to do with bitterness over
Vietnam and the Chicago convention debacle, party reformers themselves
abused the commission's mandate. Instead of trying to reform the
Democratic Party, they sought to revolutionize it.
For starters, new Democratic National Committee chairman Senator Fred
Harris of Oklahoma didn't appoint any party bosses -- such as former
Pennsylvania governor David L. Lawrence and former DNC chairman John
M. Bailey -- or their representatives to the commission, as promised.
"I made up the membership of the commission in such a way as to ensure
that they would come up with what they did come up with," he says
today.
As a result, the commission was stacked with party reformers, many of
whom were deeply opposed to the war.
One of these was 30-year-old Ken Bode, hired as the commission's
research director (he later became the moderator of PBS's "Washington
Week in Review"). Bode favored increasing the representation of women
and young people in the party, in part to advance ideological goals."
At that time it was well-known women were more likely to oppose the
war," Bode said in an interview early last year. "There was a cleavage
in society. People under 30 were fighting this war, and we said,
'Count the number of delegates who were under 30 and women.' The idea
was that if women were brought in, there would have to be policy
consequences."
Those ideas bore fruit at the commission's final two meetings in 1969,
held on Nov. 19 and 20. In the old and elegant Senate Caucus Room, the
revolutionaries pushed through three major changes. First, the
commission could require state Democratic parties to comply with its
wishes -- the equivalent of Congress being able to do the same to each
of the 50 state legislatures in the country. Second, it would require
soft quotas in the selection of delegates. Women, young people, and
blacks would have to be represented in numbers "in reasonable
relationship" to their demographic presence.
Third, there would be an end to the practice of appointing ex-officio
delegates (i.e., the cronies of the bosses) to the convention. Today,
about 20 percent of delegates are still "super" or ex-officio
delegates, interest group representatives, and union officials, the
latter two appointed by party officials.
The McGovern commission brought the old system to an end. No longer
would party bosses have control over two-thirds to four-fifths of the
delegates. Not only could they no longer appoint ex-officio delegates,
but just as importantly -- and against the desires of many on the
commission -- a number of state legislatures decided to institute new
elections in order to comply with the jumble of new rules. Thus the
modern presidential primary was born. In 1968, 16 states held
primaries. By 1972, 28 did -- and George McGovern himself became the
Democratic nominee. In 2004, primaries are scheduled in 33 states.
* * *
The McGovern commission also changed the makeup of the party's
followers. No longer would nonunionized working-class whites have the
same influence in party affairs. As polls have consistently shown,
they don't tend to vote in primary races, while college-educated
professionals do. The latter are not only more civically engaged in
general than their working-class counterparts, they are more
knowledgeable about party affairs. As a result, more upper-middle-
class voters joined the party and had more say within it.
In addition, the McGovern commission brought more women in general,
and feminists specifically, into the Democratic coalition. It's easy
to forget now, but as late as 1971 many of the top supporters of an
Equal Rights Amendment, such as one-time RNC cochair Mary Crisp, were
Republican women. Many of these Republican feminists were attracted by
the Democrats' new rules for convention delegates.
"They were a way to seek to reform the existing structures within
rather than challenging them from the outside," said Doris Meissner,
who was head of the National Women's Political Caucus. In 1968, 13
percent of the delegates to the Democratic convention were women. In
1972, the number had jumped to 40 percent.
But in adding women and feminists, most of whom supported legal
abortion, the McGovern commission loosened other groups' ties to the
party. One such group would be the so-called Reagan Democrats,
typically Midwestern Catholics disheartened by the party's embrace of
social liberalism. When the economy is strong, as it was in 1988 and
2000, these voters tend to vote Republican.
As Democratic pollster Stanley Greenberg wrote in a post-2000 election
analysis for the Institute for America's Future, "Voters turned away
from Al Gore, in the first instance, on cultural concerns. . .. The
cultural minefield made the most damage, moving non-college white
women and younger non-college white men to Bush." According to
Greenberg, the three biggest doubts about Gore were, in order, his
perceived support for domestic partnership benefits for gay couples,
his position on abortion, and his support of gun control.
(Of course, the McGovern commission transformed the Republican Party,
as well. The assimilation of evangelical voters into the GOP's ranks
in the late 1970s was a result of their power in newly expanded
Republican primaries, as well as the rise of organized movements like
the New Right.)
* * *
A final effect of the McGovern commission was to change the rationale
of the party's presidential nomination process. The old boss system
focused on selecting candidates who would win. As John Bailey, DNC
chairman from 1961 to 1968, often said, "I go with the bird that can
fly, not with the pigeon that can't get off the ground." But the new
primary-based system ends up producing candidates who appeal not only
to primary voters but also to various ideological interest groups --
not to mention the TV camera.
Howard Dean's candidacy is an excellent example. Unlike most
Democratic nominees before 1972, he is more liberal on social issues
(except gun control) and foreign policy than he is on economic issues,
where his track record in Vermont is one of fiscal restraint. Among
Democratic primary voters, these positions play well. But while his
social liberalism -- along with his forthright demeanor and outsider
status -- have made him the Democratic front-runner, it may hurt him
in a general election. In the Pew study, Dean ranked fourth among the
Democratic candidates in a head-to-head matchup with President Bush,
trailing the incumbent by a 41-to- 52 margin.
Some conservative pundits have lately been chortling over the prospect
of a McGovern-style debacle in 2004. But the point of the McGovern
commission wasn't to win elections, but to transform the party. As
McGovern himself says today of his commission's work, "I'm not saying
we'd get a better presidential nominee. It just means that whoever we
nominate would go through a democratic process. Democracy has always
been a gamble, and if we make mistakes, at least they are our
mistakes."
Mark Stricherz, a Phillips Foundation fellow, is writing a book on the
McGovern commission.
© Copyright 2003 Globe Newspaper Company.
Belfo...@gmail.com
> It should be noted thatMcGovernwas the ONLY candidate Nixon didn't
> sabotage which causedMcGoverncaused him to get nominated in '72.
> The extent of Nixon's conspiracy, known as "Watergate", to getMcGovernnominated is much greater than people know. The new book
> "Nixonland" shows a broader conspiracy.
>
> It also should be noted that it was Nixon who laid the groundwork for
> much of the "New Left" through environmental, women's and youth
> (lowering the voting age) legislation.
>
> All of this ultimately killed the unions, except government unions
> natch, and social programs which has produced what we see now...a Left
> indistinguishable from the Right except on social issues which the
> Right ignores. Economic Rightists should thank Nixon and Leftists
> should now be seen as the dupes of Nixon, not vica versa as they
> thought. Good people everywhere lost.
>
> Tom
>
Great article Tom! This explains why the dems nowadays seem more like
the repubs of old.
Belfort Bax
> body called theCommissionon Party Structure and Delegate Selection
> (1969 -- 72), better known as theMcGovernorMcGovern-Frasercommission.
>
> TheMcGoverncommission, chaired first by Senator GeorgeMcGovernand
> then Congressman Don Fraser of Minnesota, ended the old boss system of
> choosing presidential nominees and helped create the modern
> presidential primary system. This led to a class shift in each party,
> as affluent liberals gained more power in the Democratic Party while
> working-class conservatives won more say in the GOP.
>
> Perhaps most importantly, thecommissionchanged the rationale for
> abused thecommission'smandate. Instead of trying to reform the
> Democratic Party, they sought to revolutionize it.
>
> For starters, new Democratic National Committee chairman Senator Fred
> Harris of Oklahoma didn't appoint any party bosses -- such as former
> Pennsylvania governor David L. Lawrence and former DNC chairman John
> M. Bailey -- or their representatives to thecommission, as promised.
> "I made up the membership of thecommissionin such a way as to ensure
> that they would come up with what they did come up with," he says
> today.
>
> As a result, thecommissionwas stacked with party reformers, many of
> whom were deeply opposed to the war.
>
> One of these was 30-year-old Ken Bode, hired as thecommission's
> research director (he later became the moderator of PBS's "Washington
> Week in Review"). Bode favored increasing the representation of women
> and young people in the party, in part to advance ideological goals."
>
> At that time it was well-known women were more likely to oppose the
> war," Bode said in an interview early last year. "There was a cleavage
> in society. People under 30 were fighting this war, and we said,
> 'Count the number of delegates who were under 30 and women.' The idea
> was that if women were brought in, there would have to be policy
> consequences."
>
> Those ideas bore fruit at thecommission'sfinal two meetings in 1969,
> held on Nov. 19 and 20. In the old and elegant Senate Caucus Room, the
> revolutionaries pushed through three major changes. First, thecommissioncould require state Democratic parties to comply with its
> wishes -- the equivalent of Congress being able to do the same to each
> of the 50 state legislatures in the country. Second, it would require
> soft quotas in the selection of delegates. Women, young people, and
> blacks would have to be represented in numbers "in reasonable
> relationship" to their demographic presence.
>
> Third, there would be an end to the practice of appointing ex-officio
> delegates (i.e., the cronies of the bosses) to the convention. Today,
> about 20 percent of delegates are still "super" or ex-officio
> delegates, interest group representatives, and union officials, the
> latter two appointed by party officials.
>
> TheMcGoverncommissionbrought the old system to an end. No longer
> would party bosses have control over two-thirds to four-fifths of the
> delegates. Not only could they no longer appoint ex-officio delegates,
> but just as importantly -- and against the desires of many on thecommission-- a number of state legislatures decided to institute new
> elections in order to comply with the jumble of new rules. Thus the
> modern presidential primary was born. In 1968, 16 states held
> primaries. By 1972, 28 did -- and GeorgeMcGovernhimself became the
> Democratic nominee. In 2004, primaries are scheduled in 33 states.
>
> * * *
>
> TheMcGoverncommissionalso changed the makeup of the party's
> followers. No longer would nonunionized working-class whites have the
> same influence in party affairs. As polls have consistently shown,
> they don't tend to vote in primary races, while college-educated
> professionals do. The latter are not only more civically engaged in
> general than their working-class counterparts, they are more
> knowledgeable about party affairs. As a result, more upper-middle-
> class voters joined the party and had more say within it.
>
> In addition, theMcGoverncommissionbrought more women in general,
> and feminists specifically, into the Democratic coalition. It's easy
> to forget now, but as late as 1971 many of the top supporters of an
> Equal Rights Amendment, such as one-time RNC cochair Mary Crisp, were
> Republican women. Many of these Republican feminists were attracted by
> the Democrats' new rules for convention delegates.
>
> "They were a way to seek to reform the existing structures within
> rather than challenging them from the outside," said Doris Meissner,
> who was head of the National Women's Political Caucus. In 1968, 13
> percent of the delegates to the Democratic convention were women. In
> 1972, the number had jumped to 40 percent.
>
> But in adding women and feminists, most of whom supported legal
> abortion, theMcGoverncommissionloosened other groups' ties to the
> party. One such group would be the so-called Reagan Democrats,
> typically Midwestern Catholics disheartened by the party's embrace of
> social liberalism. When the economy is strong, as it was in 1988 and
> 2000, these voters tend to vote Republican.
>
> As Democratic pollster Stanley Greenberg wrote in a post-2000 election
> analysis for the Institute for America's Future, "Voters turned away
> from Al Gore, in the first instance, on cultural concerns. . .. The
> cultural minefield made the most damage, moving non-college white
> women and younger non-college white men to Bush." According to
> Greenberg, the three biggest doubts about Gore were, in order, his
> perceived support for domestic partnership benefits for gay couples,
> his position on abortion, and his support of gun control.
>
> (Of course, theMcGoverncommissiontransformed the Republican Party,
> as well. The assimilation of evangelical voters into the GOP's ranks
> in the late 1970s was a result of their power in newly expanded
> Republican primaries, as well as the rise of organized movements like
> the New Right.)
>
> * * *
>
> A final effect of theMcGoverncommissionwas to change the rationale
> of the party's presidential nomination process. The old boss system
> focused on selecting candidates who would win. As John Bailey, DNC
> chairman from 1961 to 1968, often said, "I go with the bird that can
> fly, not with the pigeon that can't get off the ground." But the new
> primary-based system ends up producing candidates who appeal not only
> to primary voters but also to various ideological interest groups --
> not to mention the TV camera.
>
> Howard Dean's candidacy is an excellent example. Unlike most
> Democratic nominees before 1972, he is more liberal on social issues
> (except gun control) and foreign policy than he is on economic issues,
> where his track record in Vermont is one of fiscal restraint. Among
> Democratic primary voters, these positions play well. But while his
> social liberalism -- along with his forthright demeanor and outsider
> status -- have made him the Democratic front-runner, it may hurt him
> in a general election. In the Pew study, Dean ranked fourth among the
> Democratic candidates in a head-to-head matchup with President Bush,
> trailing the incumbent by a 41-to- 52 margin.
>
> Some conservative pundits have lately been chortling over the prospect
> of aMcGovern-style debacle in 2004. But the point of theMcGoverncommissionwasn't to win elections, but to transform the party. AsMcGovernhimself says today of hiscommission'swork, "I'm not saying