People who question a HRC nomination are just as committed to "winning" as HRC supporters.

[Ken Burch]

9. OK, Muskie would have won. But he was taken out by CREEP, not McGovern

Last edited Mon Nov 25, 2013, 07:44 PM - Edit history (1)

I actually supported Muskie before McGovern(I was eleven, but had an early interest in these things)...but his defeat was caused solely by the Nixon people(and by Muskie's failure to get an effective national campaign organization in place), and it's silly for you to be angry at McGovern over Muskie's defeat in the primaries. The kind of people who'd back Warren or Bernie Sanders in this era weren't the ones who were trying to stop Muskie in '72. And McGovern and his campaign didn't do anything dirty or unfair to Muskie...McGovern ran a pure, honorable, issues-based campaign and built his support on the merits...and the last thing Muskie would have wanted was for the party regulars to secretly leadpipe McGovern and guarantee Nixon an undeserved landslide. McGovern's main mistake was not realizing that the regulars would be more fixated with getting payback against him and the Sixties activist types who worked for him than they would be in trying to take back the White House. He assumed they'd be loyal to him, as he had been loyal to Humphrey in the fall of '68.

Muskie was also clearly a progressive...he was AGAINST the war...so you can't compare him to HRC, would(based on her present positions)would have run a "we can do it better" campaign on Vietnam that would have made electoral victory meaningless, since staying in the war would have made any liberal policies impossible. In the 1972 analogy, HRC is only comparable to Scoop Jackson, who lost simply because most Democrats honestly didn't ever want him nominated. She has nothing in common at all with Edmund Muskie.