Even though our military involvement in Vietnam came to an end anyway a couple of months after the election, and Nixon wound up out of power twenty-one months later, if you think about it, having McGovern in the White House would have spared us the whole Watergate scandal and the corrosive distrust in government that sprung from it. Also, a whole bunch of players who went on to become big names in the future (Cheney and Rumsfeld among policy-makers, and the Atwaters and Roves among political operatives) would have been mainly known as having been part of a failed administration and lost election, and would never have reached the positions of prominence that allowed them to spread their poison through the political system for decades. Not to mention that we wouldn't have seen the rush (spearheaded by Jimmy Carter at the '72 convention, let us remember) to "move to the center" and purge liberal idealism that was the hallmark of the Democratic Party through the Clinton presidency. Even today, we see its toll -- although I would be the last to claim that Obama is not progressive, neither he nor the other crop of current Democratic leaders is anything but doggedly pragmatic, without the idealism of the Kennedys and McGoverns. As, as the old saying goes, "where there is no vision, the people perish."
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