We tend to overglamorise the past, but it wasn't like the reformers were ... wrong to call out the corruption and blindness of the old machine party (I would imagine most of this forum would be far more likely to be McGovernites than Humphreyites or, lmao, the AFl's favourite candidate Scoop Jackson).
I think this would have been true say a decade ago on the forum, but Humphrey (and more broadly the midcentury New Deal labour liberal tradition) has gotten something of a rehabilitation on here in the past few years as members recognized Humphrey's strengths and perhaps equally importantly McGovern's flaws who was after all no proto-Bernie Sanders (late in his life McGovern opposed the Employee Free Choice Act for instance-
https://www.politico.com/story/2009/05/friendly-fire-labor-targets-mcgovern-022422). Even Scoop Jackson, who was far more of a sincere hawk than Humphrey ever was, looks much better in contrast to the ineptitude of the Carter Administration. After Vietnam was over, would it not have been better to have had an experienced Washington hand with the full confidence of labour in 1976 rather than Jimmy Carter?
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