I was reading
the transcript of the 1976 vice-presidential debate between Bob Dole and Walter Mondale when a quote by Dole popped out at me. It was on the subject of an embargo on American grain exports imposed by Gerald Ford and opposed by Dole himself. Dole suggested that George Meany was responsible for the embargo:
Now this is extremely interesting to me. Of all the Democratic Presidential candidates of the past half-century or so, the consensus opinion on McGovern is that he was by far the most left-winged out of all of them. Yet is seems that McGovern alone of any of them was willing to completely break with organized labor and directly oppose one of their key issues.
This isn't the only way in which a public figure generally considered to be on the Right of the American political spectrum has praised McGovern. The
American Conservative magazine ran a glittering profile of McGovern's career in 2006. The choicest quote:
Richard Nixon has long been the subject of historical revisionism by his partisans: that he instituted mass desegregation of the school system and established the EPA is held up as proof-positive that he should never have been hated as much as he was by the 'Left'. Why, then, can't a narrative be constructed from the opposite perspective? That, in the 1972 campaign, George McGovern was the traditionally conservative candidate?
It doesn't fit perfectly, of course. McGovern wanted to institute a Minimum Guaranteed Income. But then, Nixon had made some overtures towards this in his campaign as well. On economic issues it seems to me a draw, though McGovern still looks better than the man whose foreign policy led to the oil crisis in 1973.