On pages 739-740 of Nixonland, Rick Perlstein tells the following story about George McGovern, the 1972 Democratic Presidential candidate:
“‘In a recent month,’ McGovern intoned in a radio ad, ‘a quarter of
the wounded civilians in South Vietnam were children under twelve. As
we vote November seventh, let us think of Tanya and all the other
defenseless children of the world.’ The candidate was howling, howling
into the wilderness. If he was going to lose, he would lose his way.”
Tanya was a twelve-year-old girl whom Richard Nixon mentioned in his
1972 acceptance speech before the Republican National Convention. She
lost her family in World War II, and Nixon exhorted, “Let us think of
Tanya and the other Tanyas and their brothers and sisters everywhere—-in
Russia, in China, in America, as we proudly meet our responsibilities
for leadership in the world in a way worthy of a great people.” McGovern was turning Nixon’s reference to Tanya on its head: Sure, lets
think of Tanya and people like her, but let us remember that defenseless
people like her are being wounded due to the war in Vietnam.
I like what Perlstein says on pages 739-740 because it is about
transforming a loss into an opportunity. If McGovern was going down, he
was going to go down making an important statement. Granted, people
were seeing him as a cliche of himself. He himself was much more
moderate than many believed him to be: he wasn’t in favor of drug
legalization, abortion-on-demand, or many of the radical or
controversial groups at the 1972 Democratic National Convention, but
many people thought that he was, one reason being that a number of his
prominent supporters had those stances. When McGovern tried to explain
that he wasn’t for putting half of the country on welfare whether the
recipients wanted to work or not, but instead wanted for everyone to
have a job, many did not believe him. They thought he was
flip-flopping. McGovern was on the defensive and was trying to explain
himself, and, as someone Perlstein mentions in the book asserted, when
you’re explaining, you’re losing. (Well, not always: there was Nixon’s
Checkers Speech, and Arnold Vinick’s exhaustive response to reporters’
questions at the nuclear power plant on The West Wing!)
Maybe McGovern had been caricatured and his loss was certain. But he
was still going to make a clear statement. He was still going to call
out evil when he saw it. He would appeal to people’s moral sensitivity.