"Come Home, America"

RIP, George McGovern.

First, Charles Pierce on the first and best presidential vote he ever cast.

I voted for George McGovern. I continue to this day to be prouder of that vote than of any other I ever have cast, and not merely because, by voting in my home state, I was part of the only electorate in the nation to spit in the eye of Richard Nixon, who actually was a crook.

McGovern was the last of so many things — the last true prairie populist, the last truly antiwar war hero, and, really, the last true insurgent to rise through the primaries and capture the nomination of a major party. (Carter me no Carters. The party establishment fell in line behind him the way it never did behind McGovern. There was no "Democrats for Ford" operation run against him. It only turned against him once he was in office.) Accepting that nomination, at a time when the Vietnam War was still raging, and when the country was not yet aware of the depths of the crimes committed by the incumbent and the men around him, McGovern delivered one of the great acceptance speeches of all time, and the only thing that anyone remembers is that it took place in the whiskey hours of the morning.

Read the whole beautifule thing.

Second, John Nichols at The Nation on the genius of "Come Home, America."

George McGovern’s vision makes even more sense now than it did in 1972.

When McGovern ran for president in 1972, his slogan was “Come Home, America.”
The South Dakota senator’s message was a necessary and appropriate one for that moment, when the United States was mired in what seemed to be a war without end in Southeast Asia—a war that emptied the US treasury into the coffers of a military-industrial complex that demanded resources that could have been spent on job creation, education and healthcare.
And it still resonates:

Together we will call America home to the ideals that nourished us from the beginning,” McGovern told the convention that nominated him almost four decades ago.

From secrecy and deception in high places; come home, America.

From military spending so wasteful that it weakens our nation; come home, America.

From the entrenchment of special privileges in tax favoritism; from the waste of idle lands to the joy of useful labor; from the prejudice based on race and sex; from the loneliness of the aging poor and the despair of the neglected sick—come home, America.

Come home to the affirmation that we have a dream. Come home to the conviction that we can move our country forward.

The wisdom and hope that was inherent in McGovern’s call that year was not sufficient to defeat Richard Nixon. In a matter of months, however, polls would reveal that Americans regretted their decision, as they came to recognize the extent of Nixon’s corruption.

Forty years on, McGovern’s vision that America might come home to the ideals that had nourished it from the beginning is less a matter of hope than necessity.

 I often long for another FDR. I think what the Democratic Party really needs is another George McGovern.