MSNBC's Chris Matthews is the latest to talk about this year as if it is 1972 and poor George McGovern losing badly to Richard Nixon in Nixon's re-election campaign. Just listen to this whine from him. It is worth the whole listen to really get to understand how this corporate employee's mind works.
Not once does Matthews look at the current polling data showing Bernie ahead of Trump nearly everywhere Trump magically won in 2016 when Trump had no business winning. Not once does Matthews go back to the 1972 polling data, which shows Nixon beating McGovern in the spring by double digits--a time when many American workers could not fathom their lives would be ruined by global corporate capitalists and where corporate media narratives went largely unquestioned. The Nixon camp had already perfected the way to divide workers on cultural issues--hardhats beating up and screaming at hippies was a favored "issue" for corporate media to exploit--and the Nixon camp had perfected the Southern Strategy through the use of racist dog whistles, oftentimes hidden within calls for more "law and order."
It never occurs to Matthews to ask, in light of what supposedly happened to Gore and Hillary Clinton and third party candidates Nader and Stein, why it was that leading Democrats across the land formed "Democrats for Nixon," and with Democratic Party stalwarts such as John Connolly, Robert Strauss (who, right after the 1972 election, was rewarded to become head of the national Democratic Party), AFL-CIO president George Meany and others, going for Nixon or sitting on their hands against the Democratic Party's nominee, George McGovern. McGovern was a true patriotic American, a medal winning Air Force pilot in WWII, had a 100% rating from the AFL-CIO, and was a decent human being who was still within the mainstream of most Democratic Party voters' views. Funny how the debacle has long been blamed on McGovern, not those who defected--the opposite of what we continue to hear from Clintoites and Neo-liberals about Nader and Stein voters. What's worse is the people who deserted the Democrats in 1972 went right over directly to the Republicans and Nixon.
And Matthews conveniently forgets that part of the various parts of what is called the Watergate scandal(s) involved the "rat-f**king" tactics of the Nixon camp to sabotage the Democratic Party's primary--and undercut the more compliant to the powers that be candidates, Senator Ed Muskie (D-Maine) and the aging Hubert Humphrey (D-MN).
But again, the big difference is McGovern was largely unknown nationally compared to most politicians running for president, Nixon had much stronger polling against all Democrats that year, and Nixon had his foreign policy triumphs in China and Russia that year, which took most of the air out of the political room. Unlike Matthews, at least this writer at The New Republic--in 2016--and this writer, Ed Kilgore (a former DNC pooh-bah), at New York Magazine, in 2019, have a much better clue about the significance of the 1972 presidential election and any relevance it may possibly have to 2020's presidential elections. I hesitate to call Matthews an idiot, but what would be worse and more accurate is to call him a corporate employee who is hack.
