http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_presidential_election,_1972
Without hindsight I’d probably have voted for Nixon due to McGovern’s highly objectionable views on foreign policy and social issues but with full knowledge of Nixon’s shenenigans (to put it mildly) and also the obvious fact McGovern could not have won, I suppose I would vote for him (although if there’s a write-in option I might just write-in Humphrey or Jackson).
Nixon ran on ending the war in '68 and we’re still in it; fuck him, McGovern it is.
McGovern without hesitation. I agreed with many of his stances on the issues and, from most accounts, he seemed like a pretty good guy (at least better than Nixon). That being said, as a candidate, McGovern was really inept even if a lot of his problems were due to bad luck and Nixon’s dirty tricks.
His nomination was due to Nixon’s (team’s) dirty tricks, which were designed to sabotage the primary campaigns of all the other Dem contenders because McGovern was judged the easiest to beat, and were entirely successful. That was the whole point of CREEP’s activities throughout Nixon’s first term, of which the Watergate break-in was only the tail end. You can read the story in Nixonland by Rick Perlstein. See also Ratfucking (that was CREEP’s own name for their tactics).
BTW, here’s a recently broken story about another break-in (of the safe at the Brookings Institute) that Nixon ordered personally. (It was never carried out.)
Its before my time, but from what I hear, McGovern was sort of a schlub.
Are you asking who I would have voted for back then, or who I would vote for given the choice today? The answer would probably be different.
I voted for McGovern then, and I would vote for McGovern now.
It was my first Presidential election. The federal voting laws had just changed so that you could vote at 18, so my younger sister was able to vote for the first time. I was jealous that I couldn’t vote till I was 22 but she got to vote at 18.
I was stationed at Travis Air Force Base at the time and drove a car with three bumper stickers:
VOTE (with a peace symbol for the O)
MCGOVERN
PEACE
I got a lot of stares.
BTW, John G Schmitz’s daughter is Mary Kay Letourneau, the teacher who kept having sex with her teenaged student and having children by him. They’re now married.
Say, was this the first presidential election with a Libertarian candidate?
I don’t know if I’d go that far. He was a nice guy and a good senator but, as a presidential candidate, he was rather dull and had the miraculous ability to make Nixon look charismatic.
And BrainGlutton, I did read Nixonland. Interesting book and an excellent refresher on a lot of things in the early 70s I was either too young to know about or had forgotten.
Interesting connection. Also BTW, Schmitz was the nominee of the American Independent party, which four years earlier had run George Wallace.
Yes, although they were only on the ballot in three states. It is also the only election in which the Libertarians won an electoral vote–from a faithless elector. Theodora “Tonie” Nathan, the vice-presidential nominee, was the first woman ever to receive an electoral vote for either office.
I had heard that he was actually kind of a crappy Senator; that he had this tendency to offend other Senators and wasn’t really “chummy”, so that, for instance, he had to take his name off the McGovern-Hatfield Amendment, because there were Senators who supported withdrawing troops from Vietnam, but he had pissed them off so badly they wouldn’t vote for a bill that he sponsored.
Same here. It’s great when hindight turns out to be the same as at-the-time-sight.
This was the last one before I became of voting age. I rooted for McGovern then, I would have voted for him in a heartbeat. Great man, but not the most politically astute individual ever to run.
Muskie’s nomination was far from a slam dunk, even if Nixon had been as pure as the driven snow. Many front-runners have imploded over the years, and Muskie was far from a universal favorite–see Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail for savage criticism of Muskie from the left.
McGovern won the nomination mostly because he was the most firmly and consistently antiwar candidate, which was the priority of the Democratic primary electorate.
Me too.
Ah, yes! FALOTCT’72! 
[QUOTE=Hunter S. Thompson]
There is almost a Yin/Yang clarity in the difference between the two men [Nixon and McGovern], a contrast so stark that it would be hard to find any two better models in the national politics arena for the legendary duality – the congenital Split Personality and polarized instincts – that almost everybody except Americans has long since taken for granted as the key to our National Character. This was not what Nixon had in mind when he said, last August, that the 1972 presidential election would offer voters “the clearest choice of this century,” but on a level he will never understand he was probably right . . . and it is Nixon himself who represents that dark, venal, and incurably violent side of the American character almost every other country in the world has learned to despise. Our Barbie doll president, with his Barbie doll wife and his box-full of Barbie doll children is also America’s answer to the monstrous Mr. Hyde. He speaks for the Werewolf in us; the bully, the predatory shyster who turns into something unspeakable, full of claws and bleeding string-warts, on nights when the moon comes too close . . . At the stroke of midnight in Washington, a drooling red-eyed beast with the legs of a man and the head of a giant hyena crawls out of its bedroom window in the South Wing of the White House and leaps fifty feet down to the lawn . . . pauses briefly to strangle the Chow watchdog, then races off into the darkness . . . towards the Watergate, snarling with lust, loping through the alleys behind Pennsylvania Avenue, and trying desperately to remember which one of those four hundred identical balconies is the one outside Martha Mitchell’s apartment . . .
[/QUOTE]
Can you explain the underlined portion?
That does not appear to be criticism of McGovern.
Nor of Muskie. What is your point?