Will commentators never stop comparing Howard Dean to George McGovern? Will they never acknowledge that, far from being a single-issue "peace" candidate, Dean is a sensible moderate who boasts a fairly conservative record?
That's the repeated complaint from a chorus of opinion-makers who, having uncovered in Dean's antiwar harangues evidence of "nuance" and "moderation," argue that comparisons to the hapless 1972 candidate mislead more than they clarify. Neatly summarizing the revised wisdom, American Prospect editor Robert Kuttner instructs, "Dean is fundamentally a moderate. He was a fiscal conservative, rather centrist governor," while the National Journal's Jonathan Rauch warns that "Republicans chortling that Dean would be the next McGovern had better watch out: He may be the next Clinton." Taking the argument a step further, the Dean 2004 Web site trumpeted the rollout of the governor's ostensibly tough-minded foreign policy team with the admonition, "McGovernize This!" -- a request, alas, that anyone who bears the slightest familiarity with the writings of its members could all too easily oblige. Which is the burden those who reject the McGovern caricature must bear: In Dean's case, the caricature happens to be substantially true.
(1991 Photo Of George Mcgovern/the Washington Post)
|
|
This would hardly be the first time backers of an antiwar candidate have convinced themselves that the truth contains more nuance than it actually does. Arguing that McGovern himself was no McGovernite, his campaign biographer, Robert Sam Anson, insisted that the candidate could "sound almost hawkish" and touted "an almost conservative philosophy." New York Post columnist Pete Hamill assured his readers that McGovern, who "comes at you like one of those big Irish heavyweights in the 1930s," stood a very real chance of winning the election, while peace activist Allard Lowenstein enthused that McGovern was "in a very real way almost too good to be true. He was a centrist . . . He was a bomber pilot."
The election, of course, revealed that Lowenstein's center was located several degrees to the left of the rest of the country's. Nonetheless, claims that obviously left-leaning candidates amount to something other than the sum of their words and positions were to become a staple of subsequent Democratic presidential runs, including the present one. But the subordination of fact to wish only gets you so far, and simply asserting that a candidate is a centrist does not -- at least as far as a public arguably better attuned to the substance of centrism than those advancing the claim -- actually make him one.
This has done nothing to dissuade the Dean-is-no-McGovern chorus from adducing evidence to bolster their case in, among other places, Dean's fiscal record, his past opposition to gun control, and other domestic positions that could fairly be characterized as conservative. Never mind that McGovern himself had opposed gun control, had voted against cuts in defense spending, had earned poor ratings from liberal groups, and boasted a fairly moderate domestic record. The essence of McGovernism was not its namesake's domestic positions but his vituperative condemnation of America's conduct in Vietnam and on the international scene more broadly.
What puts Dean squarely in that tradition is his own, very similar bill of particulars, offered at a time when national security ranks once more as an urgent concern for voters. In this arena, Dean and his partisans like to remind audiences that he championed the first Persian Gulf War along with the military campaigns in Kosovo and Afghanistan.
Yet, just as the foreign policy positions McGovern touted as a candidate obscured his earlier service as a bomber pilot and his votes in favor of military action in Vietnam, so too do the actual positions of candidate Dean rightly count for more than the foreign policy inclinations of Gov. Dean. And, his protestations to the contrary notwithstanding, candidate Dean's critique of America's global role has been no more confined to Iraq than McGovern's was to Vietnam. The White House contender's promise to seek "permission" from the international community before resorting to force, his refusal to "prejudge" Osama bin Laden, his pledge to "tear up the Bush Doctrine," his (subsequently withdrawn) demand that U.S. troops in Iraq "need to come home," his broadsides against the more hawkish members of the "Republican wing of the Democratic Party" -- is it really necessary to point out the echoes of McGovern in this litany?
The answer comes, oddly enough, from the December issue of Playboy magazine, which features a 5,000-word essay that, when not condemning the "warmongers" who have criticized both Dean and McGovern, details and even celebrates the similarities between the two. The author knows a thing or two about the McGovern analogy; indeed Dean, alone among the candidates, sought him out for advice. His name is George McGovern, and he has anointed a successor worthy of the name.
The writer is a senior editor at the New Republic and a Hudson Institute fellow.
