How Not to Succeed in Politics

The very astute liberal political historian Rick Perstein, whose book on Barry Goldwater is (as far as I’m concerned) the definitive history of the start of the modern conservative movement as a force in electoral politics, has a new book out on Richard Nixon. But to tell the story of Richard Nixon, he’s also got to tell the story of Nixon’s 1972 Democratic opponent, George McGovern and the 1972 Democratic convention.  BookForum’s got an excerpt from the book in which he does just that, and although the whole thing is worth reading, one passage in particular stuck out:

The New Politics reformers had fantasized a pure politics, a politics of unyielding principle—an antipolitics. But in the real world, politics without equivocation or compromise is impossible. Thus an unintended consequence for the would-be antipolitician. Announcing one’s inflexibility sabotages him in advance. Every time he makes a political decision, he looks like a sellout. The reformers fantasized an open politics, in which all points of view had time to be heard. That meant that the Tuesday session adjourned eleven hours after it began, at 6:15 am—a fortunate thing, coolheaded Democratic strategists decided, terrified over what this all looked like on TV.

In recent years, Democrats have united their party to a greater extent than in 1972, but as the increasingly bloody Obama/Hillary stand-off shows, this remains a problem for the party.  Even when it has some direction, it has a hard time unifying everyone and moving toward it.  This isn’t to say that the GOP is entirely unified; there are clearly some strong divisions in the party right now.  But even still, the relative ease with which a candidate like McCain — not always the favorite son amongst the base — has taken the lead suggests a less fractious group.