George McGovern

The 2020 Democratic National Convention is getting underway this week. It'll look a lot different from any past convention, though, because of the coronavirus pandemic. Let's go back 48 years, to 1972, when the Democratic party nominated South Dakota Senator George McGovern as their standard-bearer. Running on a liberal, anti-war platform, McGovern lost badly to Republican incumbent Richard Nixon -- who, less than two years later, resigned in disgrace over the Watergate scandal. When I interviewed George McGovern 2004, in he had just published a book advocating for those same traditional liberal values.