Forgotten but not Gone

GEORGE MCGOVERN has a new office in Washington now, a few miles uptown from Capitol Hill, at Dupont Circle. He still hasn't broken the place in yet: it's a bit understaffed, scantily furnished, and the walls are bare except for some old McGovern '72 posters. This is the first new office George McGovern has had in eighteen years. The one he used to have, in the Russell Senate Office Building, belongs now to James Abdnor, the New Right Republican who won the 1980 election for senator in South Dakota.

McGovern always wanted to seem like an outsider, a fresh face. But that was image-building: after all, George McGovern is very much a veteran politician. It is therefore a bit surprising that he doesn't greet you with standard politician's etiquette--no slap on the back, no patronizing compliment for your home state. He just shakes your hand firmly, his youngish face breaking into the familiar half-moon smile, and asks, with genuine interest, what's on your mind.

And he tells you what's on his mind. It's a conversation, not an interview--he seems grateful for the chance just to talk. "I've been under a lot of pressure for the last twenty years," he says. "So for at least the next two years, I don't want to be on a schedule, to be tied down to anything." That explains why the South Dakotan turned down several prestigious job offers after November, including the chancellorship of the University of Massachusetts system. McGovern is satisfied for now writing articles and lecturing on politics once a week at Louisiana State New Orleans.

He turns, naturally enough, to the New Right's role in defeating McGovern--and other liberal senators--in 1980. It was never easy for him to win elections in a conservative farm state, McGovern points out, and with South Dakota's voters already evenly divided, the New Right's sophisticated media campaign--hitting hard at McGovern's liberal stand on abortion--may have been decisive. The former senator seems genuinely hurt by the Right's effort to label him a "baby killer." "What really hurt me the most were people who I knew, who'd supported me in the past, old friends coming up and saying, 'I just can't go with you this time.' And they wouldn't say why."

So McGovern decided to confront this New Right adversary from his new seat on the sidelines. In addition to his plans to taking it easy, McGovern has a political project as well--a new citizen action committee called "Americans for Common Sense" (ACS). The title, drawn from Thomas Paine's famous pamphlet, reflects the committee's objective: to inject "common sense" into the current political debate, which McGovern believes is dominated by the irrational messages of the New Right. ACS will act both as an information clearinghouse on New Right groups and as an organizing committee in support of progressive causes.

McGovern seems to separate the current president from some of his hate-mongering supporters. "Well, he's probably the kind of guy you wouldn't mind going fishing with for a weekend," he laughs. McGovern believes that Reagan himself probably makes very little of his own policy, merely acting as a spokesman for business interests and leaving more sophisticated policy-making to people like Alexander Haig and Caspar W. Weinberger '38. McGovern takes particular issue with Reagan's defense budget and claims "at least 30" senators agree with him. But he says the 30 are unwilling or unable to speak out. Among them, McGovern says, is his "good friend" Barry Goldwater, who is now too old to take up controversial causes. McGovern speaks with great fondness and respect for Goldwater, the man who stood at the opposite end of the ideological spectrum from him for 20 years in the Senate.

McGovern doesn't mention a return to electoral politics. Though chastened by defeat, he still possesses confidence in the progressive cause. He steadfastly refuses to paint any disaster scenarios for the future under Reagan. Moreover, McGovern retains his faith in reasoned political debate--he firmly believes that people with sound ideas and clear thinking can defeat the irrational Right, if only they have the courage to speak out.

THIS ABIDING FAITH in the power of reason was the guiding principle of McGovern's political career--as such, it was both his greatest virtue and the source of his ultimate failure. On the one hand, it gave him the determination to speak his mind, to take principled but unpopular positions on civil rights, on political reform, and on Vietnam. And his faith gave him the confidence to believe in the underlying sincerity of his political opponents: that is why he could be friends with Barry Goldwater, and why he thinks it is possible to out-argue the New Right.

But, on the other hand, as 1980--and the debacle of 1972--showed, McGovern's faith obscured his vision of political reality. The genius of the New Right groups who defeated him was to recognize that one can't afford to trust one's political opponents the way McGovern did. The Right doesn't just disagree with its adversaries--it hates them. To the New Right, Barry Goldwater's friendship with McGovern is a form of treason, or at least an inadmissible sentimentality in the midst of the struggle against liberalism.

So politics were never as good as George McGovern wanted them to be. And, if anything, the political game is rougher now, played by fiercer men, according to fewer rules. In a sense, the New Right's defeat of McGovern confirmed his obsolescence, confirmed that the political voices of the eighties will not speak with an indiscreet excess of conviction. Perhaps George McGovern, the former college professor, never belonged in politics in the first place. Perhaps that Capitol Hill office was meant for James Abdnor all along.