"Come Home, America"...George McGovern's 1972 nomination acceptance speech

[Ken Burch]

(It was posted on the old version of DU, but reposting now with the senator's passing last month.)

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If ONLY the country had listened.

[MarianJack]

1. George McGovern...

...a greats man!

One reason that the country didn't listen was that the convention was such a disorganized mess that everybody was in bed by the time he got to speak around 2 AM.

PEACE!

[Ken Burch]

2. I always thought they should just have had him do the speech again the next night.

There was going to be prime-time tv coverage anyway, so why not?

Or, they could have booked tv time at least once in the fall campaign to re-run it.

[Drunken Irishman]

3. That and the whole campaign was a mess...

Sadly, it was just a disjointed mess. Even if McGovern had given that speech at a reasonable time, he was still going to lose in a landslide. McGovern was a great guy, a great senator, but easily defined and because of that, he could never shake being the candidate of amnesty, abortion and acid. The Eagleton disaster didn't help endear him to Americans, either.

It was just a poorly run campaign. The only way McGovern had a shot at victory in '72 is if Watergate blew up during the election and even then, I'm not so sure he would've won. It's just one of those elections, like in '84 and '96, where the incumbent is almost certainly unbeatable.