Opinionline: McGovern's legacy is a life of service
Aberdeen (S.D.) News, editorial: "The accomplishments of South Dakota's George McGovern (who died on Sunday) cannot be overstated. Known nationally for his failed 1972 presidential campaign against Richard Nixon, McGovern had a long and storied career. ... In politics, McGovern focused on the needs of working families, with a keen interest in agriculture, nutrition and hunger issues. ... We will remember him as a humble public servant who gave his time and much of his 90 years to the betterment of his fellow citizens."
Eleanor Clift,TheDaily Beast: "Forty years after losing the presidency in a landslide, McGovern still tortured himself wondering what he could have done differently to change the outcome. ... McGovern suffered privately but never betrayed any bitterness, not even when the presidency of the man who vanquished him, Richard Nixon, unraveled as a result of the Watergate scandal. Losing the presidency, McGovern wrote, was 'one chapter in a long, complex and richly happy life.' He grieved, he said, not for himself, but for the thousands more young Americans and Vietnamese destined to lose their lives in a war he would have brought to an end."
Walter Mears, Associated Press: "(McGovern) wasn't good at political gamesmanship. He suffered his worst blunders when he strayed from straight talk in his doomed 1972 presidential campaign. … By the time he was nominated for the White House, McGovern had been marginalized by rivals in his own party, who argued that he was too far left to be elected. … McGovernite became a label for losers. But he went back to the Senate, and within months he could joke ruefully about his landslide loss."
Bruce Miroff,TheNew York Times: "During the 1972 presidential campaign, political pundits assumed that a man who was that nice could not possibly be the strong leader Americans required. Few predicted that he would still be standing after the early primaries. McGovern ... was a decent man, but beneath a mild exterior he was ambitious, tough and brave. … What supporters most remembered about him was the moral clarity of his character and vision. This clarity may have cost him in the 1972 election, but it was a principal source of the abiding affection that so many Americans ... feel for McGovern."
John Nichols,The Nation: "McGovern's campaigns remain definitional political experiences for millions of Americans because they were about more than politics. They were about a deep vision of the republic's past, present and future. ... Generations of Democrats recognized McGovern as a North Star hero, just as generations of Republicans made him the face of what they fear: a politics of compassion and decency that would, in the words of one of McGovern's heroes, former Montana senator Burton Wheeler, 'place humanity above the dollar.'"
Nick Gillespie,Bloomberg: "McGovern, (many friends and foes) say, effectively turned the Democratic Party over to wild-haired incompetents and left-wing dreamers whose extremism ultimately set the stage for the Reagan 'revolution' and the rise of a right-of-center America. There's truth in that. McGovern's early criticism of the Vietnam War was out of step with a bipartisan Cold War consensus that smothered serious debate for too long. Yet when you take a longer view of his career ... what emerges is a rare public figure whose policy positions shifted to an increasingly libertarian stance in response to a world that's far more complicated than most politicians can ever allow."