Horowitz on McGovern

David Horowitz:

On Christmas Day former Senator and former presidential candidate George McGovern wrote a letter to the editor of the Los Angeles Times (and probably many other papers) calling for an American surrender in Iraq. George McGovern has not been in the headlines for three decades and his name consequently may be unfamiliar to many. But no one has had a greater or more baleful impact on the Democratic Party and its electoral fortunes than this progressive product of the South Dakota plains.
...As a post-graduate student at Berkeley in the early Sixties, I was one of the organizers of the first demonstration against the war in Vietnam. It was 1962 the organizers of this demonstration as of all the major anti-Vietnam demonstrations (and those against the Iraq war as well) was a Marxist and a leftist. The organizers of the movement against the war in Vietnam were activists who thought the Communists were liberating Vietnam in the same way Michael Moore thinks Abu Musab al-Zarqawi is liberating Iraq.
In 1968, Tom Hayden and the anti-war left incited a riot at the Democratic Party convention which effectively ended the presidential hopes of the Democratic candidate Hubert Humphrey. Humphrey, who was Lyndon Johnson’s Vice President was a supporter of the war. This paved the way for George McGovern’s failed presidential run against the war in 1972.

Failed is too kind; McGovern was routed. A Democratic candidate for President whom had deep support from the anti-war left against a hated incumbent who supported the war and the Democrat was beaten soundly; sound familiar? This essay brings up interesting points concerning when the Dems stopped being the "party of the people" and started being the party of surrender and hand-wringing.