You could say it was because of George McGovern that I had my first rum and Coke. You could also say it was because of George McGovern that I became cynical about politics. You could also say it’s because of George McGovern that I’ll vote next month.
The evening before the presidential election, November 1972. My friend Pam and I went to the Sioux Falls airport to wait for McGovern and his entourage. It was dark and cold and his plane was late. Finally, it arrived. Even a pair of sixteen year olds could feel the doom in the air.
Pam and I spent Election Day at a county Democrat’s lovely home, calling people like crazy to see if they needed a ride to the polls. We didn’t bother to ask if people were voting for McGovern; we hoped they might vote for the other Democrats on the ticket. The college kids who were driving people to vote bounded in and out of the house to get their assignments. Pam and I had both been doing political volunteering for years, even at sixteen, and our parents supported us missing the day of school. Pam’s parents and her older sister were active in the party; while my parents weren’t friends of McGovern, the father of the state Democratic Party, he knew many of our relatives from the days he went around the state house to house, talking with folks about what the party stood for and why he was proud to be a Democrat at a time when that was a novel concept in South Dakota. As for me, I was an experienced pol; my first phone calling and envelope stuffing came for Gene McCarthy’s presidential campaign in 1968, the summer I turned twelve.
Finally, no one else needed a ride. A couple of the college boys took Pam and me along with them to the place where McGovern would make his speech later that night. We all knew what kind of speech it would be; the only question was how quickly it would come.
I remember the part something along the lines of “It hurts too much to laugh, and I’m too old to cry.” Pam and I felt kind of the same way. Then one of the college boys appeared, carrying what looked like soda pop. “Rum and coke,” he intoned darkly. “Even sixteen year olds need a drink on the night the world started to end.” We all nodded, and drank.
Two years later, Nixon gone and the world saved, I was thrilled to vote for McGovern in his Senate re-election effort. But things had changed by 1980. I was a reporter. McGovern’s opponent this time was a good man, Jim Abdnor, a man who had helped two of my uncles make it through college. I got to know too much about politics during that election, too much about staffers being used for campaign purposes before they came off the congressional payroll. I became disillusioned and cynical as I learned that these were common practices in congressional elections everywhere, not just in this bitter race in South Dakota. When election day came in 1980, I voted for the third-party senatorial candidate.
It seems odd, to think that Abdnor and McGovern and another colorful South Dakota politican I covered, Bill Janklow, all died this year. It seems odd to think that that cold night I stood outside at the airport, McGovern was younger than I am now. I get now that politicians, including those three, are a strange bunch, and that rules get broken all the time, even by men who are honestly devoted to public service. And despite that disappointment and cynicism I learned perhaps far too young, I’ll think of the three of them as I stand in line to vote next month. I’m still idealistic enough to believe my vote counts for something.
