Back in 1972 I supported George McGovern for president. I thought I was a liberal then. One of the people in the office where I worked slipped me one of these notes as a joke. The vast majority of the people in the office were Nixon supporters. As a political items collector, I should have held on to it, but somehow I lost it during one of my moves. I was in a coin shop yesterday, and they happened to have a pile of them. I obtained one with a blue back and a brown back. Here it is the blue back version, which is what my office mates gave me in 1972. This piece represents at lot trivial history on the 1972 presidential campaign. One indicator as to weather or not a candidate would be a good president is how they run their political campaign. McGovern showed what he would have been, a disaster. His presidential campaign was one of the worst. One of McGovern's proposals was to pay $1,000 to every person in the United States. He got around the "money to millionaires" charge by saying that the taxes would take the $1,000 from them. A Thousand dollars was a lot more money in 1972 than it is today. My annual salary was $10,000 a year, and that was above average. Therefore this would have been quite a handout. It was a dumb idea that hurt an already dead campaign. The back covers another McGovern snafu, his pick for vice president. Like too many presidential campaigns, McGovern put little thought into who would be his running mate. After a hard fought nomination process, he picked Senator Thomas Eagleton of Missouri on the spur of the moment. Eagleton failed to tell McGovern that he had suffered from depression and that he had had shock treatments. When the story broke, McGovern stayed by Eagleton at first and said that he "was backing him 1000%." Still the story won't go away, and McGovern caved. A lot of Democrats wanted Ted Kennedy to take his place. Kennedy wisely passed. Instead the Democrats held a mini convention and picked Kennedy in-law, Sargent Shriver. The Eagleton affair probably cost McGovern votes. My parents were "yellow dog Democrats" who would have voted for ANY Democrat, but they were disappointed in McGovern when he caved. They sill voted for him, but they viewed the way he handled the whole thing as a big mistake. Others blamed him more. Here is a McGovern - Eagleton button. It's been said that ALL of these pieces were made AFTER Eagleton left the ticket. Still they were made for collectors. And her is an "official" button, from the same maker, with Shriver in the second spot. "Come home American," was the theme of McGovern's acceptance speech, which he delivered at 3 in the morning. That was another McGovern snafu. Acceptance speeches often give a candidate a lift. The McGovern speech was useless because no one saw it. McGovern lost in every state except Massachusetts. Later on when the Watergate Scandal broke, a few Democrats wore these buttons.
