Yes, I'm sick and tired of the election, too ... but ...

Yes, I'm sick and tired of the election, too.  I have to confess, though, that the night before the election is just like Christmas Eve was to me when I was a kid.  Maybe it's just me, but for all my excitement, I'm going to have a hard time getting to sleep tonight, and tomorrow morning I'll be up and running down the stairs ... because after months of being talked to and talked at, of dozens of robocalls and campaign contribution solicitations, of having my daily practical thoughts interrupted at every turn by a SuperPAC campaign ad, I'm finally going to get my present.  I'm going to get to have my say.

As much as I may be completely fed up with this campaign, I do love our process.  It's a great gift, and I can hardly wait until sunrise to open it.

Barack Obama at Greensburg Town Hall Meeting

... on March 28, 2008, at the Hempfield Area High School gymnasium.

Parley Christensen

Parley P. Christensen was born on this day in 1869 in Weston, Idaho.

A Cornell law graduate, Christensen became the youngest ever county attorney for Salt Lake County, Utah, and was a prominent Republican organizer until 1912, when he defected to Theodore Roosevelt's Progressive or "Bull Moose" Party. In the aftermath of Roosevelt's defeat that year, Christensen found himself aligned with pro-labor independents, and as a founder of the Utah Labor Party became a staunch defender of members of the International Workers of the World (IWW, or Wobblies) against politically-motivated criminal charges brought against them during the period.

At the first convention of the Farmer-Labor Party in 1920, Christensen was nominated for president, and he campaigned largely on the platform of establishing the 8-hour work day, disarming the U.S. and nationalizing basic industries, but also prominently supported the release of political prisoners such as his rival, Socialist presidential candidate Eugene Debs, who had been imprisoned for sedition after giving a speech criticizing U.S. government crackdowns against political dissenters. More leftists saw fit to vote for Debs himself as the "real deal" rather than for Christensen; Christensen polled 265,411 votes (mainly in Montana, South Dakota and Washington) to Debs' 919,799 as Warren Harding easily won the election.

After a tour of Europe which included a meeting with V.I. Lenin, Christensen settled briefly in Chicago, where he ran for U.S. Senate as the candidate of the Illinois Progressive Party in 1926. Shortly thereafter he moved to California where he became involved in Upton Sinclair's campaign for governor in 1934, and eventually served as the most liberal member of the Los Angeles City Council (1935-37 and 1939-49), until he was defeated from the left by Edward Roybal, the first hispanic to be elected to Council since the 1880s. Christensen died on February 10, 1954 in Los Angeles.

Never, Never Believe It

"If you are lucky enough to be a success, by all means enjoy the applause and the adulation of the public. But never, never believe it." -- Robert Montgomery.

Robert Montgomery was born Henry Montgomery, Jr. on this day in 1904 in Fishkill Landing, New York, the son of a rubber company executive.

Montgomery is remembered today, if at all, as the father of Bewitched star Elizabeth Montgomery, but his film and TV career is notable in its own right, for his contributions both on and off the screen.

After a few years acting on Broadway, Montgomery arrived in Hollywood for the beginning of the Sound Era, and as a prep-school educated boy with patrician good looks, he fell easily into the role of the devil-may-care, tuxedo-wearing playboy. He managed to rise above the bluntness of his typecasting in a few films here and there, including The Big House (1930), Private Lives (1931), Hitchcock's comedy Mr. & Mrs. Smith (1941) and They Were Expendable (1945), and was nominated for best actor Oscars for his performances as a psychotic murderer in Night Must Fall (1937) and as the boxer in a playboy's body in Here Comes Mr. Jordan (1941) --the inspiration for Warren Beatty's Heaven Can Wait (1978).

He served four terms as president of the Screen Actors Guild, beginning in 1935, during a time when Hollywood producers weren't interested in letting actors unionize under any circumstances. The fate of the fledgling organization was uncertain, but under Montgomery's leadership, the Screen Actors Guild boycotted the 1936 Academy Awards and voted to strike on May 10, 1937, causing the major studios to sign the first SAG minimum wage contract, one that applied equally to stunt men and extras under Montgomery's insistence.

Montgomery also managed to stare down a threat from the Capone mob. Capone had his hooks into the International Association of Theatrical Stage Employees (IATSE), which had managed to extract tribute money from Hollywood producers around the time that SAG was being born. Seeing SAG as a threat to his neat little arrangement, Capone tried to intimidate Montgomery by sending thugs around to slash his tires. Montgomery stood firm, however, invited the FBI into the mix, and ultimately cooperated with the Feds to get Capone's lieutenant Willie Bioff sent to prison.

The same sense of public duty that inspired him in his role with SAG was aroused by the conflict in Europe, and in 1940, Montgomery secretly went to France for several weeks to drive an ambulance. Shortly after he returned, he and Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. enlisted in the U.S. Naval Reserve, and Montgomery was placed in the Intelligence Section in London. Later, he served as an operations officer on a destroyer during the D-Day invasion, saw action at Guadalcanal, and commanded a PT boat in the South Pacific. He retired from the Navy with the rank of commander in 1944.

While continuing to act, he made his mark as an actor-director in Lady in the Lake (1947), the first Hollywood film to employ the subjective camera point of view of its protagonist for an entire feature. Montgomery starred as detective Philip Marlowe, but was seen on screen only at the odd moment when he might catch his own reflection in a mirror. "YOU do get into the story and see things pretty much the way the protagonist, Phillip Marlowe, does, but YOU don't have to suffer the bruises he does," noted the New York Times. "Of course, YOU don't get a chance to put your arms around Audrey Totter either. After all, the movie makers, for all their ingenuity, can go just so far in the quest for realism." Overall, the film was received as a curiosity, an interesting failure as a Hollywood film, but one that certainly confirmed Montgomery's willingness to take an artistic risk.

In the 1950s, Montgomery became the first effective political media consultant of the television age as an adviser to President Eisenhower, helping the ex-general to harness the new medium. In a particularly spectacular coup during the run-up to the 1956 election, Montgomery managed to convince CBS to air a birthday tribute to the president's wife Mamie in March 1956 -- never mind that the first lady's birthday was actually in November. Seeing Nixon's disastrous performance in the 1960 presidential debates against John Kennedy, Eisenhower is reported to have remarked that "Montgomery would never have let him look like he did in that first television debate."

Montgomery died on September 27, 1981 in New York City.

Seward and His Folly

William Seward was born on this day in 1801 in Florida, New York.

A skilled criminal lawyer, Seward became active in New York state politics by supporting the Anti-Masonic Party, and later entered the state senate in 1830 as an anti-slavery Whig. Beginning in 1838, he served two terms as governor of New York, returned briefly to his lucrative law practice, and was elected to the U.S. Senate from New York in 1849.

Serving in his second term in the Senate as one of the more eloquent anti-slavery partisans, as the 1860 presidential election approached Seward was also one of the more high-profile members of the new Republican Party, and with New York's delegation representing about 1/3 of the votes needed for the Republican nomination, Seward seemed to be the likely nominee of the Party. However, at the convention in Chicago, Abe Lincoln's backyard, Seward and his campaign manager Thurlow Weed found themselves stymied by the momentum forming around the rough-hewn railsplitter from Illinois, and on the third ballot, Lincoln carried the nomination.

Seward, while not confident of Lincoln's abilities, campaigned energetically for him and was rewarded by being appointed Secretary of State. Seward believed his personality and experience would come to dominate Lincoln's cabinet (and he surely was an able leader during the Civil War, shrewdly negotiating with Great Britain, through U.S. minister Charles Francis Adams, to keep the British from recognizing the Confederacy); but Lincoln ignored Seward's naive strategy to unite the South behind a Monroe Doctrine-inspired, manufactured war with France and Spain, later causing Seward to admit that Lincoln was the better man for taking the fight directly to the South.

As the Civil War drew to a close in April 1865, John Wilkes Booth and his fellow conspirators planned the assassinations of Lincoln, Vice President Andrew Johnson and Seward in order to throw the country into electoral chaos; and on the night that Booth fatally shot Lincoln at Ford's Theatre, Booth's compatriot Lewis Payne pistol-whipped Seward's son Frederick and stabbed Seward in his right cheek as he lay in his home recuperating from a recent carriage accident.

Although the stabbing permanently disfigured him, Seward recovered and continued to serve most loyally as Secretary of State to President Johnson, and was the nation's most respected supporter of Johnson's lenient Reconstruction policies. Seward negotiated the annexation of the Midway Islands, as well as the purchase of Alaska from Russia for $7.2 million (known for many years before the discovery of valuable mineral reserves there as "Seward's Folly"), and retired from politics at the end of Johnson's term in 1869. He died on October 10, 1872 in Auburn, New York.

Pat Brown

Pat Brown, Democratic governor of California, father of Jerry Brown, was born Edmund G. Brown on this day in 1905 in San Francisco, California.

Nicknamed for American patriot Patrick Henry (whom Brown is said to have quoted often as a boy), Pat Brown worked his way through evening law school and entered the bar in 1927. He entered the political arena almost immediately, running unsuccessfully for a California state assembly seat as a Republican from the San Francisco area in 1929. Switching to the Democratic Party, he was elected district attorney of San Francisco on his second try in 1942, was elected attorney general of California in 1950, and in 1958 became only the second Democratic governor of California since the 19th century.

A folksy, gregarious Catholic liberal who enjoyed the benefits of a Democratic majority in the state legislature, Brown's policies led to the expansion of the California school and highway systems, and to the irrigation of portions of the California desert. Although he was morally opposed to the death penalty, he enforced it on several occasions as governor -- including with respect to robber/rapist/autobiographer Caryl Chessman.

In 1960 he was briefly considered to be a "favorite son" candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination, and he angered John F. Kennedy partisans by being too slow to support Kennedy for the nomination; once he did throw his support to Kennedy, many of his California delegates ended up voting for Adlai Stevenson for the nomination. Brown was re-elected in 1962 in a heated battle against ex-Vice President and former presidential candidate Richard M. Nixon by about 300,000 votes. In both 1960 and 1964 he was mentioned as a possible vice-presidential nominee, but publicly took his name out of contention, explaining that "Being Governor of California is more important than sitting and waiting for a President to die."

Brown's second term saw an increase in public unrest, including anti-Vietnam War protests and the violent Watts riots in 1965, and by 1966 when he faced Ronald Reagan in his bid for a third term, his popularity had gone into sharp decline. Brown's impolitic mocking of Reagan during the campaign certainly didn't help, as he rather notoriously quipped, "I'm running against an actor, and you know who shot Lincoln, don't cha?" Brown lost to Reagan, 58% to 42%.

Pat Brown died on February 16, 1996.

Categories: American-Politicians, Presidential-Campaigns

Speaker Bankhead

William B. Bankhead, Democratic U.S. Congressman from Alabama (1917-40), speaker of the House (1936-40) and father of actress Tallulah Bankhead, was born on this day in 1874 in Moscow, Alabama.

In return for all of the assistance Bankhead had provided Franklin Roosevelt in getting his "New Deal" legislation through Congress, Roosevelt had allegedly promised Bankhead the vice presidency for the 1940 election, but instead threw the post to Henry Wallace. Bankhead complained privately, "The Convention was an ordeal that will not be soon forgotten. I venture to say that it was the most un-American and dictatorial meeting ever held by the great Democratic party . . . President Roosevelt has double-crossed me for the last time. I shall never forgive him for the way he acted."

Within two months of his complaint, on September 15, 1940, Bankhead died; good soldier Sam Rayburn succeeded him as speaker, and Roosevelt's "New Deal" lived to see another day.

Governor Moonbeam

The son of Democratic California governor Pat Brown, Jerry Brown (born on this day in 1938 in San Francisco) was certainly one of the most durable yet unorthodox political personalities of the latter half of the 20th century -- the one nationally recognizable American politician who could credibly be called a "maverick" for over 30 years. His ability to remake and renew himself demonstrates resourcefulness on many levels: he travels light, like David Carradine in Kung Fu, sleeps very little, and draws upon a deep well of religious and philosophical inspirations untapped by other politicians. He is the only politician, it seems, who can quote from Noam Chomsky, Martin Buber, Mother Teresa or Gregory Bateson, to name just a few of his heroes, with a pilgrim's zeal.

He originally studied for the Catholic priesthood, but graduated from Yale law school 4 years before being elected secretary of state of California in 1970. In 1974, after 6 years with Ronald Reagan in the statehouse, Brown was elected as the youngest governor of California (at age 34), cultivating an ascetic lifestyle which appealed to California populists: unmarried, he refused to take residence in the new governor's mansion recently completed by the Reagans, instead sleeping on a mattress on the floor of a rented apartment and driving a used car from the state fleet.

Just two years later, he was a late entry in the race for the Democratic presidential nomination, running 3rd behind Jimmy Carter and Morris Udall at the convention. Warming up with an African safari with some-time girlfriend Linda Ronstadt in 1979 (his token foreign relations tour), he tried again in 1980, this time running against incumbent President Carter and Ted Kennedy. By this time, his credibility had been damaged by columnists around the country who referred to him as "Governor Moonbeam" for his suggestion that California might develop its own space program (not wholly implausible given today's commercial space industry) and other unfamiliar and seemingly impractical ideals.

He left the statehouse in 1982, having built a modest record of radical change in environmental protection, education reform and affirmative action in California, but his political career seemed to be over when he was beaten by Pete Wilson in a bid for U.S. Senate. Brown used the defeat as an opportunity to get back in touch with his spiritual roots, studying meditation with a Zen master in Japan and then working with Mother Teresa in the slums of Calcutta before returning to head the California Democratic Party in 1989.

In 1992, he launched an angry and entertaining yet quixotic 3rd campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination, snarling at the role of lobbying dollars in the political process and barking out his "800" number at every public appearance, claiming the unqualified right to say "I told you so" to Democrats who became disillusioned with Bill Clinton's willingness to sacrifice judgment to the whims of his campaign contributors.

In 1998, Brown resigned from the Democratic Party and surprised pundits by waging a successful campaign for mayor of Oakland, California (getting 74% of the vote), a reflection of his shifting interest from the empty gamesmanship of national politics broadcast to a disconnected electorate, to nurturing, community-based mechanisms for meaningful change. He later re-registered as a Democrat, and was re-elected as mayor with over 60% of the vote in 2002. Proving his staying power, at the age of 68 he was elected attorney general of California just last year, defeating LA city attorney Rocky Delgadillo 63% to 37%.

Learn to Say President Willkie

Wendell Willkie was born on this day in 1892 in Elwood, Indiana.

Wendell Willkie blazed in and out of American politics with the short-lived intensity of a spark of static electricity. An unlikely presidential candidate, he was the model of the dilettante crusader, the role Ross Perot seemed to fill in 1990s American politics. His father and mother were both lawyers, and he was raised to become a lawyer himself and a good Democrat. After serving in the artillery at the Meuse-Argonne front in World War I, he joined Firestone Tire and Rubber Co. in Akron, Ohio as an in-house lawyer. In 1929, he moved to New York City to work for and later head Commonwealth & Southern, a large electric utility company.

Although he had campaigned for Franklin Roosevelt in 1920 when Roosevelt was on the Cox for President ticket and had contributed $150 to Roosevelt's 1932 campaign, Willkie became a strident opponent of Roosevelt's New Deal excesses -- particularly Roosevelt's establishment of the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) by which cheap electricity was introduced to rural Tennessee through federal projects which competed with Willkie's own utility company. Although Willkie generally supported the New Deal conceptually, his ire over the TVA led him to denounce Roosevelt on a national speaking tour.

His natural charisma appealed to the anti-Roosevelt minority, and "Willkie Clubs" began to spring up around the country, leading a group of Eastern Republicans to convince Willkie, who had never held public office, to switch parties and seek the Republican presidential nomination in 1940. With conservative Robert Taft and a too-young Thomas Dewey as his only credible opponents, the Republicans unanimously rallied around Willkie at the convention on the 6th ballot.

Ideologically similar to Roosevelt, Willkie supported intervention in Europe and much of Roosevelt's economic policies. Nevertheless he barnstormed 30,000 miles around the country giving more than 500 speeches criticizing Roosevelt's aspirations for a third term (employing the words of George Washington as moral precedent for presidents not serving more than two terms). He was enough of a thorn in Roosevelt's side that Roosevelt considered leaking a story that Willkie carried on adulterous affair. Roosevelt decided against the strategy, and the voters decided that Willkie did not offer enough of a reason to change horses in midstream: Roosevelt defeated Willkie, 55% to 45%.

After the election, Roosevelt dispatched Willkie to Europe to visit allied governments on behalf of the U.S. He published a best-selling book, One World, in support of international cooperation, and pursued the Republican nomination again in 1944, but withdrew from the race after a poor showing in the Wisconsin primary. He died shortly thereafter, on October 8, 1944, in New York.

Candidate, Under a Eucalyptus Tree

John B. Anderson was born on this day in 1922 in Rockford, Illinois.

A 20-year Republican congressman with a record of bucking the conservative wing of the Republican party by supporting the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Fair Housing Act of 1968, relative unknown John Anderson decided to run for the Republican presidential nomination in 1980 in an effort to help steer the party away from right-wing candidates such as Ronald Reagan.

With thick white hair, thick plastic-rimmed glasses and a foghorn voice which sometimes betrayed a cranky impatience, Anderson was anything but telegenic, but he captured the attention of the press with his non-partisan candor in the Iowa debate; he was the only candidate who refused to pander to farm interests when he voiced his support for Democratic President Carter's grain embargo against the Soviet Union in retaliation for the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Although he placed a poor fifth in Iowa, his national profile was on the rise when cartoonist Garry Trudeau began to feature the Anderson campaign in his Doonesbury comic strip.

After Iowa winner George (H.W.) Bush lost to Reagan in the New Hampshire primary, some polls began to identify Anderson as the strongest moderate alternative to Bush, and Anderson placed a close second in the Massachusetts and Vermont primaries. After he lost to Reagan in his home state of Illinois, however, Anderson decided to take a breather (in his words) "to sit under a eucalyptus tree in California" (a reference, no doubt, to Siddartha's epiphanous rest under a pipal tree), and in April 1980 he emerged as an independent candidate for president.

With a combination of socially liberal positions (favoring abortion rights, the Equal Rights Amendment and gay rights) and economic pragmatism (poking holes in Reagan's supply-side economic program and supporting a 50 cent hike in the gas tax), Anderson built on support from moderates and independents, including many college students, and drew polling numbers of 20% to 30% during April and May, causing speculation that the presidential election might result in an Electoral College draw. He suffered, however, from lack of funds and from being excluded from the September debate between Carter and Reagan -- although CNN, then just a fledgling network, did feature Anderson that evening responding to the same questions from another stage.

The Carter campaign was particularly hard on Anderson, as they believed that Anderson would take more votes from Carter than from Reagan in the general election, and the campaign repeatedly called upon Anderson to bow out of the election and avoid being a spoiler. Anderson, however, who believed Carter's fate was sealed following the botched Iranian hostage rescue attempt, responded by asking, "What's to spoil?" Anderson ended his campaign by borrowing funds from supporters (probably a securities violation) on the promise that he would pay them back with federal matching funds, which he would receive only if he achieved 5% of the general election vote. He kept his promise, getting 6.6% of the vote to Reagan's 50.7% and Carter's 41%.

After the 1980 election, Anderson largely retired from politics, teaching law and working on public interest projects, including the Center for Voting and Democracy. He supported Democrat Walter Mondale during the 1984 election, and briefly considered running for the 2000 Reform Party nomination.

Vice President Breckinridge

John C. Breckinridge was born on this day in 1821 near Lexington, Kentucky.

A bona fide member of the Southern political aristocracy (his father was a member of the Kentucky legislature and his grandfather, John Breckinridge, was a U.S. senator and attorney general), Breckinridge set up a law practice in Burlington, Iowa after reading law at Princeton and Transylvania University (Kentucky). He served with distinction in the Mexican War and parlayed his name, war service and affable charm into a political career as a Democrat -- first in the Kentucky House (1849-51) and then in the U.S. House (1852-55).

While in Congress, he shuttled between friends Stephen A. Douglas, Senate chairman of the committee on territories, and President Franklin Pierce, smoothing out support for the Kansas-Nebraska Act (1854), which effectively repealed Henry Clay's Missouri Compromise and allowed each state to decide the slavery issue by popular vote. For this, although he represented a border state and was merely trying to effect a compromise between the South and Northern Democrats, he was branded as a Lower South extremist.

The Democrats chose him as James Buchanan's running mate on the successful 1856 ticket, although Buchanan completely ignored Breckinridge once in office, and Breckinridge was looking forward to leaving the administration and entering the U.S. Senate in 1861. Meanwhile, when the 1860 Democratic National Convention broke up over the slavery issue, the Southern wing of the Party nominated Breckinridge for president, while the Northern faction nominated Douglas. Breckinridge proposed that he and his friend both decline and try to bring the Convention back together, but when Douglas refused to back down, Breckinridge reluctantly went ahead as well. The two old compadres split the Democratic popular vote (although, by electoral votes, Breckinridge swept the South, while Douglas won only two states), leaving Abraham Lincoln as the victor in the 1860 election.

Breckinridge attempted to stay neutral over secession while in the Senate, but when Kentucky declared itself pro-Union, Breckinridge, under threat of arrest for treason, defected to Virginia and the Confederacy. He served, rather successfully, as a brigadier general in the Army -- thereby becoming the first vice-president to take up arms against the U.S. -- unless you count Aaron Burr.

In February 1865, Jefferson Davis appointed Breckinridge secretary of war, which at that late date was little more than a "winding-down" assignment, consisting mainly of preserving records, advising Gen. Joseph Johnston on the terms of surrender, and urging cooperation and orderly repatriation. Fearing arrest, he fled to Cuba after the War, and lived in England and Canada before returning to the U.S. in 1869 after Andrew Johnson issued a general pardon. He stayed away from electoral politics after his return, although he did publicly denounce the Ku Klux Klan and other devices of Southern revenge.

Breckinridge died in Lexington on May 17, 1875.

Giving Christmas Back to the Chipmunks

We had barely recovered from Halloween in Napa, its inevitable San Francisco repercussions, and the great grinning mania of Election Day -- when sitting in our local grill the other day, looking up from our pints of Bass Ale, my wife and I suddenly noticed that the bar had already been decorated for Christmas. Silent Night played softly in the background, while someone on Fox News was announcing that Steny Hoyer had been elected House majority leader. "All is calm, all is bright . . ."

Okay -- so it seemed a little early to be thinking about Christmas, but that's a well-worn cliche at this point. The question is why -- why do our friends in commerce feel the need to initiate the celebration of Christmas some time after Election Day and well before Thanksgiving? And why do I have the sneaking suspicion that Christmas will start being celebrated just before Labor Day by 2010?

I think the main reason for "Christmas drift" has to do with the size of Christmas today, as compared with the size of Christmas 35 years ago. When I was a kid, we threw up a tree and put the big colored lights on the facie of the house, we practiced the school Christmas show for a week, sang some songs, and opened up presents on Christmas Day. That was it. Today, the logistics and scale of Christmas for the average family seems to have exploded from that simple sequence into something that compares favorably to a major public construction project. It is now, of course, de rigueur for every middle-class American family to have its own personal Holiday on Ice pageant, combined with the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade, Space Mountain and The Price is Right -- until, all swirled up, it feels a lot more like a holiday edition of Survivor. In one's own family room. You can't pull that off in just a week.

This is no different, in fact, from what has happened with presidential election campaigns. In 1952, Adlai Stevenson wasn't even sure he was running for president as late as April -- a mere seven months before he nearly won the popular vote in the general election. Fast forward to 2006: we've just had a mid-term election, the coffin lids haven't even been nailed down on losing incumbents like George Allen and Rick Santorum yet, and here, 22 months before the 2008 presidential election, we have John McCain, Rudy Giuliani and Tom Vilsack already forming exploratory committees. Spending on all campaigns for federal office has mushroomed from less than $250 million in 1952 to $3 billion in 2000. Bigger almost always means more time.

But I digress. As I started to think about the simplicity of my own childhood Christmases, inevitably my mind turned back to a classic among Christmas music albums, a tiny gem of an LP that we would play on our little portable turntables in our little suburban bedrooms. I am speaking, of course, about Christmas with the Chipmunks (Vol. I), originally released in 1962.

This was pure low-tech fun of the kind today's children can barely appreciate. In fact, once you got the hang of what producer Ross Bagdasarian was doing with recording and playing speeds, you could turn all your parents' Andy Williams or Vikki Carr albums into Chipmunks records by flipping the turntable speed switch from 33-1/3 to 45. Try doing that on your iPod. (As comedian Patton Oswalt has famously observed, you could also turn your Chipmunks album into "three normal, monotone guys singing a song about Christmas," with Ross Bagdasarian as the Chipmunks' impresario, David Seville, sounding like a "demon from the ninth level of murderers and traitors," by turning the switch from 33-1/3 to 78. He's not lying.)

How can you not just break out into a silly smile listening to the album's first song, "The Chipmunk Song (Christmas Don't Be Late)"?:

(All right you Chipmunks! Ready to sing your song?
-I'll say we are!
-Yeah!
-Let's sing it now!
Okay, Simon?
-Okay!
Okay, Theodore?
-Okay!
Okay, Alvin? Alvin? ALVIN!
-OKAY!!!)

Christmas, Christmas time is near
Time for toys and time for cheer
We've been good, but we can't last
Hurry Christmas, hurry fast
Want a plane that loops the loop
Me, I want a hula hoop
We can hardly stand the wait
Please Christmas, don't be late.

(Okay fellas get ready.
That was very good, Simon.
-Naturally.
Very good Theodore.
-Ahhh.
Ah, Alvin, you were a little flat, watch it.
Ah, Alvin. Alvin. ALVIN!
-OKAY.)

That, my friends, was a song that spent four weeks on the top of the charts. Critic Stanton Swihart says the tune has "the allure of an old Italian love song."

With fine familial harmonies, Alvin, Simon and Theodore have always seemed to me like a cartoon version of the Beach Boys. This was brought home to me in high relief with the release of the Help Me Ronda Sessions not too long ago, in which Murry Wilson, father of Brian, Carl and Dennis, arrives in the middle of the session and manhandles the boys, drunkenly berating and humiliating them by turns for their lack of discipline. "David Seville" did much the same thing with the Chipmunks, only without the Chivas on his breath, and perhaps without so much out-and-out abuse or such far-reaching psychological effects on his young charges.

Whatever the psychodramatic backstory, here it certainly produces some charming results. The Chipmunks' covers of "Frosty the Snowman," "Here Comes Santa Claus" and "Over the River and Through the Woods" are startlingly wide-eyed and innocent in their embrace of the Christmas holiday -- they are irresistibly quirky reminders of an elegantly simple flavor of a child's Christmas Past that lasted little more than a decade or so within American culture . . . a kind of Eisenhower Christmas before the intrusion of the Holiday Industrial Complex, if you will.

If I could get away with it, I would block Christmas out of my mind until December 19 or so, and then enjoy it to the hilt by wrapping gifts and listening to albums like Christmas with the Chipmunks. As you may recall, however, I sold all of my LPs to make room for my wife's collection of Christmas decorations. So if anyone needs me today, I'll be out front reassembling the digital holographic audio-animatronic nativity scene.

Henry A. Wallace

"Wallace was really too naive for a hard world." -- Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.

As an economist and crop scientist who spoke at least four foreign languages passably well, Henry A. Wallace cast a singular silhouette in 20th century American politics.

Born on this day in 1888 in Adair County, Iowa, the son of Henry C. Wallace -- a dairying professor, founding editor of Wallace's Farmer and U.S. secretary of agriculture under Presidents Harding and Coolidge -- young Henry developed an interest in plant science under the influence of one of his father's students, George Washington Carver. From his teens onward, Wallace worked in his own private agronomy laboratory breeding new crops, pausing occasionally to deliver lectures on advanced statistics to the faculty at Iowa State and to write for the Farmer. In 1923, he developed the first commercially viable strain of hybrid corn (more than doubling the per acre yields of Midwestern corn), which he sold through his Pioneer Hi-Bred Seed Company.

Wallace's frustration with the Republicans' lack of interest in agricultural issues led him to begin supporting the Democrats in 1928, and when Franklin Roosevelt won the presidency in 1932, he rewarded Wallace by appointing him secretary of agriculture. From this post Wallace became one of the most enthusiastic "New Dealers," campaigning for the passage of the Agricultural Adjustment Act of 1933 (later augmented by the Soil Conservation Act of 1935 to enable the policy to pass constitutional muster) to help end the family farm crisis by paying farmers to reduce crop output (thus helping to support prices for actual output), as well as for the Federal Crop Insurance Program (1938), the food stamp program (1939) and the school milk program (1940).

Roosevelt admired Wallace, and Wallace was his only choice for vice-presidential running mate for the 1940 campaign. As vice president he did not enjoy particularly good relations with the Senate (perhaps his accidental knockout of Senator Allen Ellender in a friendly intramural boxing match didn't help matters) or with the members of Roosevelt's cabinet (in his role as chair of the economic defense board, he locked antlers with secretary of commerce Jesse Jones as Wallace attempted to increase the level of governmental involvement in building supply stockpiles); but he joined Roosevelt in his vision of American involvement in World War II as an opportunity for creating a post-war international peace mission.

In 1943, he visited Latin America, addressing the public in short Spanish sentences (speaking the language as well as Xavier Cugat could speak English, according to film actress Margo); and in the following year, Roosevelt sent him to China and the Soviet Union. Wallace returned from the latter trip as an enthusiastic supporter of the Russian people and some aspects of Soviet economic policy. His public remarks sent chills up the spines of pre-Cold War anti-Communists, who demanded that Roosevelt dump him from the ticket in 1944. The move was fateful, as shortly after the election, Wallace's replacement, Harry Truman, became president when Roosevelt died in 1945. Although Roosevelt appointed Wallace secretary of commerce as a consolation prize, Truman dismissed him in 1946 after Wallace gave a speech criticizing U.S. policy relating to the Soviet Union after World War II.

Originally hoping to challenge Truman for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1948 in the name of world peace and human rights, in 1947 he announced his candidacy under the banner of the Progressive Party. The U.S. Communist Party immediately lent its support by nominating Wallace as its candidate, doing an about-face from its pro-Democratic Party/low-profile policy during World War II as a result of Truman's anti-Soviet stance; against his advisors' counsel, Wallace failed to disavow the Communists, sending most Democratic Party progressives, including the leaders of organized labor, back to Truman. With mainstream America believing that he was pro-Soviet if not anti-American, as well as with the disclosure of his relationship with the late Russian yoga guru Nicolas Roerich when a series of "Dear Guru" letters were leaked to the press, Wallace's campaign failed to have much of an impact: running 4th behind Truman, Dewey and Strom Thurmond, Wallace received just 1,157,140 votes, or a little over 2% of the popular vote, as Truman was re-elected.

Wallace continued to lead the Progressive Party until 1950, when his optimism about the Soviets was finally tarnished by their record of intervention in Eastern Europe. He retired to his farm in South Salem, New York, raising chickens, strawberries and gladioli until succumbing to Lou Gehrig's Disease on November 18, 1965.

The Irrepressible Mrs. Woodhull

With her sister, Tennessee Claflin, Victoria Claflin (better known as Victoria Woodhull) was notorious for chipping away at social taboos involving religion, sex, business and politics. She was an ethical gadfly with a tarnished pedigree, a screwball pioneer where pioneers were not invited or even tolerated, and it is only in hindsight that we can appreciate some of her adventures, since they represent the first bold gestures toward the multifarious identity of the 20th century American woman.

Born on this day in 1838 in Homer, Ohio, Victoria grew up on the run; her father having been accused of insurance fraud, he brought his family along as he wandered throughout the Midwest posing as a faith healer. At 15, she married a Chicago physician of questionable character, Canning Woodhull, and they proceeded to move from coast to coast, Victoria supporting Canning's bad habits and her retarded son Byron with sewing jobs and as a spiritual healer in the mold of her huckster father.

At 26 Victoria divorced Canning, and joined Tennessee to travel as faith healers and clairvoyants. They had brushes with the law, including being accused of running a whorehouse in Cincinnati, but generally they survived by their wits. Victoria remarried in 1866 to Col. James H. Blood, a Civil War vet who introduced her to socialism and free love, and 2 years later they moved to New York in answer to the suggestion of the spirit of Demosthenes, whom Victoria claimed appeared before her in a hotel room in Pittsburgh.

In New York, Tennessee was asked to perform a healing massage on tycoon Cornelius Vanderbilt. Soon, with Vanderbilt's assistance, the sisters were speculating successfully on Wall Street, opening their own brokerage house in 1870. Woodhull, Claflin & Co. was the first woman-owned enterprise of its kind, and was a moderate success. Around the same time, Woodhull became captivated by the utopian ideas of Stephen Pearl Andrews. Together with Blood and Tennessee, Woodhull and Andrews promoted their ideas in Woodhull and Claflin's Weekly, along with running translations of George Sand and the first American appearance of Marx and Engels' Communist Manifesto -- this despite the fact that Woodhull was a Wall Street tycoon.

Around the same time, Woodhull announced her candidacy for president, and began to give speeches which were an interesting melange of progressive politics and bold assertions of sexual independence for women. Benjamin F. Butler arranged to let Woodhull speak on women's suffrage before Congress, a move which caught Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton by surprise and caused them to invite her to speak at the National Woman Suffrage Association convention.

Her participation in the convention allowed critics to conclude that women's suffrage would lead to pernicious free love and the breakdown of the family. Rather than quieting the critics, she continued to advance the cause of free love in bold terms, stating in an 1871 speech that she had "an inalienable, constitutional and natural right to love whom I may, to love as long or as short a period as I can, to change that love everyday." With support from Susan B. Anthony and the rest of the suffragettes drifting away, she convened her own Equal Rights party convention, which nominated her for president and African-American leader Frederick Douglass as vice president. Douglass ignored the honor, and like Anthony, supported Grant's re-election in 1872.

Soon afterward, her successes began to fall apart: with expenses mounting (even Canning Woodhull had joined the eclectic household in New York by this time), she and her extended family were evicted from her New York mansion, the brokerage house was in a shambles, and Woodhull was sued for her debts.

Lashing out at those who she perceived were exercising their sinister indirect influence on her financial affairs and who would seek to co-opt her radical reform crusade with half-measures, she gave a speech accusing moderately reform-minded preacher Henry Ward Beecher, a former lover of Woodhull's, of having an extramarital affair with another woman, and published an account of it in the Weekly. She was arrested on the eve of the election for peddling obscenity, and spent election day and a month more in a New York jail cell. Released on bail, she put out another issue of the Weekly; was reindicted; and went on the lam, speaking around the country about the Beecher affair. The obscenity charge was later dropped, and Beecher's mistress published a full confession of the tale.

Blood continued the Weekly until 1876, when he and Woodhull divorced; and the following year Woodhull moved to England (in part to avoid giving testimony in a dispute over Vanderbilt's will). There she met and married a wealthy banker, John Martin, against the objections of Martin's family (the story provided the basis for Henry James' story, The Siege of London). In 1892, Woodhull again declared herself a presidential candidate, to considerably less attention, and visited the U.S. from time to time to speak on eugenics, women's suffrage, public health reform and government assistance for science and the arts. She died on June 10, 1927 in London.

Alf Landon

The son of an oil promoter, born on this day in 1887 in West Middlesex, Pennsylvania, Alf Landon moved to Kansas when he was 17, working in the oil business as a wildcatter and getting his law degree. He campaigned for Theodore Roosevelt's Bull Moose candidacy in 1912, and served as secretary to Kansas governor Henry Allen before being elected governor himself as a Republican in 1932 and 1934. In the process he drew national attention to himself as he bucked the tide against the Republican Party beginning with Franklin Roosevelt's defeat of Herbert Hoover in 1932.

At the 1936 Republican convention, Landon's status as the most strongly supported Republican in the nation won him the presidential nomination on the first ballot. In his campaign, distinguished by buttons and posters with Landon's demurely smiling face at the center of a big yellow sunflower (the state flower of Kansas), Landon focused mainly on the anti-business methods of Roosevelt's "New Deal," playing on tax phobia and touting "good government" in his earnest and sincere (and somewhat awkward, by radio standards) fashion. Despite a Literary Digest telephone poll which predicted Landon would win by a landslide, Roosevelt beat Landon mightily, 61% to 37%; the only 2 states Landon would carry were Maine and Vermont.

After the election, Landon retired cheerfully to Topeka and named his children's ponies "Maine" and "Vermont." Roosevelt later sent him to Peru to initiate Roosevelt's Latin American "Good Neighbor" policy. Over the years he became an American elder statesman, receiving heavyweight members of both parties (Ronald Reagan and Bobby Kennedy among them) as well as authors and movie stars at his home in Topeka. His daughter, Nancy Kassebaum, served as Republican U.S. senator from Kansas from 1978 to 1997.

LaRouche

Although he has never seemed to have a following any larger than the entire population of Jefferson County, Ohio, Lyndon LaRouche's wacky yet sinister political movement and well-funded haranguing against the unseen hands of global power have provoked righteous denunciations, lawsuits and giggles from the mainstream (including as a throw-away joke in Mike Myers' So I Married an Axe Murderer, 1993). He was also the inspiration for one of my favorite pieces of doctored graffiti. After one of his followers had scrawled "Kill Satan/ Free LaRouche" on a bridge pier near my home, someone else came along and tampered with the message, so that it ultimately read: "Things to do Today/ 1. Buy Milk/ 2. Kill Satan/ 3. Free LaRouche."

Lyndon LaRouche was born on this day in 1922 in Rochester, New York. At the beginning of World War II, LaRouche was a college drop-out and conscientious objector in a Quaker work camp, but by the end of the War he was serving in a non-combat role with the U.S. Army in Burma, where he was introduced to socialism while observing anti-British demonstrations. After the War, he earned his living as an "economic consultant to the footwear industry," but indulged his political calling by joining the Socialist Workers Party.

In the 1960s, under the pseudonym of Lyn Marcus, he inspired a following as a Marxist theoretician in Greenwich Village, and founded a leftist organization called the National Caucus of Labor Committees (NCLC). Around the time of his split with his common-law wife in 1973, however, LaRouche's approach became aggressive and isolative. Calling himself "Der Abscheulicher" (the "Abominable One"), he began to advocate the development of a goon squad to launch physical attacks against the "Nixon-allied Communist Party" and started to employ harsh, confrontational psychological techniques to his own followers (grilling; verbal abuse; denial of personal feelings and space) as a recruiting and deprogramming tool.

(As a sidelight -- in 1974, he briefly attracted psychologist Fred Newman to his crew, who advocated political action as a form of psychotherapy, with echoes of Reich; Newman quickly spun away from LaRouche and formed the New Alliance Party, best known as Lenora Fulani's first political vehicle.)

LaRouche's ferocious new identity was now three parts bully and one part delusional paranoia, as he apparently underwent a conversion similar to Mussolini's switch from socialism to right-wing fascism, but with the flavor of a psycho-religious cult. Some have theorized, however, that LaRouche is still a Marxist, but that he sports conservative duds to get money from gullible rich conservatives.

He ran for president in 1976 under the banner of his U.S. Labor Party (9th place, 40,084 votes), often addressing current issues with an articulate, mainstream-sounding veneer, but out of the other side of his mouth spewing an ornate theory of conspiracy that holds that the U.S. government is actually a puppet for Queen Elizabeth and the British banking elite (especially Jewish banking families), whose worldwide reign goes back for centuries and has swept within it the Pope, the CIA, the state of Israel, international drug cartels and other characters on the world stage. One famous assertion provides the flavor of his conspiracy yarns: "The Beatles," LaRouche once wrote, "had no genuine musical talent, but were a product shaped according to British Psychological Warfare Division specifications."

He ran again, as a Democrat, in the 1980, 1984 and 1988 primaries, but he was convicted of conspiracy and mail fraud in December 1988 for NCLC's solicitation of $34 million in loans from senior citizens (LaRouche complained it was retaliation by vindictive government agents), and was sentenced to 15 years in prison. He ran his 1992 campaign, Debs-like, behind bars in a Minnesota federal prison, and was released in 1993. Settling in amidst ostentatious secrecy on a million-dollar estate in Loudoun County, Virginia, LaRouche has continued his manic pamphleteering and presidential campaigning unabated.

In 2000, he scored enough votes in the Arkansas primary to send delegates to the Democratic convention, but the Democrats fought LaRouche off in court, citing the fact that as a convicted felon, LaRouche was not a registered Democrat and therefore not entitled to be represented at the convention.

Hiram Johnson

Hiram W. Johnson, a Republican governor of California (1911-17) and U.S. senator (1917-45), was born on this day in 1866 in Sacramento, California.

The son of a corporate lawyer, Johnson achieved renown as a stem-winding assistant prosecutor in a case against a corrupt labor boss -- a case he inherited when his predecessor was shot in open court. As the Republican candidate for governor of California in 1910, his hard-driving, florid oratory and progressive "reform" views succeeded in getting him elected, whereupon he promised to kick big corporate interests such as Southern Pacific Railroad out of politics, and urged the adoption of state constitutional amendments which would permit recall elections of state officials and legislation by popular referenda (mechanisms which would ultimately help propel the political careers of Howard Jarvis and Arnold Schwarzenegger).

In 1912, he left the Republican Party to join Theodore Roosevelt as running mate on Roosevelt's "Bull Moose" presidential ticket, but after their defeat he rejoined the Republicans and won election to the U.S. Senate. In the Senate, he was one of the leading voices of isolationism. He reluctantly supported U.S. involvement in World War I, but broke away from the Republican establishment to speak out against the League of Nations.

He ran hard for the Republican nomination for president in 1920, entering the convention a close second behind Major General Leonard Wood, running against American intervention in foreign affairs and against the "international bankers" who had seduced both Republicans and Democrats into believing that intervention was America's destiny. But shortly into the convention, his support dwindled (especially after Charles Wheeler, in his nominating speech for Johnson, accused the convention of being packed with delegates who were "political slaves" hand-picked by the party bosses). As the convention deadlocked, the Republican leaders met in a suite in a hotel in Chicago, the quintessential "smoke-filled room," and picked Warren Harding as a compromise candidate, a turn of events Johnson bitterly denounced.

He continued to be popular in California, however, and used his weight as an independent Republican to support Franklin Roosevelt over Herbert Hoover in 1932. Turning down Roosevelt's offer to become secretary of the interior, Johnson was initially a New Deal supporter, but turned against Roosevelt as he stepped up aid to the Allies in Europe prior to World War II. The attack on Pearl Harbor convinced him that he had to support American entry into the war, but he continued to strenuously object to American participation on the world stage.

Johnson died on August 6, 1945 in Bethesda, Maryland -- ironically, on the same day that the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, the moment when U.S. involvement on the world stage would thereafter be a certainty.

John G. Schmitz

John G. Schmitz was born on this day in 1930 in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

A Republican congressman representing a portion of conservative Orange County, California and a long-time member of the John Birch Society, Schmitz was chosen in 1972 as the presidential nominee of the American Independent Party, temporarily reunifying factions of the organization which sponsored George Wallace's presidential candidacy in 1968. Wallace, however, was a nationally-known figure with a populist flavor to his rhetoric; Schmitz, while having a caustic sense of humor, was not well known. In the absence of a strong Southern candidate, incumbent President Nixon was able to run a "Southern strategy" aimed at bringing conservative Southerners into the Republican column, with the result that while Wallace polled nearly 10 million votes in 1968, Schmitz and his running mate Tom Anderson garnered only 1,107,083 votes in 1972.

Schmitz was later elected to the California state legislature as a Republican. With his state senate seat disappearing due to redistricting at the end of 1982, Schmitz pursued the Republican nomination for U.S. Senate in California, but lost in large part due to the controversy surrounding his characterization of legislative hearing witnesses testifying against abortion restrictions as "bull dykes" with "hard Jewish and arguably female faces."

Shortly after the primary, the fate of his political future was sealed when it was revealed that he had fathered 2 children in an extramarital affair with one of his political science students, the affair having come to light when the woman was accused of child abuse. The abuse charges were dropped, but Schmitz admitted to the affair and thereafter lost credibility with conservatives.

One of Schmitz’s daughters by his wife, Mary Kay Letourneau, was convicted of statutory rape in a highly publicized trial in 1997, for her involvement with her 13-year old student -- with whom she had 2 children while he was under-age, and whom she has subsequently married.

Schmitz died on January 10, 2001 in Bethesda, Maryland.

'Kefauver Hearings'

Democratic U.S. senator and presidential candidate (Carey) Estes Kefauver was born on this day in 1903 in Madisonville, Tennessee.

Known on the campaign trail for his trademark coonskin hat, horn-rimmed glasses and broad grin, Estes Kefauver was an Ivy-educated country boy with an insatiable appetite for publicity. A track star and student newspaper editor at the University of Tennessee, Kefauver returned to his home state after Yale Law school to practice in Chattanooga, where he entered politics by organizing a local government reform movement and securing an appointment as chairman of the local planning board. In 1939, he was elected to Congress, where he supported New Deal programs such as the Tennessee Valley Authority and became a thorn in the side of the old conservative guard of Tennessee Democrats.

When he ran for U.S. Senate and won in 1948, he successfully toppled the Memphis political machine of Boss Crump, who had attempted to brand Kefauver as a "pet coon" to Communists; responding to the charges, Kefauver went to Memphis and donned his coonskin hat, declaring, "I may be a pet coon, but I'm not Boss Crump's pet coon!"

Shortly after he reached the Senate, Kefauver became chairman of the special committee on organized crime in interstate commerce, a post he used, a la Joseph McCarthy, to secure for himself the new spotlight offered by live television. His amoebic investigations of organized crime focused not only on big city mobsters like Frank Costello and Tony Accardo, but also on the pop culture eruptions they supposedly inhabited and financed, such as boxing and gambling, as well as pulp porn and comic books. Although the investigations were not particularly successful (none of the 22 contempt citations issued by the committee held up in court, and almost none of the committee's recommended bills passed), they did succeed in hounding a few marginal players out of business and getting the comic book industry to adopt self-censorship, and they made Kefauver a household name. He also won one of the first-ever Emmy awards, for "outstanding public service."

He parlayed his fame in a run for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1952 and beat President Truman in the New Hampshire primary, causing Truman to announce his intended retirement; but the Democratic establishment passed over the rambunctious Kefauver in favor of the more demure Adlai Stevenson. He tried again in 1956, but dropped out early and snagged a spot as Stevenson's running mate; the two lost to Eisenhower and Nixon.

As a senator, Kefauver was one of only two Southern Senators (the other being Albert Gore, Sr.) who refused to sign the "Southern Manifesto" (1957), a statement against the U.S. Supreme Court's desegregation decision in Brown v. Board of Education; stood alone in the Senate against a measure that made it a crime to belong to the Communist Party (1954); and sponsored the Kefauver-Harris Drug Control Act (1962) which, in response to the thalidomide crisis, required the FDA to determine that a drug is both safe and effective before licensing it for sale.

Unbeknownst to the public, Kefauver apparently had a gargantuan sexual appetite and frequently had his staff procure prostitutes for him during his lecture and campaign tours -- ironically enough, since prostitution was a subject his committee investigations also touched upon.

Kefauver died on August 10, 1963 in Bethesda, Maryland, after collapsing from a heart attack on the Senate floor.

McGovern

After he lost 49 out of 50 states to incumbent Richard Nixon in the disastrous 1972 Democratic campaign, and after the exposure of the abuses of power waged by Nixon and his crew in the Watergate affair led to numerous convictions and the resignation of Nixon himself, George McGovern wrote: "I have to live with the knowledge that, not only did I lose the election, but I lost it to the most discredited man ever to occupy the White House." He occupies a unique position in recent history as the electoral martyr in a not-so-fair fight, but one for whom no great feeling of passion is summoned. Respect, yes -- but not passion.

Born on this day in 1922 in Avon, South Dakota, McGovern was a World War II combat pilot who settled in as a professor of history and government at Dakota Wesleyan University, the earnest, serene, soft-spoken McGovern served briefly in Congress before John Kennedy appointed him director of the Food for Peace Program. The prestige from that stint contributed to his election to the Senate in 1962, where he focused on poverty issues (particularly as chairman of the Select Committee on "Unmet Basic Needs"). After the assassination of his friend Robert Kennedy just before the 1968 Democratic convention, McGovern waged a three-week candidacy for the nomination as a successor to Kennedy's Vietnam peace candidacy, but disappeared in the confusion which led to the nomination of Hubert Humphrey.

He seemed like a long-shot at the beginning of the 1972 campaign, with a young, close-to-the-ground campaign staff he capitalized on the wobbliness of Edmund Muskie's campaign, placing a convincing 2nd in New Hampshire (Muskie's own backyard) and sending Muskie to the showers soon afterward. After George Wallace was sidelined by a would-be assassin, only Humphrey stood by as a potential threat to McGovern's most improbable nomination, waging convention floor fights over credentials which, while unsuccessful in conquering McGovern, hobbled his hoped-for harmonious launch. McGovern's first choice for his running mate, Sen. Tom Eagleton, stumbled into controversy when he admitted to having undergone shock therapy for depression. After first guaranteeing his support for Eagleton ("1,000 percent"), McGovern coolly shrugged to the party leadership and chose Kennedy relative Sargent Shriver as Eagleton's replacement on the ticket.

The same capacity McGovern had for riding out stormy weather without panicking made him a colorless campaigner, however; coupled with the Republicans' success in tarring him as the ultra-liberal candidate of "amnesty, acid and abortion" (a refrain begun by his Democratic primary opponents) and a loss of confidence from his core supporters over his perceived waffling on the issue of ending the Vietnam War, he suffered a decisive defeat in November.

He lost reelection to the Senate in 1980 in the midst of the anti-Jimmy Carter backlash, and went back to teaching, until he surprised everyone by announcing yet another presidential candidacy in 1984. If the 1972 campaign seemed quixotic, his 1984 bid for the Democratic nomination was downright sisyphean: tooling around New Hampshire in a rented car with one volunteer staffer, running far behind his own wunderkind campaign manager from 1972, Gary Hart, McGovern nevertheless managed to survive on vapor for a few primaries. He stole some choice moments, coming on much as the same disengaged, slightly cranky Bodhisattva he was in 1972, as the only one of the candidates who seemed to have been guided by a moral compass and a sense of duty to humanity. Yet the effort was quickly forgotten.

In 1996, he wrote a moving reminiscence on the death of his daughter Terry, who struggled with alcoholism, and in 1998 President Clinton appointed him to the ambassador-rank position of UN representative to the Food and Agriculture Organzation in Rome. Perhaps as an indication of his "elder statesman" status, George W. Bush asked him to stay on in the position in 2001. Later that year, McGovern was appointed global ambassador on world hunger by the United Nations.