His name was Ed Muskie and he would have been President of the
United States. Everyone in New Hampshire knew his name, he came
from the rural and neighboring state of Maine where he had been
governor. He knew the land, he knew the people, he talked their
language, he was the one of them. His plan was to emerge from the
New Hampshire Democratic presidential primary with such a
overwhelming victory it would overshadow all of the other
candidates.
Ed Muskie would have been the Democratic nominee against one of
the worst presidents in American history whose scars now pale in
comparison to those of our present day leadership. He would have
run in 1972 against Richard Nixon, the frequent target of Hunter
S. Thompson who wrote in Better Than Sex
If the right people had been in charge of Nixon's funeral,
his casket would have been launched into one of those open-sewage
canals that empty into the ocean just south of Los Angeles. He
was a swine of a man and a jabbering dupe of a president. Nixon
was so crooked that he needed servants to help him screw his
pants on every morning. Even his funeral was illegal. He was
queer in the deepest way. His body should have been burned in a
trash bin. These are harsh words for a man only recently
canonized by President Clinton and my old friend George McGovern
-- but I have written worse things about Nixon, many times, and
the record will show that I kicked him repeatedly long before he
went down. I beat him like a mad dog with mange every time I got
a chance, and I am proud of it. He was scum. Let there be no
mistake in the history books about that. Richard Nixon was a evil
man -- evil in every way that only those who believe in the
physical reality of the Devil can understand it. He was utterly
without ethics or moral or any bedrock sense of decency. Nobody
trusted him -- except maybe the Stalinist Chinese, and honest
historians will remember him mainly as a rat who kept scrambling
to get back on the ship.
It was a very crowded Democratic presidential field in 1972.
It included Shirley Chisholm of New York, Edward T. Coll, Walter
E. Fauntroy of the District of Columbia, Vance Hartke of Indiana,
Hubert H. Humphrey of Minnesota, Henry M. Jackson of Washington,
John V. Lindsay of New York, Eugene J. McCarthy of Minnesota,
Wilbur D. Mills of Arkansas, Patsy T. Mink of Hawaii, Terry
Sanford of North Carolina, George C. Wallace of Alabama, Samuel
W. Yorty of California and George McGovern of South Dakota.
The big plan was to win the New Hampshire Democratic primary by a
landslide possibly even going over 50% of the vote to create
unstoppable momentum. Muskie was
the frontrunner, he had the name, he had the momentum, he had the
money, he had the big supporters going into the New Hampshire
primary. Hunter S. Thompson summed it up in Fear And Loathing
On The Campaign Trail
By the time the deal went down in New Hampshire, Muskie had
signed up about every Democratic politician in the country whose
name was well known by more than a hundred people, and it did him
about as much good as a notarized endorsement from Martin
Bormann.
Muskie won
big in New Hampshire. He got 46.4% of the vote but his
campaign would never again come close to the same results in
other primaries. Wallace won Tennessee, Alabama, Florida, North
Carolina, Maryland, and Michigan, Humphrey won Indiana, Ohio,
Pennsylvania, and West Virginia, McGovern won New York,
Massachusetts, Virginia, Wisconsin, Texas, and many of the
western states, Jackson won South Carolina, Kentucky, Missouri,
Oklahoma, Wyoming, and Washington, Chisholm won New Jersey, and
Mills won Arkansas. Muskie nearly made a comeback with a win in
Illinois with the help of the Daley machine and picked up wins in
Arizona and Maine but in the end it was not enough and the
numbers were not there.
Somewhere out there on the desolate roads of New Hampshire,
Hunter S. Thompson has the big 650 Lightning fired up and is
aiming at the yellow line with Ed Muskie riding shotgun.
Rob is
the founder and editor of the progressive news site robwire.com and is a
frequent contributor to rob.dailykos.com
