In the end, Bernie Sanders was right, and what the Democrats need to learn from his campaign.

[jake335544]

81. Humphrey's team literally campaigned for Nixon... Should we go further than Bernie or Bust tactics?

The Humphrey wing of that election practically campaigned for Nixon, stop with the revisionism. Also, McGovern made a mistake by making someone who didn't even want him to win as VP. History shows us leftys shouldn't reach across the Dem aisle so much.

Our "Bernie or Bust", was your "Anybody but McGovern". Us Dems campaign against each other when they stand for completely different things. But next time maybe we'll do it as aggressively as Humphrey's team did to McGovern, practically campaigning for Nixon. I'm being serious. We'll campaign against a corporate Dem in the general, and make the next Clinton clone's electoral map just as red as McGoverns.

https://newrepublic.com/article/130737/democrats-still-dont-get-george-mcgovern

"Perhaps the deepest damage to McGovern’s campaign came not from its own ineptitude, but from the candidate’s fellow Democrats. Early in the primaries, an adviser for Hubert Humphrey, one of McGovern’s main opponents for the nomination, promised, “We are going to show that McGovern is a radical, just like Goldwater was in 1964.” Keeping that promise, Humphrey claimed during a televised debate prior to the California primary that McGovern’s Demogrant plan would hike taxes on a middle class family making $12,000 by more than $400. The number wasn’t remotely true. According to both private calculations by Nixon’s Office of Management and Budget and independent academic estimates, the bottom 70-to-80 percent of families would pay less under McGovern’s plan than under existing law or Nixon’s proposals. But Humphrey’s claim not only stuck, it practically wrote the script for an anti-Demogrant commercial that Nixon would run in the fall.

As McGovern barreled toward the nomination, leading Democrats’ attacks became more desperate. Anti-McGovern Democrats staged an “Anybody But McGovern” movement at the convention. When that failed, some pledged that they would not campaign for him and might even support Nixon. A Democrat even handed Republicans their best attack line: “The people don’t know McGovern is for amnesty, abortion, and legalization of pot,” an unnamed Democratic senator told the press. Hugh Scott, the GOP’s Senate minority leader, transformed the quote into “the three A’s: Acid, Amnesty, and Abortion” and a golden political slur was born. (Ironically, the unnamed Democratic senator who had originated the line was none other than Eagleton, though McGovern didn’t know it at the time.) "