Nixonland: America's Second Civil War and the Divisive Legacy of Richard Nixon 1965-72

by Rick Perlstein

The notion was that McGovern was the perfect Democratic candidate to run against Nixon because his shimmering idealism, his incorruptibility, his utter straightfowardness—not to mention his early and morally uncompromising antiwar stance—could draw brand-new strands into the Democratic coalition, perhaps for good: newly enfranchised under-twenty-ones; the activists of the new social movements; the conscience-stricken idealists of a nation suffering under an epidemic of alienation. The process was supposed to be additive. That, after all, was how the Democratic coalition had always worked: new groups braided into the whole, which bodies forth ever stronger in the future. But the Democratic regulars proved unwelcoming, the old magic from the days when McGovern successfully reached out to blue-collar voters in Milwaukee bowling alleys hard to recapture.