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天边一只猴 发表于 2013-10-8 09:58 ![]()
3 k7 ^/ }. q1 t! i" M1972年大选民主党提名的乔治·麦戈文也是太烂了点，身为联邦参议员连自己的老家南达科他都丢了，就赢了个铁 ...
George McGovern人品是一流，去年他去世的时候，我读到对他一生的评论，不分党派，都是一片赞美之声。可惜搞政治的话，人品太好，太理想主义了，反而是个累赘。
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这是Economist上对他的Obituary，我读了以后觉得很感动。* r4 H# A) W* q5 w5 I! [
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George McGovern
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George McGovern, politician and hunger-fighter, died on October 21st, aged 90
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. U, D, @' K M0 e( U; ]* ^IN HIS own mind, George McGovern was as straightforward an American as you could wish to see. He was born in a parsonage and brought up on the South Dakota prairie. He fell in love in college (Dakota Wesleyan) and stayed married to Eleanor “for ever”. His old age was spent in the same small town in which he had been a boy. His creed, too, was simple, the theme of the speech with which he had won the South Dakota oratory contest at 17: “My brother’s keeper”. He became a Democrat, though both his family and his state were staunchly Republican, because that was the party of the average Joe. His public career was devoted to easing the hunger of the poor, and that was all he wanted to be remembered for.
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4 ~& f+ ?& W& QAll the more frustrating, then, that he was remembered for something else: for running, in 1972, the most idealistic or daft campaign for the presidency ever seen, and for earning one of the soundest electoral trouncings. He promised swingeing cuts in the defence budget, an end to the war in Vietnam, an amnesty for draft-evaders, universal health care, a guaranteed job for every American and an income above the poverty line for every American household. Bright-eyed young volunteers stuffed envelopes for him; Hollywood stars turned out for him; Simon and Garfunkel sang. To no avail. Richard Nixon won 49 states; he won Massachusetts and the District of Columbia.1 p% T1 I$ ~. G2 ]
3 c: w4 C4 H2 i. A. WHis name became a byword for Democratic disaster, linking him for ever to the long-haired likes of Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin and to those who screamed “Hell, no, we won’t go!” But he was no radical. He seldom got mad at anyone, hugely regretting any loss of his “sense of balance”. His soft, slow plainsman’s drawl held just the slightest quaver of emotion. Out of Christian principle, he loathed abortion, and did not want pot legalised. He was no pacifist, either. War had a purpose sometimes, and in 1944-45 he had flown the lumbering B24s to prove it, making 35 bombing sorties over Europe. He saw no such purpose in Vietnam. Alone, he spoke out in Congress against the war (“This chamber reeks of blood!”) and ran for president to appeal for peace again.
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Politics never seemed quite the right career for him. He believed in the ideal and the impossible. Guile was unknown to him. His best advice was “Never say anything that, down inside, you think is wrong.” Driving the straight roads of South Dakota in his clunking sedan, he could enlist farmers as Democrats with a handshake; but he never learned the art of schmoozing. After four years in the House, from 1957, and 18 in the Senate, from 1962, he had almost no legislation to his name. In 1970 he rewrote the election rules for the Democratic Party: mayors, bigwigs and labour barons lost their backroom power to choose delegates, and openly contested primaries replaced them. His party eventually prospered from this, as it did from the near-death experience he had given it. But in 1972 he offended the powerful, and hurt his chances. He hurt himself more by clinging to, then abandoning, his running-mate Thomas Eagleton, who had admitted mental problems. Expediency was not something he knew much about.: t2 o9 g1 C- t9 c$ F2 s2 o
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His true talent lay behind the scenes. On the agricultural committees he worked for price supports, grain reserves, food stamps, rural development. Farmers had no better friend than George McGovern. But he added another dimension, hinting at his youthful leanings to follow his father as a Methodist minister: a conviction that out of America’s surplus, the poor of the world should be fed.
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This conviction went deep. He first felt it in Mitchell, his home town, where the domed Corn Palace was decorated each year with murals made from corn, seeds and grass, the bounty of the plains. There too, in his boyhood, ravaging dust storms seeped through every chink in the house, and swarms of grasshoppers ate even the wooden handles of hoes left in the fields. Nature gave and took away. In wartime, he did the same: dropping bombs and then food parcels over Germany and Italy, where emaciated children fought and drowned over Hershey bars flung into the Bay of Naples.# v% q' b8 \8 O; l
2 n/ f; Q* N d" O; cWant and plenty+ l& w0 }( U2 }! |# ^* \. J
5 |" g6 L X2 \7 f7 e' E; UIn 1961 President Kennedy put him in charge of Food for Peace, which gave poor countries credits to buy American grain. Within a year, 10m more people were being fed from America’s surplus. He helped to set up the UN World Food Programme and became, to his delight, “the point-guy on global hunger”. In later years he determined to give a square meal to the 300m schoolchildren who, he reckoned, started the day without one. Three books laid out his strategy for ending world hunger by 2030. He was eager to live to see it.
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A- c$ V& o ~: B' P9 {There was also work to do closer to home. He had never forgotten his fundamental horror that plenty and want could co-exist in the same country. Malnutrition in America, however, meant excess of the wrong things, as well as deficiency of the right ones. The only report he left behind, besides his work on election rules, was one advising Americans on what they should eat: less fat and sugar, more vegetables. And, with that, the thought that they should also give up war, hunger for justice, and feed on dreams.
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雷达卡
发表于 2013-10-8 02:26:33
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发表于 2013-10-8 02:44:58
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