Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72 (Harper Perennial Modern Classics)

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But the part of the quote that interested me more was where he said he wasn’t sure if they should be put back together. TV screens in my coworking space are eternally fixed on these channels, featuring wide men in suits lined up behind desks, endlessly talking about a single play. If we assume that your term “new politics” had any validity, your choice of Eagleton was the point where it turned around and you decided that the time had come to make friends with the people you’d been fighting the whole time.

I think that element of indecisiveness, and the willingness – as he said in his interview – to do anything possible to forge a “winning coalition” didn’t do him any good at all. But for Americans, politics is just another sport: a long, drawn-out and essentially boring game puffed up to importance with pomp and pageantry and a maddening ocean of statistics.

My first loss came in New Hampshire, where I felt guilty for taking advantage of one of McGovern’s staffers who wanted to bet that George would get more than 35% of the vote; and I lost when he wound up with 37. They were skeptical and I think the mood of the country was much more conservative than we had been led to believe in the primaries.

HST: That actually isn’t much fun, writing about it … the High is in the participation, and particularly if you identify with one candidate … I don’t think that I could do it if I didn’t care who won. We had left New York that morning, with a stop in Philadelphia, and by the time we got to Wichita the scene in the Zoo Plane was like the clubhouse at Churchill Downs on Kentucky Derby Day… and now, flying back from L. I think if we’d have gotten off to a better start just like a – I remember when I was at Northwestern there was a great hurdler that was supposed to win the US competition and probably win the Olympics, and he hit the first hurdle with his foot, and then he hit about the next four in a row, you know, and just petered out. Both McGovern and Eagleton would have complete physicals later at Walter Reed Hospital, and challenge the other candidates to do the same and release the medical results. If you give 25 million people a new toy, the odds are pretty good that a lot of them will try it at least once,” he offers at one point.I think it was a tradition dating back to one of the Kennedy campaigns… At every hotel, wherever the campaign press corps stopped, there would be maybe a hundred rooms reserved for the press. I firmly believed throughout 1971 that the major hurdle to winning the presidency was winning the Democratic nomination. HST: One of the weird unanswered questions is whether McGovern actually said1000% to anyone but Eagleton. My own theory, which sounds like madness, is that McGovern would have been better off running against Nixon with the same kind of neo-“radical” campaign he ran in the primaries.

Ed: The other day I reread the end of Hell’s Angels, one of my favorite books… and you talked about The Edge… you know… that moment that I’ve experienced … I was a … minor league bike-rider in my youth… that moment of being on the edge… and you talk about that a lot throughout your coverage this past year. It’s the difference between watching a football game between two teams you don’t care about, and watching a game where you have some kind of personal identity with one of the teams, if only a huge bet. Any candidate who’d offered a real possibility of an alternative to Nixon – someone with a different concept of the presidency – could have challenged him and come very close to beating him. I think it might be better to have the President sort of like the King of England – or the Queen – and have the real business of the presidency conducted by … a city manager-type, a Prime Minister, somebody who’s directly answerable to Congress, rather than a person who moves all his friends into the White House and does whatever he wants for four years.Thompson paced about his room – at the end of an 18-foot microphone cord – describing the final days of the doomed McGovern campaign. Groups of men with nothing to talk about — say, at a mediocre party — will find common ground in sports statistics. He was a great lover of guns, an occasional political candidate and lover of narcotics who eventually committed suicide in 2005. HST: Well, he spent most of the afternoon at a country club reception … it was the first time I’d ever seen him drinking… sort of casually and openly in public . The selection of a replacement for Eagleton was one of the most heinous botches in the history of politics.