Bernie Sanders' big win in New Hampshire has given his campaign a big boost, but even Bernie knows that there's still a long primary season ahead.
One of the biggest criticisms about Bernie Sanders, one that I hear frequently from pro-Clinton callers, is that Bernie Sanders could be the next George McGovern.
And it's a serious criticism that's being thrown at Bernie.
Because George McGovern ran as a progressive who wanted to end the Vietnam War and institute basic minimum incomes for the nation's poor, and he lost.
In fact, he lost in one of the biggest landslide losses in American presidential history.
He didn't even win in his home state of South Dakota, and the only electoral votes that he won were from Massachusetts and Washington, D.C..
But there's a few really good reasons to move past that criticism and to realize that if Bernie Sanders gets the nomination, he's not going to be the next George McGovern.
It's really, really, important to remember where the country was 44 years ago, back in 1972.
Nixon was an incumbent who had already been President, and Commander-In-Chief, for three years, and had been Vice President under the wildly popular Eisenhower for 8 years.
During those three years as President, foreign affairs became domestic affairs as young people, like me at the time, demonstrated in the streets to push back against U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War.
McGovern built his platform on ending the war in Vietnam, and during his announcement speech he promised to withdraw every American solider from Southeast Asia and to improve economic conditions by reducing military spending.
The platform had a strong appeal to the young people like me, the people who had grown up with a government that was sending us off to a war in Vietnam to "stop the spread of communism", because we had strong feeling that we had been lied to, and that Nixon was continuing to lie to us.
McGovern had the support of young people, like Barack Obama did in 2008, and like Bernie Sanders seems to in 2016.
But he lost, in a landslide.
His platform simply didn't resonate with the older generation, the people in my dad's generation, the people "over 30" who us young people had learned not to trust.
The first problem was that Nixon made the Vietnam War a non-nothing issue for the older generation by pointing to the on-going process of "Vietnamization" that his administration was leading, and by promising that he would end the war in Vietnam and do it in a way that would bring "peace with honor".
That's the part of the story you'll read in history books, and it's the common narrative to explain why McGovern lost every state except for Massachusetts to Nixon.
But it's not the whole story.
The real question is, WHY didn't the people over thirty, those in my dad's generation, turn out to vote for McGovern?.
It's because my dad's generation, the people who voted for Nixon, didn't feel like they had been screwed by the government the way young people felt screwed, because my dad's generation had lived through a time of American prosperity in the 50s and 60s.
