Mister, we could use a man like WHO again?

All right, dummy up, all ‘o youz!

Here’s the story of the other U.S. presidential campaign scandal from 1972, though this one really was nothing more than third-rate.

And it’s about a transgression not by that bigoted vindictive liar Richard Nixon, who had treasonously sabotaged a peace agreement in 1968 to get in the White House in the first place, then obstructed justice four years later to stay there. Nope, this lapse in integrity was by the progressive George McGovern.

It was so tiny a lapse it is historically irrelevant -- forgotten by all but the most hardcore political history wonks. Which is why I am the person writing about it.

If a burglary and cover-up didn’t prevent President Nixon from trouncing the liberal senator from South Dakota by 22 percentage points in the popular vote, a little identity sleight of hand by a popular actor on behalf of the McGovern campaign didn’t stave off the resounding 1972 landslide loss either.

For context, consider the landscape of McGovern’s race in the autumn of that year: much of his own Democratic party is not with him, the AFL-CIO under the powerful George Meany has declined to endorse him, his central issue the Vietnam War has been wound down (and the Nixon campaign’s 1968 sabotage is still secret).

                                     
The '72 Race on the Airwaves: Each side defines Senator McGovern: He says he will make things fairer for the average American. Nixon says he would leave us defenseless.

As though his problems weren't enough, McGovern had to eat an unprecedented amount of crow days after the Democratic Convention by replacing his vice-presidential running mate Tom Eagleton with Sargent Shriver. As the fall campaign went on, the voters were not terribly concerned about the Watergate break-in, instead fearing McGovern’s perceived “radicalism.”

Now, addressing this r-word label, comes perhaps candidate George McGovern’s last hope: a TV ad featuring the very face of meat-and-potatoes American conservatism.

The ad opens with Carroll O’Connor striking exactly the seated pose of his signature character Archie Bunker when Archie would be in his iconic living room chair, the spot from which he would launch brusque and uninformed conservative salvos weekly to TV audiences.

In this ad for McGovern, O’Connor decries, “the radicalism of the present administration.”

Nothing misleading about that. But O’Connor then says:

 

“Radicalism is what any conservative must try to remove from authority, and that is why I, as a conservative man, am going to vote with confidence for Senator George McGovern.”

 

Calling Nixon radical makes perfect sense; his war on drugs is a radical right purge of minorities, his invasion of Cambodia opened the way for Pol Pot, and his agricultural policies would soon enable corporations to obliterate the small family farm. That’s the stuff of Juan Peron or Mussolini.

Whereas the “radicalism” label is correct, just who is the labeler? Carroll O’Connor is recognized on sight as the snarling bigot Archie, but off the set of the wildly popular and influential CBS show “All in the Family,” he is an eclectic and educated liberal.

O’Connor, who would go on to do TV ads for Senator Ted Kennedy’s 1980 runs in presidential primaries, is not the man who continually lauded “Richard E. Nixon,” in debates with his “pinko” and “Polack” son-in-law Mike. That was Archie Bunker.

It wasn’t O’Connor who tore into his wife’s cousin Maude’s pieties by declaring, “This country was ruined by Franklin Delano Roosevelt!” – or, for that matter, who started each show by harmonizing that, “Mister, we could use a man like Herbert Hoover again!”

All that, as well, was Archie.

So just who is it who is telling the voters he is “a conservative man” in this ad for the most liberal Democrat to run for president?

Deceptive, or at least pandering though it may have been to represent Carroll O’Connor to the voters as Archie Bunker, the normally hyper-ethical Senator McGovern could read his dismal poll numbers during the fall of 1972. After the ad ran, McGovern talked it up, and did nothing to disabuse viewers who weren’t up on the fact that O’Connor was no Archie Bunker.

In a broadcast appearance by the candidate in Los Angeles featuring live phone calls from average voters, McGovern, as reported by the L.A. Times, said:

 

“I want to thank Carroll O’Connor for his endorsement…. Carroll O’Connor is known to most of you as Archie Bunker. The only thing we ask is that all of you who like Archie Bunker vote for George McGovern and Sargent Shriver.”

 

Those who liked Archie Bunker were in large part what demographers would shortly call “Nixon-crats.” These were blue collar working families who celebrated the clichéd social conservatism trumpeted each Saturday evening by the fictional Queens loading dock worker. Archie’s full-voiced pronouncements demonstrated no awareness of how his family’s comfortable life at 704 Houser St. was possible because of FHA mortgage guarantees, the G.I. Bill, minimum wage laws, farm subsidies, and the right to form unions – all given to him by the FDR he calls the ruin of America.

This array of once cherished New Deal reforms, obscure to the voting public by the 1970s, wasn’t working as a rallying call any longer for the Democratic Party. The liberal O’Connor seemed to realize this, never alluding in the ad to the traditional Democrat economic egalitarian ideal, content to fashion himself a conservative.

And George McGovern, for all his idealism and 2 am-acceptance-speech devotion to principle, also was a politician. Playing to that tendency of the American public (or as his endorser might call them, “dingbats”) to confuse TV actors with their characters is the kind of thing to which politicians will resort when they’re down by 22 points.

Brian Arbenz enthusiastically backed George McGovern in 1972, even to the point of welcoming the endorsement of "a conservative man" who appeared to be named Archie. Hey, in elections ya do what ya gotta do.