Let us now praise famous men . . . that have left a name behind, that their praises might be reported.
— Ecclesiastes 44:1,8
Beginning with the first presidential election in 1789, 110 men have been counted in the final election results. Forty-three were elected president and 67 lost (some, of course, ran numerous times, both winning and losing).
To have been a candidate for president of the United States is a very great honor. But winners are lionized and losers forgotten, unless they come back winners, like John Adams, William Henry Harrison, James Monroe, Grover Cleveland and Richard Nixon. But if you lose without a reprieve, you are consigned to the losers’ bracket.
Nowhere has this been more apparent than in the treatment accorded by the Democratic Party to those who didn’t win, such as George McGovern, Walter Mondale and Michael Dukakis. In the convention years that followed their nominations, they were essentially ignored at the party’s national gatherings.
Indeed, at the 2004 Democratic Convention in Boston, Dukakis, who had been the party’s nominee in 1988 and who three times had served as governor of the Commonwealth, was absent from any substantially visible role (a few speeches here and there). The same thing happened at the ’96 and 2000 Democratic gatherings in Chicago and Los Angeles. Both Dukakis and McGovern were there, but without notable acknowledgment.
This shameful treatment by the Democratic Party of three of its presidential standard-bearers strikes at the every essence of what the party chooses to believe about itself, that it is a party proud of its past, committed to changing the present, and mindful of its obligations to the future. A party that makes that claim while shunning those who once represented its greatest hopes is guilty of rank hypocrisy.
Such advice is rooted in the contempt so many consultants have toward the American electorate. The consultants’ publicly unstated but privately acknowledged belief is that voters are so stupid, any prime-time exposure at national conventions of former presidential nominees who lost reinforces the notion Democrats are losers.
Neither Dukakis, McGovern, nor Mondale, men of extraordinary decency, have complained about the disrespectful treatment they’ve received, nor will they; it simply isn’t their style. But that does not change the injustice of such treatment.
Thus it is left to those who value their public service to America, of their unending commitment to the commonweal, of the Athenian ideal of civic engagement, to raise the issue and to ask party chairman Howard Dean and presumptive presidential nominee Barack Obama: Will you put right this fundamental wrong? Will you ensure in Denver that Dukakis, McGovern and Mondale are given, in prime time, a public expression of the gratitude they so richly deserve?
It seems such a small thing to ask, that the Democratic Party remember in a most public way acknowledge those who represented its highest hopes and greatest ideals — and to do so when the party convenes here at its national convention.
Golda Meir was a small-D democrat, blessed with great wisdom. We would do well, all of us, Democrats and Republicans, to heed her advice: “One cannot and must not try to erase the past merely because it does not fit the present.”
George Mitrovich (gmitro35@ ) is president of The Denver Forum, which will honor Sen. George McGovern for his service to America at a luncheon during the DNC.
