George McGovern, bleeding heart liberal, RIP

[Odelay]

During my years in Congress and for the four decades since, I've been labeled a 'bleeding-heart liberal.' It was not meant as a compliment, but I gladly accept it. My heart does sometimes bleed for those who are hurting in my own country and abroad. A bleeding-heart liberal, by definition, is someone who shows enormous sympathy towards others, especially the least fortunate. Well, we ought to be stirred, even to tears, by society's ills. And sympathy is the first step toward action. Empathy is born out of the old biblical injunction "Love the neighbor as thyself."
—George S. McGovern, What It Means to Be a Democrat (2011).

For the same reasons as ol' George, I've never been bothered by the label of bleeding heart liberal.

[Prospero]

Your headline sounded worthy of OMK! McGovern was a good guy. My American family campaigned for him in days of yore.

[Cuchulain]

"Of all the men that have run for president in the twentieth century, only George McGovern truly understood what a monument America could be to the human race." - Hunter S. Thompson

[Stavros]

Perhaps it is a measure of the times we live that McGovern admitted that in 1972 he was more focused on policy issues than his image, and was ridiculed as a liberal by a man who would struggle to get selected to represent today's Republican Party. He was instrumental in creating a more open and inclusive political party, although it is arguable that the Democrats after Johnson were struggling to contain the different factions that joined it, encouraged by the gains of the civil rights movement, for it did give them a chaotic look and feel, and the 1972 convention was a shambles that could never happen today when everything is micro-managed.
Out of office, McGover never sought the riches that some political failures conjure up from lobbying in Washington DC, and his clarion call at the 1972 convention for closed doors to be opened was not just resonant of the secrets and lies that eventually brought the Nixon administratin into disgrace, it was a message that rings true today.
But I doubt he would get very far in today's political climate, which suggests that more has been lost than has been gained since the 1970s.

He declared at the Convention that on inaugural day he would immediately cease the bombing of Indo-China; and I shall remember him for the climax to that speech, and not just the remarkable thought -today an inconceivable thought?- of an American politician quoting Woody Guthrie on prime time tv...

From secrecy and deception in high places; come home, America
From military spending so wasteful that it weakens our nation; come home, America.
From the entrenchment of special privileges in tax favoritism; from the waste of idle lands to the joy of useful labor; from the prejudice based on race and sex; from the loneliness of the aging poor and the despair of the neglected sick -- come home, America.
Come home to the affirmation that we have a dream. Come home to the conviction that we can move our country forward.
Come home to the belief that we can seek a newer world, and let us be joyful in that homecoming, for this “is your land, this land is my land -- from California to New York island, from the redwood forest to the gulf stream waters -- this land was made for you and me.”