COLUMN: What Will It Be This Time?

By Tobin Barnes
I’m going to lay my cards on the table. No jokers.

Obama’s my guy.

Has been since last fall when the multitudinous candidacies first started to shake out. I like the sense of dignity he brings to the table and also his long-term view of the nation’s problems. We’ve been short-sighting ourselves way too long now.

Meanwhile, my wife’s been for Clinton all that time—still is. She likes her feistiness and her constant championing of the underdog. My wife can’t stand to listen to Jay Leno tell jokes about Hillary. So I have to sit there and snark in private through all the pantsuit quips.

That doesn’t mean I couldn’t support Clinton if she somehow became the nominee, despite the best political judgment, which has been famously wrong before.

Both Clinton and Obama would be much better than McBush, as some pundits have perhaps unfairly labeled John McCain. (No one ever said politics is fair. You make your own bed, but, unfortunately, other people get to tuck you in.)

Whatever, I don’t want a 72-year-old McCain Presidency that could run on to an 80-year-old Presidency and all that implies, particularly when “stay the course” might be it’s mantra. As David Letterman said about a potential eight more years of Bush,
“Hey, cut me off another slice of that!”

So I suppose my wife and I will cancel each other out when it comes down to South Dakota’s June 3 primary. So it goes. I obviously didn’t marry myself, and thank goodness for that.

Not sure those last two primaries, South Dakota and Montana, will make much of a difference anyway, but nevertheless, it’ll be South Dakota’s biggest hurrah in Presidential politics since 1968 and 1972. Those were years when two Democratic native sons, Hubert Humphrey and George McGovern respectively, ran for President.

Humphrey was born in Wallace, SD, and grew up in Doland, SD. McGovern was born in Avon, SD, and grew up in Mitchell, SD. Both went on to distinguished lives and careers, including terms in the United States Senate, Humphrey representing Minnesota and McGovern, South Dakota.

Humphrey once said, “I learnt more about politics during one South Dakota dust storm than in seven years at the university.” He also said he didn’t mind being caught shedding a tear now and then because there’s more than enough tough guys in the world.

McGovern grew up as a small-town minister’s kid and went on to serve as a heroic bomber pilot in WWII. His wife Eleanor, who died just last year, grew up in the little burg of Woonsocket, between Huron and Mitchell. George and Eleanor met as high school debaters. It turned out to be Woonsocket over Mitchell in that one. She and her sister beat George and his partner.

I not only share the same hometown as McGovern, but my mother sometimes walked to school with him, and my brother dated his daughter for a spell, and I got to play tennis with him once.

Of course, none of this has anything to do with Presidential politics as much as pride of place and origins.

When Humphrey and McGovern ran for President in 1968 and 1972, they each lost to Richard Nixon, Humphrey in a tight popular-vote race and McGovern in one of the biggest Presidential landslides of all time.

Also, in each case, South Dakota chose Nixon over it’s own native sons. From my point of view, not a proud voting record.

South Dakota had presented the best it had to offer, each made of great Presidential material, and their state and nation rejected them. But then, South Dakota’s never been a bastion of support for Democratic Presidential nominees, except during the Depression when the common man of South Dakota was sorely down-and-out and therefore immune to conservative ideology.

Using twenty-twenty hindsight, it’s not difficult to imagine either or both Humphrey and McGovern being better Presidents than Nixon—in depth of character and integrity, if nothing else.

And that appears to have been plenty.