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	<title>FrontPage Magazine &#187; George McGovern</title>
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		<title>Liberal Ex-Congressman Opens Restaurant, Realizes Government Regulations Suck</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/liberal-ex-congressman-opens-restaurant-realizes-government-regulations-suck/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=liberal-ex-congressman-opens-restaurant-realizes-government-regulations-suck</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/liberal-ex-congressman-opens-restaurant-realizes-government-regulations-suck/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Tue, 29 Apr 2014 13:20:12 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Daniel Greenfield]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[The Point]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[excessive government regulation]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[George McGovern]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=224325</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[“It took us a ridiculous amount of time to get our permits."]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/10593_EFCARallyBonior-628x250.jpg"><img class="alignnone  wp-image-224326" alt="10593_EFCARallyBonior-628x250" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/10593_EFCARallyBonior-628x250-450x179.jpg" width="563" height="224" /></a></p>
<p>It&#8217;s different <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/former-congressman-bonior-longtime-liberal-on-capitol-hill-discovers-the-profit-motive/2014/04/26/3d99e3a2-c9a3-11e3-95f7-7ecdde72d2ea_story.html">when you&#8217;re on the receiving end</a>.</p>
<blockquote><p>The former Michigan Democratic congressman, liberal pit bull, academic, antiwar firebrand and labor-union BFF has undergone an epiphany, making him simpatico with businesses and the profit motive.</p>
<p>When his family approached him more than four years ago about starting Zest, Bonior became a scrappy entrepreneur. He used his congressional access to knock on every one of 435 congressional offices, dropping off a flier for Zest. He worked the Metro stations, handing out coupons. He went door-to-door, as if he were campaigning.</p>
<p>“We kept thinking of ways to reach out.”</p>
<p>He knew it was risky. Most restaurants fail within two years. But his stepson and daughter-in-law were experienced in restaurant management. In the process, he gained an appreciation for the profit motive.</p>
<p>“The biggest surprise is how you have to hustle,” he said. “It was an eye-opener. I always heard this when I was in Congress. ‘You should try and own a business someday, Bonior.’ So I own two small businesses with my stepson and daughter-in-law. It’s tough to make it, in terms of profit margins. But somehow you get by and you figure it out.”</p>
<p>Bonior said if he had the power, he would lighten up on pesky regulations.</p>
<p>“It took us a ridiculous amount of time to get our permits. I understand regulations and . . . the necessity for it. But we lost six months of business because of that. It’s very frustrating.”</p></blockquote>
<p>Maybe everyone in Congress should be obligated to manage a business on the side. It might introduce a note of reality into their legislating.</p>
<p>It also <a href="http://www.thenewamerican.com/usnews/politics/item/13306-the-passing-of-george-mcgovern-a-liberal-who-got-mugged">happened to George McGovern</a>.</p>
<blockquote><p>&#8220;In 1988, I invested most of the earnings from this lecture circuit acquiring the leasehold on Connecticut&#8217;s Stratford Inn. Hotels, inns and restaurants have always held a special fascination for me. The Stratford Inn promised the realization of a longtime dream to own a combination hotel, restaurant and public conference facility — complete with an experienced manager and staff&#8230;</p>
<p>I also wish that during the years I was in public office, I had had this firsthand experience about the difficulties business people face every day. That knowledge would have made me a better U.S. senator and a more understanding presidential contender….</p>
<p>To create job opportunities we need entrepreneurs who will risk their capital against an expected payoff. Too often, however, public policy does not consider whether we are choking off those opportunities.</p>
<p>It was the choking of local, state and federal rules, regulations and mandates that forced his venture into bankruptcy. He explained:</p>
<p>&#8220;My business associates and I … lived with federal, state and local rules that were all passed with the objective of helping employees, protecting the environment, raising tax dollars for schools, protecting our customers from fire hazards, etc. While I never doubted the worthiness of any of these goals, the concept that most often eludes legislators is: Can we make consumers pay the higher prices for the increased operating costs that accompany public regulation and government reporting requirements with reams of red tape? It is a simple concern that is nonetheless often ignored by legislators.</p>
<p>For example, the papers today are filled with stories about businesses dropping health coverage for employees. We provided a substantial package for our staff at the Stratford Inn. However, were we operating today, those costs would exceed $150,000 a year for health care on top of salaries and other benefits. There would have been no reasonable way for us to absorb or pass on these costs.&#8221;</p></blockquote>
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		<title>McGovern&#8217;s Legacy</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/arnold-ahlert/mcgoverns-legacy/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=mcgoverns-legacy</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/arnold-ahlert/mcgoverns-legacy/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Thu, 25 Oct 2012 04:25:35 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Arnold Ahlert]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[1968]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[1972]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[death]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Democratic Convention]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Election]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[George McGovern]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Nixon]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=159959</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The Democratic icon nurtured a leftism that polarized America.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2012/arnold-ahlert/mcgoverns-legacy/mcgovern11/" rel="attachment wp-att-159964"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-159964" title="mcgovern11" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/mcgovern11.gif" alt="" width="315" height="238" /></a>On Sunday, Democratic icon George McGovern, who served the state of South Dakota for more than twenty years in the House and Senate, passed away at the age of 90. Despite an accomplished <a href="http://www.cnn.com/2012/10/21/us/george-mcgovern-dead/index.html">record of service</a> during WWll that included 35 combat missions as a B-24 bomber pilot in Europe earning him the Distinguished Flying Cross, McGovern was best known for his anti-war stance with regard to Vietnam, and his overwhelming defeat in the 1972 presidential election. Since his passing, McGovern has been rightly eulogized for his personal affability and agreeableness, but what must not be airbrushed over is the true nature of his influence on the political landscape. As unfortunate as it is, McGovern helped lead the transformation of the Democratic Party into a coalition of leftists distinct from the previous generation of liberals in the Kennedy mold. As a result, the country has never been the same.</p>
<p>It was McGovern himself who <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/22/us/politics/george-mcgovern-a-democratic-presidential-nominee-and-liberal-stalwart-dies-at-90.html?pagewanted=all">planted the seeds</a> of that divisiveness. As the <em>New York Times</em> notes in its obituary, McGovern &#8220;became the chairman of a Democratic Party commission on delegate selection, created after the fractious 1968 national convention to give the rank and file more say in picking a presidential nominee.&#8221; As a result, the McGovern-Fraser Commission &#8220;rewrote party rules to ensure that more women, young people and members of minorities were included in delegations. The influence of party leaders was curtailed. More states began choosing delegates on the basis of primary elections. And the party’s center of gravity shifted decidedly leftward.&#8221;</p>
<p>&#8220;Leftward&#8221; is somewhat inaccurate. Democrats established a de facto quota system informed by identity politics, where people were encouraged to first think of themselves as members of sub-groups identified by race, class, ethnicity and sexual orientation. Nothing has changed to this day, as California&#8217;s 2012 <a href="http://www.cadem.org/admin/miscdocs/files/Final-2012-Delegate-Selection-Plan-11.3.11.pdf">Delegate Selection Plan</a>, for example, reveals. Goals for representation at the Charlotte convention included dividing Californians into six subgroups with the &#8220;proper&#8221; percentages relative to the general population&#8211;as in 16 percent African-American, 29 percent Latino, 1 percent Native American, 10 percent Asian/Pacific Islanders, 12 percent LGBT, 10 percent Disabled Persons, and 18 percent Youth-Under 30.</p>
<p>In 1972, the Democrat convention in Miami turned into a circus. When party activists <a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2012/daniel-flynn/how-mcgovern%E2%80%99s-radical-party-polarized-america/2/">offered</a> up selections such as migrant-worker organizer Cesar Chavez, Yippee Jerry Rubin, anti-corporate crusader Ralph Nader, Communist dictator Mao Zedong, and sitcom character Archie Bunker for Vice President, all the shenanigans did was push McGovern&#8217;s acceptance speech well into the next morning. Furthermore, the party platform with which Democrats emerged was anathema to middle America. Aside from the staunch anti-war position, they advocated amnesty for war resisters, the abolition of the draft, deep cuts to the military, a $1,000 grant to every American, a guaranteed family income well above the poverty line, prisoners’ rights, federal funding for local food cooperatives, the adoption of an Ethnic Studies curriculum bill, and a host of other leftist initiatives.</p>
<p>Yet it was McGovern&#8217;s opposition to Vietnam that <a href="http://www.cnn.com/2012/10/21/us/george-mcgovern-dead/index.html">resonated</a> the most with his supporters. &#8220;Let us resolve that never again will we send the precious young blood of this country to die trying to prop up a corrupt military dictatorship abroad,&#8221; he said at the convention.</p>
<p>The convention turned out to be the high point of McGovern&#8217;s campaign. Soon after, it was revealed that McGovern&#8217;s running mate, Senator Thomas F. Eagleton (D-MO), had been hospitalized for nervous exhaustion and undergone electroshock therapy. Despite McGovern&#8217;s promise to back Eagleton &#8220;1000 percent,&#8221; he was replaced by Kennedy in-law R. Sargent Shriver. The election was a rout. McGovern carried Massachusetts and the District of Columbia, earning 17 electoral votes, while Nixon carried 49 states and won 520 electoral votes.</p>
<p>McGovern reflected on that defeat as recently as a month before he died in a <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/george-mcgovern-on-his-1972-presidential-defeat/2012/09/28/dded48fc-f78c-11e1-8398-0327ab83ab91_story.html">piece</a> for the <em>Washington Post.</em> &#8220;The loss is there, an old wound never fully healed,&#8221; he wrote. &#8220;My disappointment was certainly personal, made deeper by the awareness that many thousands of young Americans, and far more Vietnamese and other Asian citizens, were going to and did lose their lives with the Nixon administration’s continuation of the war.&#8221;</p>
<p>For McGovern, like so many liberals, the war in Vietnam remains a one-sided telling of history to this day. It was another liberal icon, JFK, who <a href="http://www.historylearningsite.co.uk/kennedy_vietnam.htm">escalated</a> America&#8217;s presence in Vietnam, because he believed in the Domino Theory: if Vietnam fell to Communism, the entire Southeast Asian Peninsula would follow. In fact, that&#8217;s exactly what happened, and 2-3 million Vietnamese, Cambodians, and Laotians were slaughtered in the ensuing bloodbath. It was a bloodbath caused not only by our troop withdrawal, but the <a href="http://militaryhistory.about.com/od/vietnamwar/a/VietnamEnd.htm">passage</a> of the Foreign Assistance Act of 1974 by a Democratically controlled Congress, cutting off all aid to Saigon. One year later, Communists gained control of the entire country. That leftists calculatingly omit these details when trumpeting the success of the anti-war movement is nothing short of appalling.</p>
<p>That 1974 vote arguably marked the point where the New Left effectively took control of the Democrat Party. The classical centrist Democrat liberals who had vigorously opposed Communist totalitarianism would thereafter become rarer and rarer within the party. Add the emergence of identity politics to the mix, and the resultant party was no longer &#8220;liberal,&#8221; but leftist.</p>
<p>It is a leftism that has polarized America. That polarization is best explained by the <em>Wall Street Journal&#8217;s</em> James Taranto. While conceding the prevailing meme promoted by leftist obituaries that McGovern was above all else a &#8220;decent man,&#8221; he challenges New Republic writer Rick Perlstein, who <a href="http://www.tnr.com/article/politics/108938/george-mcgovern-decent-and-doomed-liberal-icon">laments</a> that McGovern&#8217;s death reminds us of  &#8220;this space between the longing for unapologetic good-government liberalism and its decimation in a fallen political world&#8211;in which the decent and honorable simply get crushed.&#8221; Taranto contends that leftists labor under the delusion &#8220;that left-wing politics and decency are one and the same thing.&#8221; &#8220;This moral vanity leads the left to excuse, or even not to notice, indecent behavior on the part of their own. It is the reason Obama&#8217;s re-election campaign has been less McGovernite than McCarthyite (and we don&#8217;t mean Gene),&#8221; Taranto concludes.</p>
<p>That vanity also explains the evolution of Democrats since 1972, and why that evolution is so detrimental to bipartisanship: there is a great deal of difference between challenging conservative ideology on the basis of political or intellectual differences, and completely dismissing it as fundamentally indecent&#8211;as well as unworthy of serious rebuttal. It is telling that a substantial portion of leftist rebuttal can be reduced to single words like &#8220;racist,&#8221; &#8220;misogynistic,&#8221; &#8220;nativist,&#8221; and &#8220;homophobic&#8221; or simple catch-alls, such as &#8220;cruel&#8221; and &#8220;uncaring.&#8221;</p>
<p>All of this plays into president Obama&#8217;s current campaign, where the focus has been far more on demonizing his opponent than laying out a vision for America. Yet even when Obama lays out a vision, it is marinated in a stew of &#8220;us against them&#8221; grievances that can be traced back to the radicalism that has been mainstreamed into the Democratic Party of today.</p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank">Click here</a>.</strong></p>
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