We can't let the strong kick aside the weak

“We are the party that believes we can’t let the strong kick aside the weak. Our party believes that poor children should be as well educated as those from wealthy families. We believe that everyone should pay their fair share of taxes and that everyone should have access to health care.”
If that sounds current, that means history repeats itself:
Those were some of the “radical views” that cost George McGovern the election when he ran against the incumbent, Richard Nixon, for president forty years ago.
McGovern’s concern for the down and out began as a child in a Methodist parsonage in South Dakota when he saw people asking for food at his family’s doorstep.  Later in the Army Air Corps in World War Two, this awareness was reenforced as he encountered emaciated child beggars in Italy.
On the eve of this year’s election, I reviewed the work of this courageous man who died a couple of weeks ago at age ninety.  As a “failed candidate,” he left an amazing humanitarian record:
Senator McGovern’s opposition to the war in Vietnam probably was the greatest single factor in his lopsided defeat in 1972 (He carried only Massachusetts and the District of Columbia).  
People get labeled “unpatriotic” if they say we shouldn’t fight wars our leaders decide to take us into, whether Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Syria, or whatever is next on the drawing board.
He voted for the Tonkin Gulf Resolution in 1964, giving LBJ a virtual blank check to pay for the war. But by the next year, McGovern joined a small group of senators calling U.S. involvement in Vietnam a mistake.
On a later vote to end the war in Southeast Asia, he said in Senate debate: “Every senator in this chamber is partly responsible for sending 50,000 young Americans to an early grave.  This chamber reeks of blood.”
In the U. S. House of Representatives in the early 1960s, he introduced the idea of the U.S. Food for Peace program, which gave foreign nations credit to buy surplus U.S. crops.  President John F. Kennedy named McGovern the program’s first director.  In that work, he had a key role in developing the United Nations’ World Food Program that has provided food assistance to hundreds of millions of victims of wars and natural disasters.
“It is in our self-interest to end hunger,” he wrote in 1998 in the Los Angeles Times. “After all, we live in one world. Rich and poor alike, we breathe the same air; we share a global economy. . . . The chaos associated with political instability rooted in poverty and desperation is rarely contained within a single country.”
After being elected to the U. S. Senate in 1962, he spent much of his public life expanding food stamp and school lunch programs.
In the Senate, McGovern also stood for civil rights and urged the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty. After being defeated for reelection to the Senate in 1980, he served as the U.S. representative to the U.N. Food and Agricultural Organization in Rome and as a U.N. global ambassador on world hunger.
In its McGovern obituary, The New York Times seemed to contradict itself.  On the one hand, it said, “Mr. McGovern left no special mark in his three terms.”  Then it went on to say in the same sentence:  “but he voted consistently in favor of civil rights and antipoverty bills, was instrumental in developing and expanding food stamp and nutrition programs, and helped lead opposition to the Vietnam War in the Senate.”
Initially after the election, he was bitter.  As to how long it took to get over the loss,  McGovern said, “You never fully get over it. But I’ve had a good life. I’ve enjoyed myself ninety percent of the time.”
The year after the election, he was able to joke, “Ever since I was a young man I wanted to run for the presidency in the worst possible way — and I did.” 
I met Senator McGovern a few years after that devastating defeat.  On a trip to New York City, I was the dinner guest of a friend who lived there.  We were seated toward the back in the elegant Russian Tea Room when the Senator and another person came in and sat near the front.
As we left the restaurant, we stopped by their table, and I said, “Senator McGovern, I voted for you in 1972.”  
He smiled and said, “Well, you certainly were in a minority, weren’t you?”
“Yes,” I said.  “But I didn’t cast my vote just to be in the majority.  I voted for you and what you stood for.”