Letter to the Oregonian.
It’s been a long time since 1972, so perhaps David Sarasohn’s memory of
the fight over the Democratic convention delegates from California can be
forgiven for being a bit hazy. He wrote in Sunday’s discussion of
historical clashes over delegate credentialing that “new McGovern rules
suggested” that California’s delegates should be divvied up
proportionately rather than all going to the winner of the most primary
votes.Reforms after the 1968 convention to the delegate apportionment procedures
overseen by first Sen. George McGovern and then Rep. Donald Fraser did
establish proportional delegate distribution in many state contests. But
the McGovern-Fraser reforms did not require that states change to
proportional systems by 1972. California’s winner-take-all primary had
been approved by the Democratic National Committee more than a year before
the election and all of the candidates knew long before the primary what
was at stake.Just before the California primary, McGovern’s chief contender, former
Vice President Hubert Humphrey, told Walter Cronkite on CBS that he
wouldn’t challenge the rule if he lost: “That would be changing the rules
after the ball game is over.” Of course, that was when Humphrey thought
that he would win California, which was the only way he could win the
nomination by then. After losing all of California’s delegates to
McGovern, Humphrey did precisely what he had decried, causing weeks of
turmoil over a credentials challenge that might better have been spent,
say, vetting a vice presidential candidate rather than settling for the
late Sen. Thomas Eagleton.