From Us & Them: How the Press Covered the 1972 Election by James M. Perry (Clarkson N. Potter, New York, 1973):
It was just as bad as we anticipated–McGovern took the District of Columbia and Massachusetts–and David Broder, our most famous political writer, tried to analyze what had happened.
“What Goldwater and McGovern had in common–and what defeated both, so resoundingly–was that in the course of their campaigns, the voters came to the same conclusion that political and journalistic Washington had previously reached: that they were lightweights in the heavyweight division of presidential politics. They were men of good heart and good spirit, open and honorable, whose failing was their tendency to see public questions in one-dimensional, almost simplistic terms.”
McGovern read the column and sat down to write Broder a letter in longhand.
“Bullshit,” he said.