Social Icons  twitter google plus rss feed  Sunday, October 21,
2012  George McGovern comes home, America  When I was eighteen,
I experienced a period of temporary insanity.  I became a
Democrat.  There were several stressors. My father, a
conservative Republican who thought that Barry Goldwater was a
few fries short of a Happy Meal and was impressed by Lyndon
Johnson's career as Senate Majority Leader,  switched sides in
1964. After backing Pennsylvania Gov. Bill Scranton for the
Republican nomination, so did I.  And then, four years later, I
was facing eligibility for the draft. I was in no danger (or so
I thought) of actually being drafted (having been accepted at
what was then Concordia Teachers College in River Forest at the
time an institution for training teachers for the Missouri
Synod's parochial schools, and thus classified not merely as a
deferred college student, but as an exempted ministerial student
for Selective Service purposes), the draft didn't exactly loom
threateningly over my head.  But t