What?! Eagleton Cost McGovern the Election?

Here I am, watching the Republican Convention in the comfort of my living room, and Jim Lehrer asked Mark Shields to weigh in on the importance of the person selected by a presidential nominee to fill the vice-president slot one the ticket.

Shields blathered on for a while about what a problem Eagleton was for George McGovern.  He mentioned that the number of days that Eagleton stayed on the ticket didn't leave the McGovern campaign enough time to recover from the selection faux pas.  He spoke as though McGovern's choice of Eagleton was the nail in the coffin of his presidential hopes.

David Brooks and Jim Lehrer just nodded along as though nothing Shields said was substantially wrong.

Have they forgotten that Richard Nixon and his staff and supporters, many of them later to serve time in prison, made sure that the fix was in before the primaries were over?  Nixon wasn't going to allow anything to get in the way of a second term.  Eagleton had nothing to do with it.  Had McGovern been able to get Abraham Lincoln to come back from the grave to run with him, John Mitchell and his criminal gang would have prevented even that from having a favorable impact.

Richard Nixon, not Thomas Eagleton, harmed McGovern's campaign.

But even more, and this is what should be mentioned every time anyone speaks of that election, Richard Nixon harmed the people of the United States of America.