Ever since first seeing Fear & Loathing In Las Vegas and hearing more about Hunter S Thompson and his journalistic work I made it a mission in life to read as much of his material as possible and this is possibly his crowning jewel in my opinion, followed closely by his account of living with the Hell's Angels in the aptly titled Hell's Angels.

There's no way of truly pinning down what makes this such a great read, although if you are familiar with Thompson you know you will enjoy his seething, scathing review of American politics and even if this is your first foray into his work you will come away with one heck of an experience. It's a gruelling read, with parallels between '72 and present day which are eerie and quite scary at times.

He may be known to so many ill-educated people as that comedic recreational drug user played by Bill Murray and Johnny Depp in Where The Buffalo Roam and Fear & Loathing, respectively, but to those who saw there was so much more to him than a couple of funny films, he's an icon of journalistic freedom, brutal honesty and overall nut-casery that he, and he alone, could somehow embody and still make such an endearing effort of it!

Absolutely essential document of how McGovern ran a brilliant insurgent campaign to get the Democratic nomination in 1972 and then pissed it away (in a campaign he never could have won anyway), written in Thompson's surprisingly lucid yet take-no-prisoners style. My favorite book on politics ever. It's eerie how little has changed.

The year was 1972 but it could be 2012--heck, it could be nearly ANY year! Hunter S. Thompson covers the "truth" behind the 1972 campaign to either reelect the very divisive and seemingly unpopular President Richard Nixon, or elect one of a slew of potential Democratic candidates. In 1972 Nixon was seen as weak, with the VERY unpopular Vietnam War winding down, but far from over and only dim hope that the troops would be home soon. An economy that was increasingly under the grips of what could be described as dark, and getting gloomier. A wide assortment of characters from the fringe to the hacks all tossing about the country hitting all the major primary battleground states with the confidence that "ANYONE can beat this President." So of course when everyone person feels they have a shot, then the field gets crowded and to stand out among he herd it is necessary to spout off the craziest and sometimes the most loony of positions. Any and every politician worth their weight in lobbyist money thinks they have the charisma and wits to out last their rivals in what transpires to be the equivalent of a marathon of clowns.

Sound familiar? Sound like almost any election of the last couple cycles? Like the current campaign. You have career politicians who can never give a straight answer about any position or policy for fear of alienating not only the core primary voters, but also independents in the November election. Bring in the more "fringe" candidates who are passionate about a couple of key issues, but otherwise are unelectable for any number of reasons. May even want to add in a few simply "crazies" that don't stand any chance in hell too, just to give the race some needed flavor.

Blended together and you have a strange concoction that when Hunter S. Thompson wades through it, you get to the sheer crux of it, in all its vulgar and fearsome loathing that his perspective of truth. Which usually IS the truth! Only Dr. Thompson himself could probably deliver THE definitive truthful account of that election (facts are necessary to hyperbolize and embellish simply to GET to the truth, you know!) and on top of that, also deliver a sheer gonzo masterpiece of journalistic writing that stands up to posterity simply because the TRUTH that Hunter delivers is applicable to ANY time period and nearly ANY presidential campaign since then.

Now...fans of nearly anything else of Hunter S. Thompson's work will first note that THIS work is more "daunting" than most of his stuff. "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas" and "Rum Diaries" are far shorter works. This one is much denser and longer. It also drags...and I think some of this was done deliberately to convey how knock-down, depressingly drag these campaigns actually are. The public gets bored because we all understand they are too long and the candidates are raked over the coals in the most humiliating public fashion. Who seriously would really ever WANT to do that?

But Thompson is simply brilliant in his play-by-play and his entertaining odyssey across the country. Like any of his stuff, he inserts himself into the fray and makes it so he is as much a part of the story as the subject matter. He was truly one of the 20th century's great wordsmiths.

Five Stars for me for sheer vulgar and brilliant writing and truth-telling. Nothing is every going to be like Dr. Hunter S. Thompson. Truly a unique writer that this country will never see again.

For those that have never read Hunter, I would not start with THIS book though. Simply it has parts in it that for the unfamiliar reader, may bore them as well. Which, I believe, has more to do with the subject matter itself and the drag-out nature of Presidential campaigns. Hunter was getting bored and probably losing his mind in this fray. Also, because the subject is 40 years old and the candidates are unfamiliar to a couple of the younger generations, you also might find those dull and have the tendency to breeze through those unfamiliar names.

But once you do get a few of his books and works under your belt, dive in. Especially if you have a keen interest in politics or history at all.

Is this history? memoir? Who can classify Thompson. After reading "Nixonland" this book was a great compliment to that wild year in American History, even if seen through the opinionated, drug addled brain of Hunter S. Thompson. I have to agree with the author of the introduction. This ultimately is a book about Thompson's falling in and out of love with McGovern and the American electorate.

It's three in the AM. I've locked myself in the Hilton on the bad side of town, which, by most consensus reports, is every side of town. Room #309 just in case you want a real up close and personal look at a man on the edge. I got a perfectly sharpened line of #2s, a third world wi-fi on the fritz, and a bottle of Jack in one hand. Problems begin to creep up when you realize that there is no deadline. This gonzo review of Hunter S. Thompson's observations on the election of '72 starts in January, but ends in tears. The machinery of politics is a stubborn evil bastard. I came here looking for clarity. But instead I discovered the hard truths I didn't want to. Those kind of truths that can only be experienced as toilet bowl splashbacks after a night of grade-A debauchery and three or four vials of Vicodin. An everyday disorder that needs to be hunted and pursued until it's fully inserted into Microsoft Word before my head pops like a forgotten animal balloon. I got a headache and the sun's not even up. The only viable reason I can think of: I haven't drunk enough.

From the eyes of an outsider, a non-American not brainwashed by the red, white and blue, the American Dream, the July 4th hot dogs and Big Macs, there is a paralyzing fascination to the corruption inside and outside Capitol Hill, Washington itself. An outsider might already assume the worst, correctly so, I might add, before the symptoms of American Fear are caught and spread. One of the most dangerous areas in town is the once-fashionable district known as Capitol Hill . . . Crime figures for "The District" are so heinous that they embarrass even J. Edgar Hoover. Rape is said to be up 80 percent this year over 1970, and a recent rash of murders (averaging about one every day) has mashed the morale of the local police to a new low.

Hunter S. Thompson is ambivalent at first, these conducted Rolling Stone expeditions into the heart of the beast. Chapters are cleverly intertwined with whatever he crosses paths with, be it delivering a lonely girl to a commune, talking football with President Nixon in the back of a campaign bus, to almost blowing up President Nixon by haphazardly (a common HST motif; he means no harm by it, even if straight-laced people see it otherwise) lighting several cigarettes next to his plane's turbine engine.

First, though, before Nixon can be defeated, one has to deal with the Democratic bickering and finances. This thing called the primaries, where George McGovern is "the only candidate worth a damn." Who can they possibly put up against Tricky Dick but a polar opposite? In politics, can there even be such a thing as a polar opposite?

Here's a protracted list of just some of the venerable wisdom Hunter S. Thompson unearthed during the 1972 hellhole rat race (more entertaining if read in Johnny Depp's skittering impersonation a la Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas):

1. There is no potentially serious candidate in either major party this year who couldn't pass for the executive vice-president for mortgage loans in any hometown bank from Bangor to San Diego.

2. I can already feel the compulsion to start handicapping politics and primaries like it was all just another fat Sunday of pro football (the speculative numbers and percentages) . . . After several weeks of this you no longer give a flying fuck who actually wins; the only thing that matters is the point-spread.

3. How many more of these goddamn elections are we going to have to write off as lame but "regrettably necessary" holding actions? And how many more of these stinking, double-downer sideshows will we have to go through before we can get ourselves straight enough to put together some kind of national election that will give me and the at least 20 million people I tend to agree with a chance to vote for something, instead of always being faced with that old familiar choice between the lesser of two evils? (Remember Nader in 2004? Like it mattered in the end anyway.)

4. Skilled professional liars are as much in demand in politics as they are in the advertising business. (Well, duh, right?)

5. McGovern is doomed because everybody who knows him has so much respect for the man that they can't bring themselves to degrade the poor bastard by making him run for President.

6. (Anger over common decency means that you just might win.) They are very decent people (commenting on McGovern's followers). They are working hard, they are very sincere, and most of them are young volunteers who get their pay in room & board . . . but they lack something crucial, and that lack is painfully obvious to anybody who remembers the mood of the McCarthy volunteers in 1968. Those people were angry.

7. And then of course, because the truth hurts: We are not a nation of truth-lovers. McGovern understands this but he keeps on saying these terrible things anyway . . .

The primaries gnaw at the heels. The method to the madness is emotion, one may think. What is right is what sounds right, which McGovern wholeheartedly believed. But the political machine has no sense to decipher and shoot back out into the world your true motives.

. . . careful, careful: That trip has been done. No point getting off on another violent tangent.

There is the Democratic plot against McGovern after the primaries, because, essentially, he didn't stand for what they did. He had already been proclaimed a "radical," even if the general populace who backed him just thought that he was being reasonable about Vietnam (standing his anti-war ground way earlier than anyone else, way before it became necessary and even Nixon publicly contemplated its need for an end). . . . but a McGovern victory in November would give him at least four years to rebuild and revitalize the whole structure in his own image. To many professional Democrats - particularly the Big Fish in a Small Pond types who worked overtime for Humphrey or Jackson last spring - the prospect of a McGovern victory is far more frightening than another four years of Nixon.

Towards the end of the book, when McGovern has already lost against Nixon (and after he had a more than healthy lead a month or two ago, which amounted to a Democratic insurgence to destroy him along with vice president candidate troubles), there's a brilliant un-edited manuscript that Thompson writes on the end of McGovern's dream and what it means for the future of the nation. Written without capitalization, lots of pen cross-outs, and the occasional asterisk replacing an apostrophe, it really shows the mental devastation being invested in politics. Thompson, unable to properly cope with the disappointment (and the trauma of traversing the campaign itself), you begin to realize why he ultimately blew his head off decades later, or at least come to terms with a certain mindset who has looked directly into the eyes of insanity. And today, with its 24-hour news cycle that over saturates and distorts, when insanity is really just doing the same thing over and over but expecting a different result. This is the main lesson here. Maybe a 23-year-old kid in NYU can give you all the rehearsed reasons why so-and-so is a worthy candidate for 2012, or that Hillary Clinton needs to win in 2016 for a multitude of important things including women's rights, there is only one major truth in the political ring, which doesn't correlate with correctness or virtue or change. And that is, as copied word-by-word by a McDonald's ad in Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail '72's last chapter, entitled "Epitaph." Nothing in the world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not: nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not: unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education alone will not: the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent.

Mandatory reading material come 2016 . . . or 2018, 2020, and beyond. What would you know? My headache's gone . . .

Re-reading years later. :)

I decided to spend this year, the 50 year anniversary of the 1972 presidential election, reading Hunter S. Thompson's Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72. I bought this book back in the summer of 2021 and the owner of the store told me I'd find a lot of parallels to the recently held 2020 election. This book is laid out in different sections covering each month of 1972 and the progress of the campaign. This made for an easy pace to read throughout the year.

HST was Rolling Stone's political correspondent during this time. These different month excepts were originally serialized in Rolling Stone and were later collected here in this publication. HST gains press access to all of the events of the primary and general election, speaking directly with Nixon, McGovern and many of the campaign organizers. Beyond the political and historical aspects, HST offers readers his typical style of writing, giving his perspective on everything that is happening, often focusing on his hotel or party antics instead of the actual election.

Prior to reading Campaign Trail 72' I had only ever read Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas from HST. While I love Las Vegas I really did enjoy this book even more. We get a more focused Thompson who offers insight and evaluation of bigger issues in America and for a more sustained period of time. While HST already had success writing before Las Vegas I think this book really shows that his writing style wasn't just a one off and that he can have different dimensions to how he writes. You don't get the "Gonzo" "off the wall" writing of Las Vegas on every page but rather spaced out between and interlaced with the dry nature of political affairs.

I think the book really benefits from this. While I'm someone interested in history, I have never been too big into political history or political analysis. HST was able to win me over with an election that, to the unaware, may seem rather uneventful. The 1972 election is surrounded by much bigger events: the 1968 election, democratic convention, the overall counterculture movement and on the other end the Watergate Scandal, the rise of Reaganism at the end of the decade.

You'd think that this wouldn't be that big an event in American history but then you look at an electoral map and see the outcome. Elections results like this don't happen anymore but elections like this sure do. The 1972 presidential election was the beginning of the kind of elections we have today. HST really offers a lot of insight in this book that makes it feel like he can see into the future or is speaking from our current perspective. If he could see this in 1972, you can only wonder what he'd think now. The political backstabbing, under the table deals, and cult of personality are all covered here. While a lot of the events of this book may seem trivial by today's standards, I think it's a great look into what has become an American tradition.

With every election since, things have only gotten worse to the point where America is as divided and riled up as ever. Football is a consistent theme throughout the book and the point in which the narrative ends; Super Bowl Sunday 1973. While evaluating the outcome of the election, HST draws the conclusion that the only way to win the presidential election going forward is to have a rock star, cult of personality, that gets people as riled up as they are watching the Super Bowl. We've seen this happen and continue to happen at an alarming rate since 2016. Luckily, many of those candidates looking to capture the magic of Trump have nowhere near the kind of charisma as him, which has led to many failed campaigns. That being said, someone will break through as the next protégé. If I've learned anything from this book its that the next cult of personality will be darker and more sinister than the last and soon enough we'll be watching them walk up to the podium as Hail to the Chief plays.

The received wisdom is HST is one of those authors you go mad for in your teens, and go off as an adult.

That’s only partly true.

I’ve never felt Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas captured the man best, merely his myth - and it was the myth that did for him as much as the drugs. But this book is the man.

An English reader doesn’t need to know much about American politics to understand it. The facts are simple enough. The incumbent President, Richard Nixon, is scum incarnate; the long-shot challenger, George McGovern, is the hopeful with the youth vote on his side, intent on ending the Vietnam war. Nixon’s defeat will surely follow. Instead he wins by a landslide, and the smell of the American dream souring fills the air like a mass cremation. It isn’t for nothing that Matt Taibbi credits this book as an inspiration for his own bestselling account of the Trump campaign, Insane Clown President.

HST captures the sheer messiness of a campaign - like driving a car that stalls, crawls, and bullets down the motorway before stalling again. It’s exhausting to read, perhaps intentionally. Many books transport your imagination to a vanished era. Few do the same for your nervous system.

In 1972, Hunter S. Thompson reported on George McGovern's unsuccessful presidential campaign against Richard Nixon. Thompson outlined three reasons for McGovern's loss. First, McGovern's decision-making capacity was undermined when he asked vice-presidential pick Thomas Eagleton to withdraw due to previous electroshock therapy for depression. Second, the public favoured the conservative status quo rather than a return to the idealistic and tumultuous politics of the 1960s advocated by McGovern. And third, the Nixon Administration achieved significant foreign policy outcomes, including the American withdrawal from Vietnam, détente with the Soviet Union, and the incipient normalisation of America-China relations.

Thompson supported McGovern's campaign because he loathed Nixon, whom he compared to Adolf Hitler, and was favourable of McGovern's idealism. However, I found Thompson's political analysis wanting, with little examination of domestic and international politics and too many ad hominem attacks. Most of the book instead focused on the internal machinations of political campaigning. This was disappointing considering the book is almost 500 pages long. Despite these criticisms, the book remained entertaining. This was primarily due to Thompson's gonzo-journalistic methodology, where he embedded himself in his reportage with a dash of embellishment. Even when stretching the truth, Thompson's testimony remained allegorically true.

One can only imagine what Thompson would think of the 2024 presidential campaign. As of writing, the two most likely candidates are: Donald Trump, a megalomaniacal narcissist with contempt for American democracy and the American-led rules-based order, who may still be the Republican candidate even if imprisoned for dozens of federal and state charges; and Joe Biden, a senile old man who might die in office if re-elected, with a son also facing imprisonment on federal charges. Even Thompson could not have concocted this formulation in a drug-induced writing session. What a spectacle American politics has become, where fact is truly stranger than fiction.

Addendum:

Since I wrote this, Trump became a convicted felon, Biden's son became a convicted felon, Biden chose to pull out of the race because of cognitive decline, Trump was elected president again, Biden pardoned his son, and Trump is now trashing the American-led rule-based order. Incredible.

Ed: Any kind of campaign that taps that energy would...

HST: Would generate a tremendous high for everybody involved in it.

Ed: And would ultimately for you be another paramount experience- out there on the Edge?

HST: Oh, absolutely. But you know you'd be killed, of course, and that would add to it considerably- never knowing when the bullet was coming.

It's a wet and windy late January morning, with what looks like a squall outside, and it just occurred to me that Thompson would really have been looking forward to February 2020. The Super Bowl (for those readers who didn't grow up in the U.S., the Super Bowl is an annual football game of the utmost significance- practically a national holiday, a religious experience) is scheduled for Sunday, February 2nd, after all, in Miami, and the Democratic Iowa caucus will be held on the 3rd, followed in the next few weeks by the New Hampshire primary, the Nevada caucus and the South Carolina primary...and then of course there's Fury-Wilder II in Vegas on the 22nd, when those two extremely large individuals will attempt to disembowel each other. Lots of gambling opportunities, in other words. They've taken a bit of the fun out of sports gambling, of course, at least here in New Jersey, by legalizing it- this evidently happened sometime while I was in Russia, which I was able to infer when I came back through Newark Penn Station and saw big ads for Draftkings.com everywhere, always including that minuscule (and presumably obligatory) white text at the bottom: "Gambling addiction? Call 1-800..."- but it's also more accessible and probably safer for the average person, who will lay down money this coming weekend on either the Kansas City Chiefs (who, disconcertingly, play in Kansas City, Missouri, not Kansas City, Kansas) or the San Francisco 49ers, the heartland vs. the West coast, and tune in to watch the game, which will be frequently interrupted by commercials such as ex-New York mayor, billionaire and current presidential candidate Michael Bloomberg's $10 million Super Bowl ad, the nature of which has been kept under the strictest secrecy. MIKE WILL GET IT DONE, is his campaign's slogan (and also what I happen to plaintively whisper to myself, often unconvincingly, when I stand in front of the mirror in the morning), and his ads are now so ubiquitous across the country that he's risen as high as ~9% nationally in recent polls, despite not being in any of the debates.

Anyway, I've gotten in the habit of re-reading this book every election year, and I've just finished it for the third time. I tried on this reading to resist the temptation to draw parallels between the book's "characters" and modern-day politicians, but there are a few that are just hard to avoid. Trump works more or less as Wallace + Nixon, Hillary Clinton is clearly Hubert Humphrey, and then there's this assessment of the Democratic front-runner, "Big" Ed Muskie (a.k.a. "The Man from Maine"), offered by Frank Mankiewicz, George McGovern's campaign director: "Nobody's really for Muskie. They're only for the Front-Runner, the man who says he's the only one who can beat Nixon- but not even Muskie himself believes that anymore..."

Right. Tell me that's not Joe Biden. Thompson hears a similar sentiment from the president of the Washington Redskins (I guess I believe that's who he was talking to anyway, you never quite know for sure with Hunter):

We spent the rest of the flight arguing politics. He is backing Muskie, and as he talked I got the feeling that he thought he was already at a point where, sooner or later, we would all be. "Ed's a good man", he said. "He's honest. I respect the guy." Then he stabbed the padded seat arm between us two or three times with his forefinger. "But the main reason I'm working for him", he said, "is that he's the only guy we have who can beat Nixon"...He picked up his drink, then saw it was empty and put it down again. "That's the real issue this time", he said. "Beating Nixon. It's hard to even guess how much damage those bastards will do if they get in for another four years."

I nodded. The argument was familiar. I had even made it myself, here and there, but I was beginning to sense something very depressing about it. How many more of these goddamn elections are we going to have to write off as lame but 'regrettably necessary' holding actions?

But after a few underwhelming primary performances dissipated Muskie's aura of "electability", he sank like a stone. I posted the quote above as a reading update a few weeks ago, and someone commented: "just one more?" By which I assume the commenter meant that it's very important to beat Trump this year, just as it was very important to beat Nixon in '72, and that the Democrats should therefore nominate Joe Biden. I assume that's who the commenter meant, because that's who everyone means this year when they talk about the supposedly pragmatic choice. But...well...hold that thought.

The outcome of the '72 election would seem to back up the commenter's case. I have to admit, after all, that at least one reason I was resolved not to draw too many explicit parallels with the present day is that this book can seem pretty disheartening if taken as prophecy. And it has been taken that way- or McGovern's epic defeat (Nixon won 49 out of 50 states; McGovern got Massachusetts and DC) has been, anyway. In '72, a young and presumably idealistic Bill Clinton managed McGovern's campaign in Texas; over a decade later, in the late 80s, Clinton was a leader of the DLC, or Democratic Leadership Council, whose efforts either injected the Party with some much-needed pragmatism and common sense or sacrificed the working- and middle-classes in the quest for power, depending on how you see it. McGovern's loss (and I suppose Mondale's in '84, although that seems to be a more forgotten election- or maybe it's just that I don't know of any good books about it) still casts a shadow over any presidential candidate who is perceived as (or can be construed to be) "too far Left." So as someone who's openly behind Bernie Sanders (and if Bernie does get the nomination this year, I predict that anyone who watches cable news is going to hear McGovern's name constantly, invoked as a synonym for failure), do I perceive anything ominous in the story of an insurgent campaign that was counting on bringing an entirely new constituency of the young and disaffected into national politics, and instead suffered one of the worst beatings in political history? Never mind that 2020, like 1972, is the Year of the Rat?

Well...when you put it like that, it's certainly not encouraging. But Thompson suggests some other factors to consider, especially in the last few chapters (one of which includes an interview with McGovern). There's the fact that Nixon was saving some of his very best shots (China, the economy, Kissinger's promise that peace was "at hand" in Vietnam) for the stretch run, and then there was McGovern's selection of Missouri senator Tom Eagleton (who was known, even to McGovern, "...as a man who didn't mind taking thirteen or fourteen tall drinks now and then", and who was later revealed to have been hospitalized for "severe manic-depressive psychosis with suicidal tendencies") for VP. McGovern couldn't have done worse, Thompson writes, "with Charles Manson as a running-mate."

HST: Did you ever find out what those little blue pills were that he was eating?

McGovern: No.

HST: I think I did. It was Stelazine, not Thorazine like I heard originally. I did everything I could to get hold of the actual records, but nobody would even talk to me.

But Thompson's criticism of the Eagleton decision is only part of his broader criticism of McGovern's decision to (in political parlance) pivot, after the convention, towards the center. Notably, McGovern doesn't seem to agree that there really was any pivot at all. But why, Thompson asks him, after all that talk about "new politics", and after the Eagleton disaster, would McGovern offer the vice-presidency to Hubert Humphrey? "It seemed to be something that had to be done to get a majority coalition", McGovern answers, "but maybe not." To which Thompson replies,

My own theory, which sounds like madness, is that [McGovern] would have been better off running against Nixon with the same kind of neo-radical campaign he ran in the primaries. Not radical in the left/right sense, but radical in a sense that he was...a person who would actually grab the system by the ears and shake it.

It takes some effort to remember just how badly most of us (let's exempt Michael Moore) underestimated that appeal four years ago. Which is not to say that public opinion exists in a vacuum, without any rhyme or reason- but it seems like this is another "grab the system..." moment, and frankly for good reason. Is Joe Biden really the "safe", pragmatic candidate to run at such a moment? And by the way, what does it mean to be "too far Left", anyway? If Medicare-for-All routinely polls above 50% (and it has for many months, dipping below that number only recently under a barrage of fear-mongering from candidates like Pete Buttigieg and Amy Klobuchar), for example, doesn't that mean that it's not too far Left but mainstream? The fact that there's only one Democratic candidate who supports it unequivocally doesn't mean that the idea is too far Left- it means that we're not being represented by the candidates. So if Thompson's right about why McGovern lost (or at least why the loss was of such devastating proportions), a better lesson to draw might be "don't try to be everything to everybody", or maybe "something is better than nothing." For example, why has Elizabeth Warren fallen in the polls in the last few months? Why is she so far behind nationally that she's resorted to trying to smear Bernie Sanders as a sexist, when this is the same man who encouraged her- Elizabeth Warren, that is- to run for president four years ago, and later campaigned like hell for Hillary Clinton? Maybe it has to do with the fact that no one knows where she stands on a variety of issues, including M4A. Is she for it, against it, or something in between? Even people who disagree with Sanders on M4A understand that he's sincere. The only thing I know for an absolute certainty about Warren's stance on the issue is that it's not a priority for her, which means her administration would never get it done. Which also happens to be an issue that affects women (as well as men) a hell of a lot more than whatever she claims was said in a private meeting.

But Thompson's point clarifies, at any rate, that if Sanders were to get the nomination, and that's a big if, his campaign would have a choice: stick firmly to his principles or try to make a few concessions to the Clinton wing of the party, in order to insure their support. Presented with that choice, I personally think it might be wise for them to follow Thompson's advice to McGovern quoted above. The Clinton wing of the party obviously loathes Sanders, and I'm not sure they would support him against Trump anyway. Take it from Hillary Clinton herself, who isn't quite ready to say whether or not she would endorse Sanders...against Trump, remember. Good. Her refusal to endorse him might be the most galvanizing spark for his campaign yet.

HST: ...here's a question that sort of haunts me now...is whether this kind of campaign could have worked? Were the mistakes mechanical and technical? Or was it either flawed or doomed from the start...?

McGovern: I don't think there ever was a majority for the approach I was using. I think we had a fighting chance.

HST: No better than that? Even with all those new voters?

McGovern: I think we exaggerated the amount of the enthusiasm for change among young people...there really are a great number of people in this country that are a helluva lot more interested in whether the Dolphins beat the Redskins than they are in whether Nixon or McGovern ends up in the White House.

But back to that comment- "just one more time?" I know that my legion of readers have been waiting breathlessly for my best assessment of the Democrats' chances in November, so here's the way I see it at the moment. First of all, let's acknowledge that there's no guarantee that any Democrat can beat Trump in November. He's also extremely unlikely to be removed from office by the Senate- his voters don't care that he tried to extort Ukraine, which means Republican senators don't care. So that being said, which Democrat is the pragmatic choice? Well, Buttigieg is despised by young people, as well as by black and Latino voters, so he's got no shot. Bloomy isn't even on the ballot in the early states, and seems to be doing this as part of his bucket list- although he could still impact the race by taking votes away from other candidates, particularly the more moderate ones. Warren is a proven liar who's been fading for months...and frankly, I just don't think a Native American can win (this is a joke, people). That leaves Biden and Sanders.

(Review continued in comment #1, below.)

There are eerie parallels between the 1972 primaries and election and 2020 – the incumbent Republican seemingly hated and unpopular by a wide variety of standards, a fractured Democratic party that can’t decide if it wants to be left-left or center-left, a written-off candidate displaying an astounding grassroots ground game, the courting of the Midwest suburbs, the courting of and imploring the youth vote…

At the center of it all, gonzo himself, Dr. Hunter S. Thompson, careening wildly from one state to another on some mixed cocktail of booze, uppers, downers, Jíbaro rhythm logic, and generalized mania, and yet somehow still maintaining his ever-present acid wit and ability to read the room.

A gargantuan and detail-obsessed-if-bloated account of the 1972 primary and general elections, Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail is a locked-in time capsule of a turbulent and familiar political landscape. Despite thinking I was sufficiently politically knowledgeable, there is great detail about, for instance, voting and parliamentary procedure at the Democratic National Convention that is so esoteric I’m still grappling with whether I fully understand it. There’s similar gratuitous detail about pols, Roosevelt / Kennedy hangers-on, and other political movers and shakers that have faded away to time. And yet, there’s also early mentions of Jimmy Carter and Walter Mondale.

The political maneuvering Thompson foresaw is remarkable – the establishment Democrats abandoning McGovern due to hurt feelings and their loss of party control (that wouldn’t last); Nixon steering the Republican party further right so he could hit the center and win reelection in ’72, knowing that the Democrats would likely beat the far-right candidate he had steered toward in ’76 (right again, but only slightly correct thanks to Nixon’s resignation due to Watergate, Gerald Ford, etc.)

Thompson and indeed, George McGovern’s thoughts on the 1972 post-mortem are eerily reminiscent of 2016 as well. It’s enough to add to the generalized anxiety buzz that is modern politics stirring in the back of the brain, and maybe 2020 wasn’t the best time to read this. Thompson sums it up best in one of his manic hate-filled screeds once he realizes Nixon is going to win reelection: How low do you have to stoop in this country to be President?

while this book doesn't carry the same cultural cache as Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, it is a fascinating look into the cesspool that is the political machine. Thompson's disdain of Richard Nixon is both funny and quaint by today's standards given the current United States president. if you are into the counterculture, and HST fan, a political junkie, or just want to learn more about the era and zeitgeist of the early 1970s, then check this out. it is written in the typical Gonzo Style. just don't expect fear and loathing in Las Vegas. realize that this is more of an attempt at actual journalism.