IS Barack Obama the next George McGovern? The question has been posed apprehensively by Democrats and gleefully by Republicans. McGovern, the antiVietnam war candidate, ran for president against Richard Nixon in 1972 and lost 49 states out of 50, a landslide defeat that still haunts his party.

“Obama is the fullest flowering of liberal orthodoxy since George McGovern,” conservative columnist Rich Lowry wrote last week. Harold Ickes, a Hillary Clinton adviser, dropped thinly veiled comparisons between Obama and McGovern while trying to keep his candidate’s campaign alive.

So is it true? The former candidate, 85, can speak for himself. It is no insult to be described as a “George McGovern liberal”, he said. “They’re the best kind.”

But he added: “I don’t think Obama is all that radical. I find him a pretty moderate liberal. From the very beginning, he’s been going after Republican and independent voters and that’s what we need to do.”

McGovern, a decorated second world war pilot, was defined by opponents as the candidate of “amnesty, abortion and acid”. Republicans are looking for a similarly pithy formula to define Obama as an antipatriotic appeaser. The controversy over Jeremiah Wright, Obama’s former pastor, was heaven-sent in that regard.

McGovern compares Obama to Abraham Lincoln, the president who abolished slavery. “But Lincoln seldom went to church even though he was always quoting the Almighty. Perhaps he didn’t want to be blamed for the words of his pastor,” McGovern noted wryly.

Opposition to the Vietnam war alienated middle America, but times have changed. “Most Americans think it is time to get the hell out of Iraq,” he said.

McGovern believes Clinton would have won the Democratic nomination if she had opposed the Iraq war. Bill and Hillary campaigned for McGovern in 1972 and he initially endorsed Clinton, but switched to Obama last month.

“They got married right after my campaign so it was difficult for me to endorse Obama, but the more I watched his campaign, the more I thought he was the man of the hour,” he said.

If the comparisons made by her campaign hurt him, he isn’t saying. “They were trying to win,” he said. He believes she could have made a more “gallant and graceful endorsement” of Obama last week, however.

The Democratic candidate, he said, would “go after some of the Southern states, such as Virginia and North Carolina, with the intention of winning. The black vote is growing all the time across the South”.

However, Obama is weak among the same Democrats as McGovern was – white, blue-collar workers and Catholics, who later became known as Reagan Democrats.

“The Reagan Democrats are ready to come home,” he said. “That’s why Hillary Clinton’s endorsement is so important.”

Times Recommends

• Would you live on the wrong side of the Berlin Wall?
• Wish you were here, says Iraq tourist board
• Russian policeman’s corruption plea to Putin