McGOVERN/CARTER/DONALD:

McGovern didn't win the presidency, but the way he amassed the delegates necessary for the nomination became Carter's road map. And the themes Carter struck: "I'll never lie to you" and "a government as good as its people" had their roots in post-Watergate disillusionment and Caddell's theory about alienated voters--a theory that would eventually lead him to supporting Donald Trump. [...]

He was a mixed blessing for the administration during Carter's four years in the White House. No one ever doubted his brilliance, but it didn't always mesh with the reality as others saw it. In the summer of 1979, his poll numbers sinking, Carter retreated to Camp David for ten days to re-think his presidency. With Caddell advising him, Carter emerged to deliver what became known as the "malaise" speech. Carter never used the actual word, but Caddell did, and the rhetoric that Carter used about the public's "crisis of confidence" echoed themes that Caddell had voiced since the McGovern campaign - and that he would continue to emphasize throughout his life.

In a retrospective on the McGovern campaign in Vanity Fair in November 2012, Caddell recalled his meeting with Gary Hart, then McGovern's campaign manager, at the Miami airport. "We're in the corridor waiting for different flights, and I'm telling him my theory about alienated voters, and how the people who'd voted for Wallace in the South in 1968 were the same people who voted for Bobby Kennedy in the North. I said that the war was a one-dimensional issue. There was a lot of sentiment against it, but also a lot of support for it, especially among blue-collar voters. My argument was that McGovern was a prairie populist and that, if he used populist issues, he could appeal to that alienated vote. [...]

Last year, in November, Caddell spoke on a panel with former Trump strategist Steve Bannon at David Horowitz's Restoration Weekend Conference in Florida. He cited a raft of numbers that explained Trump's victory in 2016, according to an article on the Breitbart news site. Seventy-five percent of Americans believed the country was in decline; only 15 percent of U.S. citizens believe that if you work hard, you will succeed, while 85 percent of Americans think the rich and powerful rigged the system for their benefit.

"This is ultimately the truth," Caddell said. "Political leaders are more interested in protecting their power and privilege than doing what is right for the American people, 81 percent of Americans agree." He declared "Make America Great Again" the greatest slogan of his lifetime.

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