A tide of frustration churned up by liberal lintheads and elitist malcontents

From Fear And Loathing At Netroots Nation by David Marcus. I like articles that leverage books from the past for perspective on the present.

I have never been a particular fan of Hunter S. Thompson, though I do have a number of his books knocking around the house somewhere. My oldest son has read several of his books and enjoys Thompson's writing. I have just never gotten around to him. Yet.

Marcus's main point is to draw parallels on the Democratic Left between now and the 1972 campaign. It is his belief that the party is as hostage to its ideological fringe now as it was then and that that bodes ill for its electoral prospects. Marcus has several passages where he quotes Thompson. This is Thompson's analysis of McGovern's postmortem of the campaign.

After months of quasi-public brooding on the Whys and Wherefores of the disastrous beating he absorbed last November, McGovern seems finally to have bought the Conventional Wisdom—that his campaign was doomed from the start: conceived in a fit of hubris, born in a momentary power-vacuum that was always more mirage than reality, borne along on a tide of frustration churned up by liberal lintheads and elitist malcontents in the Eastern Media Establishment.

Well, that part, "a tide of frustration churned up by liberal lintheads and elitist malcontents" certainly sounds contemporary.