What is it like to devote two hard years to running for the White House - and then fail? Ed Pilkington talks to former presidential candidates about the shattering loss, the humiliation and the elite club they call the Misery Circle

Hillary Clinton likes to tell her senior aides at times of crisis, "Somebody has to win, and somebody has to lose." She is implicitly referring to Barack Obama, but there is a group of people scattered across America for whom the words carry a deeply personal resonance. These are the members of an elite group: the failed would-be presidents club.

Only 13 people alive have run for the US presidency in a general election (discounting those who polled less than 2%). Of those, four went all the way to the most powerful job on earth. The remaining nine - five Democrats, one Republican and three third-party candidates - never got to sit behind that desk in the Oval Office. They are the people who know best the toll of running for the White House. They can warn Clinton, Obama and John McCain of the booby traps that lie ahead. They have been the butt of attack ads, have worked around the clock for two years solid, and, whatever their political colours, have shared the same overwhelming disappointment.

In short, they know what it is to lose.

A trip in midwinter to see the elder statesman of the White House losers involves a flight across a vast nothingness - the Great Plains, which are covered in a featureless blanket of snow, as though an eraser has been rubbed across them. The journey ends in Mitchell, South Dakota, a small town frequented by hunters, fishermen, travelling corn salesmen - and a steady trickle of people interested in George McGovern, the Democratic firebrand of the 1972 elections. My meeting with him is scheduled in the McGovern Library, a stately building in municipal brown brick dedicated to his abortive White House run. The minute you step inside, you get a sense of how exhilarating, inspirational, hip even, the McGovern campaign was. The walls of the library are lined with badges in hippy rainbow colours, as if you are walking into a Yes album. Words such as "Hope" and "Peace" abound. There is a poster with planes dropping bombs over Vietnam on one half, a white dove on the other. "Come home America," it reads.

Faded front pages show McGovern addressing huge crowds, his tie loosened an inch or so, a look of elation in his eyes. You half expect that same man to step out of the photo and come forward to greet you. Instead, a slightly stooped, avuncular-looking figure accompanied by a big black labrador ushers me into his private office.

I begin by asking whether the 2008 presidential race is throwing up memories for him, and I'm taken aback by the alacrity with which he responds. "Oh yes. Almost every day." He says the Clinton-Obama battle has brought back all the excitement of being at the centre of things. "Being on the front pages, cameras following you around. The thrill of the crowds pouring themselves into the campaign, wanting to touch you, just to get close enough to touch your finger. That's a head-turning, heart-throbbing experience."

McGovern's bid for the presidency came like a blast from nowhere. Running against establishment Democratic figures - Hubert Humphrey, Ed Muskie - he seemed at first to have no chance. He was rated by one well-known odds-maker, Jimmy "the Greek" Snyder, at 200 to one. Yet slowly but surely, McGovern shrugged off the doubters and won a string of big primary victories. His campaign mesmerised millions of first-time voters - the legendary McGovern army - as well as the cream of Hollywood. There was Jack Nicholson, Burt Lancaster and Raquel Welch, Julie Christie, Warren Beatty and his sister Shirley MacLaine (who appears in a picture in the library amid a sea of McGovernites holding up a placard that reads, "Where are you now Jimmy the Greek?") The gonzo journalist Hunter S Thompson spent months following McGovern around the country in a cloud of political euphoria and narcotics.

Among the foot soldiers of the McGovern army were Hillary Rodham and Bill Clinton, then in their mid-20s. "We had them in Texas," McGovern says. "Trying to sell George McGovern in Texas is one formidable task, but they never wavered." It was partly Hillary Clinton's connections forged in Texas in 1972 that helped her win the state earlier this month and keep her presidential hopes alive. Yet the Clinton connection seems paradoxical today, because it is not Hillary's 2008 race to which McGovern's 1972 run bears an uncanny resemblance but Obama's. Both McGovern and Obama started as rank outsiders but came to prominence mobilising young grass-roots support; both ran at a time when America was divided and angry, and came to embody a popular mood for change; both stood as the prime antiwar candidate, over Vietnam then and Iraq now.

The parallels are not lost on McGovern. "I've found myself even more emotionally involved this year than usual. It reminds me so much of what was going on 36 years ago." Some of the elation of those front pages sparks back into his eyes, and his voice, though frail, grows impassioned. "I don't think that '72 campaign has ever been far away from my consciousness. We brought millions of people into the political process, just as Barack is doing today. It was a mighty army."

In the hiatus between winning the nomination and facing Richard Nixon, the incumbent president, he remembers relaxing back at home in South Dakota in preparation for a contest that he knew would be tough but that he thought he could win. He went horseriding and drank cocktails with reporters. He signed postcards showing his face superimposed alongside the four presidential profiles in the local landmark, Mount Rushmore. "It was just glorious to finally win that nomination and come home for a while. That was great. One of the happiest periods of my life."

The elation lasted for all of three days. And then, as Hunter S Thompson put it, "Without warning, it became the bleak hills."

If ever there were a lesson for Obama, that the fervour of the crowd can vanish as quickly as it erupts, it is what happened next. McGovern chose as his running mate a senator called Thomas Eagleton - a sensible choice until it transpired a few days after the announcement that he had a history of mental illness and had been given electroshock therapy for depression. McGovern at first stood by his putative vice-president, but when his financial backers went into revolt and his money dried up he was forced to sack Eagleton. "It turned almost overnight," he says now. "We had gone for a year and a half without making a single mistake, referred to as the brilliant McGovern operation. After this we were seen as clumsy and naive. It was shattering. You feel like you are out in a sailing boat with a brisk wind blowing you along, then all of a sudden it is becalmed and the sails droop... A great campaign went off the tracks."

To tumble into political oblivion is heart-rending, and McGovern has had to seek solace where he can. One of the main sources of comfort has been the company of fellow presidential losers - even those from the enemy party.

After 1972, McGovern became close to the Republican Barry Goldwater, who had lost to Lyndon Johnson eight years previously. When I hear him talk about their "real bond of friendship" that lasted until Goldwater died in 1998, I skip a beat. McGovern, arguably the most leftwing candidate to run for the White House in 50 years, and Goldwater, who made his name opposing unions, the welfare state and Johnson's civil rights act - friends?

McGovern says he also remains close to another Republican member of the club, Bob Dole, and to fellow Democrat Walter Mondale. "I think there is a sense in which we bolster each other," he says. He recalls how he bumped into Mondale in Washington in 1988, four years after Mondale had gone down in an electoral blaze every bit as dramatic as his own. "George! Stop! Stop!" Mondale had shouted. "You're the only guy in this country that can answer this question: how long after you've lost 49 states before it quits hurting?" McGovern paused, and then he replied - and remember, this is 16 years after he, too, had lost 49 states: "Ah well, Fritz, I'll let you know when I get there."

When I meet Walter "Fritz" Mondale, he knows immediately what I'm talking about when I ask him about the ties that bind members of this rarefied club. He even has a name for it. "Yes, we have a kind of misery circle. We run into each other once in a while. I see [Michael] Dukakis, McGovern and [Jimmy] Carter. There's a recognition that each of us had a unique experience."

Mondale knows as much as anyone about running for the White House - he's been on the national ticket three times. He won with Carter in 1976 to become vice-president, lost with Carter four years later, and then stood as presidential candidate in 1984. "It's a lot more fun to win," he says wryly. He recalls the inauguration in 1976 - the parade was starting to run down and an aide came over to him and said, "Let's go inside." "It hadn't dawned on me that I was going to walk into the White House and work there. Suddenly I was in the White House and in my office."

We are sitting in the plush law offices where Mondale now works in Minneapolis, in his home state of Minnesota. There is a wonderful view from his window of the Mississippi snaking through the town. He gives me a visual tour of the city, and as he does so he relates how his great-grandfather came here from Norway and was rewarded for fighting on the Union side in the civil war with a small plot of land.

There is still a good deal of the northern European about Mondale. There's a solidness to him, and he exudes a profound sense of duty and public service and Old World values. (In his family, he tells me, children were spanked for bragging.) Such qualities turned him into a fine and upstanding man, and a respected senator. They also made him a lousy presidential candidate.

His opponent was Ronald Reagan, as antithetical to a northern European as you could get. Mondale was about principles, Reagan results. Reagan was the master of the soundbite who captured the spirit of the times in one phrase: "It's morning in America." Mondale was wary of such politics-as-marketing and stuck to lengthy discourses on the need for equality and justice. His biographer calls him the last major political figure to have resisted television. He chuckles and admits, "Yeah, I could be. One of my opponents called me a media Luddite. I wasn't good at it. Reagan, he was a genius at it. He could walk in front of those cameras and it would come out magic. I would walk in and it would be a root canal."

Mondale's staff tried frantically to reform him, to drag him into the television age. They urged him to change his hairstyle, his shirt collars, his hand gestures, his voice, even his smile, so as to come across better on TV. The Norwegian in him hated it. He was intensely aware that, though he was probably going to lose, he wanted his family - his sons, in particular - to be proud of him. It was a dignity thing. "I didn't like it, and I told them so. I said, 'Look, I'm all I've got. I can't be someone I'm not.'"

It's striking how much the world had changed in the 12 years that separated McGovern's race from Mondale's. Buzz concepts such as "media training" and "communications advisers" were hardly around in 1972, and McGovern's army was recruited as much by word of mouth as through the airwaves. By 1984, Mondale's disdain for the small screen had become a huge disability, and with each election the centrality of television has grown. All three remaining candidates in the 2008 race, you can be certain, will have been media trained to within an inch of their lives.

The focus on candidates has become more and more intense. Take McGovern's disastrous choice of running mate. Mondale, of course, knew all about that, so he was careful to vet his desired number two. What he did not take into account was how far the scrutiny would extend. By 1984 it was not enough for the running mate to be squeaky clean. Her spouse had to be, too.

I go to visit Geraldine Ferraro to hear her story of the almost inhuman pressures that are put on any presidential contender - particularly, and pertinently to the election this year, if she is a woman. I find her in her lawyer's office on the 14th floor of a lower Manhattan building overlooking Ground Zero, with breathtaking views of the foundations of the Freedom Tower. (There's a theme here - run for the White House and get a spectacular view.)

Ferraro recalls vividly the tremendous sense of pride when she was asked by Mondale to be the first woman vice-presidential candidate in US history. Then, just two weeks later, it was revealed that her husband, John Zaccaro, had failed to make public his tax returns. The press descended and her family became embroiled in a frenzy of questioning and speculation, with particular emphasis on her husband's Italian surname. "They came after my husband as if he were a member of the mafia. He's a fifth-generation American. I couldn't believe it, and he was stunned by it all. He was so frightened, he didn't know where to turn."

In her book on the 1984 election, My Story, Ferraro describes walking into her bedroom at home at the height of the tax furore to find her husband in tears. It was only the second time in her life she had seen him cry. "Please don't do this to yourself," she said, putting her arms around him. "What had he done to deserve all this?" she writes. "This good man, who had supported me in everything I'd ever done, was being destroyed. And all on account of me." She burst into tears herself, and they stood together in the centre of the room, surrounded by tax returns and receipts, clinging to each other and weeping. At that moment, their 20-year-old son, John Jr, walked in on them. She notes that her son "grew up on the spot".

There's clearly a lesson here for any presidential candidate: check out your choice of running mate to the point of obsession. And not only them. Vet the husband, the wife, the aunt, the nanny, the cat and anyone else who has ever come within 50 metres of them. However, Mondale is convinced that the reason the press tore into Ferraro's husband was gender. "It's a kind of cultural thing. A lot of people believe a woman isn't really the VP candidate, it's the husband that's important. I hope that's not how we think any more."

Ferraro recalls constant smaller humiliations. After a televised debate with her Republican counterpart, George Bush the elder, he told the press that he had tried to "kick a little ass". On another occasion she was asked by a TV reporter whether she was "strong enough" to push the nuclear button, a question that had never been put to a man running for the White House.

Unsurprisingly, Ferraro is backing Clinton in 2008, and is one of her most vocal supporters. What is surprising, however, is that Ferraro should herself have stooped to questionable tactics in this campaign: she blazed her way into the headlines with the comment that Obama would not be the Democratic frontrunner "if he was a white man". The remark landed her in a huge controversy. When I spoke to her soon afterwards, she said that the storm that engulfed her this time had been far more threatening than when she'd been a candidate herself. "In 1984 I didn't have to face an orchestrated campaign like this - hate mails, voicemails, nasty messages to my law firm, people ridiculing me for my age. Back then, you could understand the White House trying to undermine me, but in 2008? I'm a nothing, a nobody."

Ferraro quit her fundraising role with the Clinton campaign, though she stands by what she said. "I've always told my kids that if you tell the truth, you will never get in trouble. So much for the advice I gave as a mother. But it is true. In 1984 I was chosen as vice-presidential candidate because I was a woman; it doesn't mean I couldn't do the job - and the same thing as a black man goes for Obama."

She dismisses as "ridiculous" Obama's characterisation of her remarks as divisive. "Nobody who knows me could say I was a racist," she says. It's hard, though, not to see her comments as a rewording of old grumblings about affirmative action - successful blacks are there only because of preferment, rather than by dint of their own abilities.

Ferraro's wider point was to signal that Clinton's gender still acts as a drag on her prospects, even in 2008; but, in fact, gender is probably not Clinton's biggest headache. As I meet more members of this exclusive club I realise quite what an ordeal presidential candidates go through - they are subjected to afflictions that can reasonably be compared to torture: sensory overload; ritual humiliation; strangers invading your body space at all hours of day and night; disorientation; sleep deprivation.

McGovern clocked up 51,465 air miles travelling between 64 cities within less than three months of general election campaigning. Ferraro trumped that with 55,000 miles and 85 cities in 87 days, and Mondale did substantially more even than that. As this year's primary season has been stretched beyond all expectation, Mondale has grown increasingly worried for the candidates. "Look under their eyes - they are using lots of make-up now. They are exhausted. You can hear it in their voices. The body only has so much to give." There is a real danger here for Clinton and Obama, who could be slogging each other to burn-out and beyond. McGovern thinks his downfall was in part brought on by tiredness that led him to make bad decisions. He campaigned seven days a week, 16 hours a day, for almost two years. "Fatigue is a treacherous thing. You are haunted by it, yet not fully aware of it. It keeps you from doing your best at anything, whether it's chasing a pretty girl, or making a good speech, or choosing a running mate."

He asked Goldwater what lessons he'd learned from his drubbing at the polls. "Don't get exhausted. It's lying out there ready to trap you and make you do all sorts of half-arsed things," was the reply. "I wish you'd told me that before I ran," McGovern replied.

"Up on a plane, down; up on a plane, down; up on a plane, down." This is Michael Dukakis, who lost to George Bush senior in 1988, describing the candidate's life. "There's nothing more boring, let me tell you," he says in his Boston drawl. Except making the same stump speech hundreds of times. By November, McCain and Obama or Clinton will have been doing that for 18 months or more. Obama may be a great orator, but I for one can recite by heart several of his favourite lines. I ask Dukakis what that's like, living the political equivalent of Groundhog Day.

"Boring as hell."

Dukakis is cooped up in a tiny office on the third floor of a university block in Boston that is a pastiche of the academic environment: worn brown carpets and scuffed walls. His door in the politics department is embossed with the words: Distinguished Professor. The room next door is labelled Staff of Dukakis, which must be an ironic joke. In 1988 he had a volunteer force of thousands working for him across the country. Here at Northeastern University, the Staff of Dukakis amounts to one, part-time.

The modest surroundings contrast strikingly with Dukakis himself, who grows expansive as he warns the 2008 candidates of the perils of negative advertising. In his case he was hit by the notorious Willie Horton ad. It focused on a black prisoner in jail for murder who committed rape while on temporary release under a rehabilitation scheme approved by Dukakis. What really proved fatal was not the ad itself, but Dukakis's failure to rebut it. "I made a decision from the beginning that I was going to run a positive campaign. Little ol' me says I'm not going to respond to the Bush attacks. That was a huge mistake. You can't just sit there and let the other guy beat your brains out. And by the time I woke up to the damage that was being done, it was almost all gone."

Dukakis warns the Democratic nominee to expect the same. "These people are not nice, they will go after you."

He's probably right, despite McCain's promise to wage a clean campaign, but the two remaining Democratic candidates are a lot more savvy than Dukakis was. They've studied what happened to him; to McGovern, who was accused of being in favour of the three As - amnesty for Vietnam refuseniks, abortion and acid; and, of course, to John Kerry in the Swift Boat saga of 2004, and they have refined their rebuttal systems like a stealth bomber. Clinton and Obama now respond to attacks via email within minutes.

Dukakis warns of another pitfall - the distortion of a candidate's character by the media; he points to the example of Al Gore, who in 2000 was made out to be wooden and dull (remember Al Bore?) but who has since re-emerged as a charismatic Nobel Peace Prize winner. In Dukakis's case, he was lampooned as an administrator. One commentator dubbed this son of Greek immigrants "Zorba the clerk", while Richard Nixon called him a word processor.

"A story line begins to develop, and journalists buy into it," Dukakis says. "Dukakis is a bloodless technocrat. Al Gore is stiff. Bob Dole looks like an undertaker. Bob Dole! Bob Dole is the funniest guy I've ever met. I'm not kidding you - he is witty as hell." It's true that since Dole lost to President Clinton in 1996 he has made something of a career out of that wit. He has been on Saturday Night Live and the Jay Leno show and appeared in commercials for Viagra. But there wasn't a lot of humour on display on the campaign trail.

I ask Dole why that was. He agrees that sobriety became a feature of both his failed runs on the White House, as running mate to Gerald Ford in 1976 and his own Republican candidacy in 1996. He remembers Ford telling him he wanted Dole to keep things straight: "We don't want a comedian putting out the funny stuff." Sobriety remained the order of the day when Dole ran against Bill Clinton. This time, the injunction to cut out the jokes came from his own advisers. "I think in '96 we listened too much to people who said, 'These are serious times.' Of course they were serious. Times are always serious."

The comedy moments were all at his expense. Dole was 73, facing a youthful Clinton, aged 50, and his opponent made the most of it - a foretaste, perhaps, of what may befall John McCain, now 71, should he be up against Obama, 46. A decorated second world war hero, Dole was wounded in action in Italy in 1945 and his right arm is paralysed. That didn't stop the Clinton camp and the media ridiculing him after he fell off a stage at a campaign event (see cover image). "The secret service hadn't nailed down the barrier around the stage, so when I leaned on it... That was played on TV over and over again, and gave them the chance to revisit the age thing," he recalls.

Dole spells out the problems he faced in his campaign - lack of cash, a popular and lavishly well-funded opponent who had the huge benefit of being incumbent president, the economy doing well... By the time he has finished the list, I want to scream out: so why do it to yourself? Why at the age of 73 take on a punishing race that you are almost certain to lose? I ask whether he was motivated by vanity and ego, a sense of duty, or because he had a mission he wanted to achieve?

"Some of each," Dole replies. "You need a certain ambition - call it ego. I believed I could do a good job as president. But it's a tough, tough thing. We are human, too. You have other things going on in your life over those 18 months that nobody knows about - other stresses, other pressures. It's not easy every day, from 7am to late at night, devoting yourself to running for the White House."

It can't be put off any longer. Election night. There is no denying that Democratic candidates have been particularly good at losing over the past 40 years, which is why there are so many of them in the misery circle. The Republicans have been in power for all but 12 of those 40 years.

McGovern's shoulders visibly droop when we speak of the final count. He knew a few weeks before the end that he was sinking, but he refused to admit it to anyone - himself included. After he and his wife, Eleanor, had cast their votes on election day, they were being driven back home from the polling station and he remarked to her how strange it would be no longer having secret service protection. She turned to him and gave him a long, silent look. "Oh, Eleanor," he said, "I didn't really mean that."

McGovern remembers preparing to make his concession speech. As he was walking towards the podium, he saw ABC's top political reporter with tears in his eyes. "To see a hard-boiled Washington news man in tears as he was about to go on camera... it was hard to resist them myself. There were a lot of tears among my campaign workers and in my family that night. I didn't shed any, but I certainly shed them inside. It was a sad night."

McGovern didn't just lose, he lost magnificently. Though the Watergate crisis was already looming by November 1972, he was given a kicking. He even lost his home state of South Dakota. In fact, he lost all states bar one - Massachusetts - and the District of Columbia, an annihilation on a scale matched only by Barry Goldwater's massacre in 1964 and that of another friend, Walter Mondale, in 1984. "I remember sitting there and watching Reagan's colour, red, filling the map. It just kept coming at you," Mondale says. Mondale also took only one state - Minnesota - and DC, which at least threw McGovern a crumb of comfort. "I never let Mondale forget that Massachusetts has four more electoral votes than Minnesota."

Each individual coped with the immediate aftermath of defeat in his or her own way. Ferraro says the demands of caring for a young family brought her instantly back to reality. Dukakis was back at his desk as governor of Massachusetts the very next morning. He says one of the hardest parts was feeling you had disappointed your supporters. "Thousands of people out there worked their tails off for you. They believed in you. I did not run a great campaign. I ran a lousy campaign, and I'd let a lot of people down."

Dole agrees that "you feel you let the party down, colleagues down, family down. But then you have to decide it's over. You have a couple of courses you can take: you can set yourself up as a critic of the president who beat you, or you can get on with your life. I chose to get on with my life."

Even if you avoid bitterness and sniping, you still have the agony of watching your opponent run the country for the next four or eight years. More profoundly, each member of the club has had to cope with the idea that if they had won the race, America - indeed, the entire world - would be a different place. That kind of thought can drive a person crazy. Mondale believes his defeat marked the final triumph of Reaganism - the fundamentalist view that the market will solve all problems. The causes Mondale espoused, of social justice and equality, were pushed into the wilderness and are only now, he believes, a quarter of a century later, enjoying a revival. "We lost 25 years. A whole generation of people never got a shot, and I'm really sorry about it... We could have made a difference."

The game of consequences plays out most chillingly for Dukakis. Here's the thought: no defeat to Bush Sr in 1988, no Bush Jr, no Iraq war. "If I'd beaten the old man, we never would have been landed with the kid. And we wouldn't be in this mess today."

Ralph Nader has had to face, much more directly, the accusation that he is responsible for the Iraq war. Many people hold him personally to blame for allowing Bush into the White House in 2000 by standing as a Green party candidate. In Florida, Nader polled more votes than Gore needed to take the state and hence the presidency. When we meet in Washington, he fires complicated mathematical arguments at me to show that the attack is wrong and that, actually, he helped Gore. "Our entry into the 2000 race got Gore more votes than if we hadn't been there," he says. I ask how he has coped with the vitriol that has been thrown at him, some of it by people who used to be among his closest allies. "I'm not into mood changes," he says. "These ups and downs undermine consistency and persistency of purpose. Once you become susceptible to moods, you become susceptible to discouragement and demoralisation, which I abolished, ab initio."

Wow! That's quite a gift, I think to myself, being able to eradicate mood changes. Just think how much money you could make if you managed to distil that ability and bottle it. But even more than with Dole, I want to scream at him: why do it to yourself? Let alone for a third time, in 2008, as he has announced he will? His answer has clearly been rehearsed: "I will not allow people to keep the citizens of this country from having a chance to improve this country, and as long as I have a chance to contribute to that, I will never give up."

Nader is an interesting, thought-provoking and intelligent man. But a phrase keeps popping into my head: sucker for punishment. Which, of course, is precisely the kind of thinking that Nader abolished, ab initio.

They haven't done badly out of life, the White House losers. Walter Mondale is a prominent lawyer in a big international firm, as is Geraldine Ferraro. Michael Dukakis may have a pokey office, but he takes great joy in teaching a new generation of political leaders. Bob Dole has an institute of politics in his name in the University of Kansas. But they all carry the scars. Mondale says he has paid a price for all those months of round-the-clock adrenaline. "For a while, the system keeps you moving, as you can see it doing with the candidates today. But I think it took something out of me. I don't have a clinical explanation, but an edge was gone and I never got it back. "

So do they regret their decision to run in the first place? Was it worth the pain? Ferraro comes closest to admitting her doubts. "If God had said to me before the nomination, 'I want to sit you down and show you the next six months of your life,' I would have said to God, 'Do me a favour...' I would not have done it." But then she adds, rather undermining the thought, that if the choice had been between her and yet another grey-haired man, "I would have said to God, 'Give me five minutes to talk to my family'."

The others speak as one voice - that despite all the knocks they took along the way, they wouldn't have foregone the experience. "Are you kidding?" squawks Dukakis. "Look, you are dying to govern. My God! Let me have it. Give me the keys to the White House and let's get on with it. People come up to me and say, you must prefer it without all that pressure. I say, you don't understand guys like us. We love pressure. We want to be there to make decisions. We are in the middle of this stupid war in Iraq, the dumbest war ever, and why do you think the guys on my side are running? Because they want to end it."

Mondale puts the same sentiment more succinctly: "If I were 45, I would do it all again." He says he knows of people within the misery circle who are still wrestling with their disappointment. "I've got friends who never get over it. They keep kicking themselves around. I've tried not to do that, not to mope. I count my blessings."

Mondale won't name names, but we know, by his own admission, the identity of one such person who has never fully recovered. George McGovern has had his compensations, too - the library in his honour that opened two years ago at a cost of $10m is evidently a source of huge pride. Then there are the many friendships he made in 1972. But he still feels the hurt of what happened 36 years ago. "You are never going to get over it," he says. "You get so you can live with it, and you don't brood about it, but when the subject comes up, you feel a little pain. A little sadness."

Somebody has to win, and somebody has to lose. Given the chance, I ask, would he be out there on the campaign trail in 2008, taking on John McCain? McGovern's shoulders rise, his chin comes up, that spark of elation is in his eyes. "Oh sure!" he says. "It's always the same. Every four years I'm ready to go again!"