Nowadays, Eugene McCarthy is mostly remembered as the anti-Vietnam candidate in '68, the Pied Piper of the Pepsi Generation.  What is less remembered is his libertarian bent.  This past January, Richard Cohan in the Washington Post recalled that McCarthy's candidacy, bankrolled by a handful of wealthy Democrats, wasn't so different from Newt and Sheldon the Sugar Daddy.       http://tinyurl.com/d3lfxd9  In fact, McCarthy later fought hard alongside such bedfellows as the Mississippi Republican Party to overturn post-Watergate campaign finance laws, and became in other ways distinctly more libertarian or maybe just contrarian as he continued in presidential quest in succeeding decades.  The poet Robert Lowell traveled with McCarthy in '68, and McCarthy was a published poet himself.  In honor of his birthday today (he was born on this day in 1916 and died in 2005), here is one of his poems:

THE MAPLE TREE

The maple tree that night

Without a wind or rain

Let go its leaves

Because its time had come.

Brown veined, spotted,

Like old hands, fluttering in blessing,

They fell upon my head

And shoulders, and then

Down to the quiet at my feet.

I stood, and stood

Until the tree was bare

And have told no one

But you that I was there.