Kevin Drum, attempting to reassure lefties that a bloody primary campaign well into the spring wouldn’t necessarily be a bad thing, invokes 1968:
The Democratic incumbent president was forced to withdraw after a primary debacle in New Hampshire. The Vietnam War had split liberals into warring factions and urban riots had shattered the LBJ’s Great Society legacy. A frenzied primary season reached all the way to California in June, culminating in the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy. The Democratic Convention in Chicago was a nationally televised battle zone. Hubert Humphrey, the party’s eventual nominee, had never won a primary and was loathed by a significant chunk of the liberal community. New Left radicals hated mainstream Democrats more than they hated Republicans.
In other words, this was the mother of all ugly, party-destroying campaigns. No other primary campaign in recent memory from either party has come within a million light years of being as fratricidal and ruinous. But what happened? In the end, Humphrey lost the popular vote to Nixon by less than 1%. A swing of about a hundred thousand votes in California would have thrown the election into the House of Representatives.
If long, bitter, primary campaigns really destroy parties, then Humphrey should have lost the 1968 election by about 50 points. “Bitter” isn’t even within an order of magnitude of describing what happened that year. And yet, even against that blood-soaked background, Humphrey barely lost.
Good points, but we can - and probably should - interpret 1968 in a completely different way.
1968 was actually the beginning of the end of Democratic political hegemony that had lasted for more than 30 years. It was a mere four years after Goldwater had been crushed like a bug; the war and the Civil Rights movement had radicalized many members of the Democratic coalition, but conservatism still seemed moribund - though as noted in the many William F. Buckley obituaries last week, it was in the process of revitalizing and reinventing itself, it’s just that few outside the conservative movement at the time recognized this.
But the riots in Chicago, maybe the violence of the ’60s altogether, the extremism within the Democratic coalition seemed to turn middle Americans away from the party, or at least gave them reason to take another look at the Republicans. The fractious 1968 campaign, then, can be seen as a sign of Democratic decay; by 1976 the Democrats would elect another president, but it would prove, really, to be a final truimph, as history was moving in the other direction - shoved, in some respects, by the tumult of 1968.
So rather than reassurance, 1968 provides a warning. After the disaster of Iraq and Katrina and everything else these past seven years, the country seems ready to take another look at the Democratic Party; but for those who wonder whether there’s now a “there” there, how does a drawn-out fight between Hillary and Obama answer that question? Or does it convince them that, once again, the Democrats can’t get their act together - and can’t, then, be trusted to run the country?
