Clinton – Don't Gel Too Soon

Big Birthday Memory #16: (More 1968) Obama, Clinton, New Hampshire And Primaries – 1968 And 2008

NOTE: As I approach my 70th birthday, I’ll reprise a milestone post here each day until the end of May. Today – from January 8, 2008.

In the 1968 New Hampshire primary, 40 years ago, Senator Eugene McCarthy got 42% of the vote running against Lyndon Johnson .

That was enough to be viewed as a win, since no one thought he’d get anywhere close to those numbers. That victory by the only national politician with the guts to run against the Vietnam War sent a shock through the Democratic Party.

McCarthy’s effort, often called “The Children’s Crusade,” was comprised largely of college students (including me) who abandoned their studies to come to New Hampshire and work to help to stop the war. Now, as I watch Barack Obama, and see the the numbers of young people propelling his success, I know just how they feel — and what awaits them if they fail.

Then too, win or lose, things will be tough for Senator Clinton. Obama, seen not only as a change agent but also as someone who offe

That’s exactly what happened in 1968. The New Hampshire victory brought Robert Kennedy into the race – establishing, until his tragic death, a three-way battle – two dissidents against the juggernaut of the Democratic establishment. Then later, Hubert Humphrey , candidate of that establishment and for years, as Vice President, public and energetic supporter of Johnson’s war, won the nomination.

To all of us, he had stolen the nomination. Many (not me) were so bitter that they refused to vote for him. (2016 NOTE: Let’s not let this happen again! That reluctance led to the election of Richard Nixon and all that followed. Think how different things would be…) Remember, for most of us, as for many of Obama’s young supporters, this was our first presidential campaign. Hillary Clinton, should she prevail further down the line, will face the same broken-hearted campaigners. Once the anti-establishment, anti-war student and Watergate hearing staffer, in the eyes of these young people she’ll be cast as the villain.

For evidence of how long that bitterness lasts, take a look at this quote from the American Journalism Review, from the 1968 Chicago Convention recollections of veteran Washington Post columnist David Broder. It’s about me – but it’s also about any young American who takes a stand and loses .

He recalls coming into the hotel lobby from the park where demonstrations were underway and spotting a woman he had first met during the Eugene McCarthy campaign in New Hampshire. “Her name was Cindy Samuels,” Broder still remembers. “She was seated on a bench crying. She had been gassed. I went over and I put my arm around her and I said: ‘Cindy. What can I do for you?’ She looked up at me with tears on her face and said: ‘Change things.’

NOTE: As I searched for links for this post I found a David Corn piece saying much the same thing. I want to take note of it since the ideas came to me independently but I didn’t want it to seem that I drew from his.

Why Are All Those Guys Being Mean to the President?

I haven't written much about the Inauguration or the first week of the Obama Administration. Partly it just hasn't sunk in, I think. Partly, like many people, we never got into our ticketed section. That wasn't so bad; we were there and that was what mattered.

After the swearing in though, we had a tough time getting off the Mall: lots of pushing and shoving and none of the spirit of earlier in the day. We were cold and exhausted like everyone else and felt really sad and beat up. I just didn't want to talk about it. Still don't.

But now, as I get used to hearing "President Obama," watch the Robert Gibbs briefings and listen to various cabinet members as they emerge, as I struggle to believe that George Bush is really gone (my husband refused to leave the TV at the reception on the Hill where we watched the actual swearing in until we saw the chopper take off) and that we have a smart, classy, competent and deeply pragmatic president, I want at least to weigh in.

It was a beautiful day. I don't know anyone, either personally, among the crowd or just around town, who isn't proud. Those I know who live abroad report the international excitement you've seen reported. We've done something wonderful. But you know that big cliche "now the hard part begins." Well, it's true. Just like it's easier and more fun to work on a startup than a big, established company, it's easier to campaign than to govern. Instead of one goal – getting elected, there are countless tasks and crises and they all happen at the same time. No news bulletin in this.

I wonder though if people are scared enough about our problems to give him time to make his way. From the first day there were people on the Hill blocking nominations and it felt to me that it was just because they could. I know that Americans don't want that to be happening but all three of the major roadblock Senators were men up for re-election so I guess they think it will benefit them at home. Reporters call it "red meat" and it's what's been troubling Americans for the past eight years; I can't imagine what these men think they're accomplishing, particularly with Eric Holder, the Attorney General nominee and widely praised including by his former Republican colleagues. Yet his confirmation was put off a week – and he, Tim Geithner (Treasury Secretary) and Hillary Clinton were all kept from early briefings where security was involved and from being an official part of the Inaugural because these guys decided to make trouble. Petty, huh?

So let's hope they come to their senses and that all of us are strong enough to hang on until the planned economic and diplomatic initiatives have time to move into place. It will all happen faster if we wait to fight until there's really something to fight over.

HILLARY SUPPORTERS AND THE OBAMA CAMPAIGN: DON’T DO THIS!

This is breaking my heart. Why is it that we Democrats are incapable of NOT shooting ourselves in the foot (feet even)? In my view (and I’m hardly alone in this) this may be the most critical election of my lifetime. I’ve written (are you sick of it yet?) about the parallels to 1968 when the refusal of many anti-war voters to show up at the polls and vote for Hubert Humphrey brought us Richard Nixon and a cascade of disaster. That could and most likely will happen again if we don’t all pull ourselves together.

I heard a commentator quote — I thought Jefferson but can’t find the source — “True democracy means acceptance of defeat by one vote.” Sounds right, doesn’t it? But there is what we wish were true and there is political reality, and the reality this year is that every moment of hesitation by Senator Clinton’s supporters puts another barrier between Senator Obama and the White House. My most-respected friend PunditMom has a very smart analysis of where all this antipathy is coming from. And there’s a survey of much of the conversation in Lisa Stone’s summary at BlogHer.

As I write this I think about the suffragists who won us the right to have this fight in the first place just 88 years ago. What would they think now? They were willing to stand up to those who asked them to halt their campaign until WWI was over. Should women have the same singular focus now — placing their anger ahead of the outcome of this election? Is the injustice so great that it justifies putting another conservative Republican in the White House?

I think not. Our sisters will do us a disservice that will last a very long time if they continue to stand in the way of an Obama victory or even just sit on their hands, because that will betray women who are at the bottom of the power pile, raising children alone, struggling for childcare, lacking health insurance, vacation or sick leave and any kind of job security. Feminists rightly say that “every issue is a women’s issue” and that means that every decision in a McCain administration will have a heavy impact on these women, and on the rest of us.

Beyond that, in my view, the perils of an anti-choice administration that will nominate judges like those who overrode violence against women laws in Virginia and frequently support employers over women seeking redress to sexual harassment or other discrimination, an Administration that will carry on the Bush foreign policy and continue to decimate our constitutional rights — oh – you know the list — those perils outweigh any grievance.

So if sisterhood is powerful, let those whose hearts are broken by the Clinton loss recall their sisters who need so much – and consider how little their interests would be served if Barack Obama does not prevail. On this, Women’s Equality Day, let them ease their pain with the knowledge that they will help on “every issue” and therefore every “women’s issue” if they can move past the pain of their defeat and see to it that our country itself is not defeated too.

WHO WANTS HILLARY? WHO WANTS BARACK? WHAT HAPPENED BEFORE? WHAT’S AT STAKE?

You really need to read this guest post at Political Voices of Women, Catherine Morgan‘s remarkable combination of editorial and aggregator. There are links there to more than 400 women who blog about politics – and guest posts. And (full disclosure) yes, sometimes that includes to my work. But I digress.

On Wednesday, April 23, just after the Pennsylvania primary, Slim, whose blog is called No Fish, No Nuts, was Catherine’s guest blogger. Slim’s post, which first appeared on her blog, wrote a loving but sad analysis of the Clinton supporters at her county convention where local Democrats elected their delegates. Listen to this:

Obama’s voters are looking toward Obama as a standard
bearer, as a point man for the change they want to see in the country.
Hillary’s supporters, at least the older women among them, are voting for their
surrogate: because they want to see a woman in the Oval Office before they die,
and because they themselves were denied so many opportunities for advancement
in their own lives.

I do not doubt that they also desperately believe in
Hillary Clinton, but their investment in her goes much deeper than politics.
Hillary Clinton is proof that they had it in them all along, the fire, talent
and creativity, and they could have been leaders but for the glass ceiling that
seemed to rise only inches a decade.

Slim also wrote that she was reluctant to offer these observations but that given polls showing many Clinton supporters saying they will vote for McCain if Obama gets the nomination, and some the other way around, she felt that times were so desperate that she had to weigh in. In her view, "We cannot afford another 4 years of war, debt and economic stagnation,
the prescription of a McCain presidency. So we Dems cannot allow
Clinton voters (or for that matter, I add, Obama supporters if it goes the other way – though they report this feeling somewhat less frequently) to take their ball and go home come November."

To that I say "amen!" I was a member of the "Children’s Crusade" that was the 1968 anti-war presidential campaign of Senator Eugene McCarthy. We worked like demons through New Hampshire, did so well there that it was considered a win even though, technically, we lost, then saw Bobby Kennedy enter the race against us. We persisted, as did his supporters, until his assassination in June of 1968. After that, many of his supporters joined us, working still to try to elect a president who would stop the war. And then.

The riots in Chicago. The nomination of Hubert Humphrey, Lyndon Johnson’s vice president and for way too long a staunch supporter of the war. And then. Many, many of my colleagues and friends indeed picked up their footballs and went home. To stay. Not only did they not work for Humphrey – that would have been very hard after what had happened in Chicago. They didn’t even vote for him. Or vote at all. And that, my friends, is how we got Richard Nixon. Which is how we got Watergate. Which is how we got Jimmy Carter– who made such a mess that we got Ronald Reagan. Who took apart so much social safety net, environmental and regulatory and other federal function that we thought more was impossible. Until we got George Bush. Who decimated much of what was left, including much of our hope. Until now, when we have two candidates who stand for so much.

Of course that’s simplistic, but what really really upsets me is that every time we educated activists, in our righteousness, take a walk because things aren’t perfect, we aren’t the ones who get hurt the most. People who are poor, whose kids go to bad schools, whose unemployment insurance runs out too soon, who no longer can afford even in-state tuition or, for many, community college tuition, to say nothing of HEALTH INSURANCE (an issue which reaches up into the middle class) — and of course the war, where low-income people do most of the enlisting…these people are the ones who are hurt the most.

We let our singular perception of what’s perfect become the enemy of the good – or at least better than bad – that we could help to bring into being. It’s infantile. It’s sad. It’s shameful. And unless all of us in the blog universe who feel this way make a lot of noise and take lots of friends to lunch no matter WHO gets the nomination, it’s going to happen again.

Thanks to Slim for her great post that inspired this rant.

BITCH IS THE NEW BLACK – WHAT DO WE THINK?

This is old now and all over the interweb PLUS all the feminist listservs that reach my mailbox. What’s the verdict? Funny? Post-Feminist? JUST funny? Too true to BE funny? Too funny to be true? Other? Check one (or more…)

OBAMA, CLINTON, NEW HAMPSHIRE AND PRIMARIES – 1968 AND 2008

In the 1968 New Hampshire primary, 40 years ago, Senator Eugene McCarthy got 42% of the vote running against Lyndon Johnson .

Then too, win or lose, things will be tough for Senator Clinton. Obama, seen not only as a change agent but also as someone who offers the hope and optimism of a JFK, has captured the imaginations not only of young people but also of many journalists, most notorious of whom is the conservative New York Times columnist David Brooks. That means that anyone who wrests the nomination away from him will be perceived as the breaker of young hearts, standing in the way of idealism and the candidate who brought young people fully in to the system.*

To all of us, he had stolen the nomination. Many (not me) were so bitter that they refused to vote for him. Remember, for most of us, as for many of Obama’s young supporters, this was our first presidential campaign. Hillary Clinton, should she prevail further down the line, will face the same broken-hearted campaigners. Once the anti-establishment, anti-war student and Watergate hearing staffer, in the eyes of these young people she’ll be cast as the villain.

For evidence of how long that bitterness lasts, take a look at this quote from the American Journalism Review, from the 1968 Chicago Convention, riot and Hum prey coronation recollections of veteran Washington Post columnist David Broder. It’s about me – but it’s also about any young American who takes a stand and loses .

HILLARY, THE TONKIN GULF AND 1984

OK, those folks who run TypePad and YouTube haven’t found a way to add this blog host to automatic video posting so I’m hooking a link in right here so you can watch this. I can’t decide what I think – it’s funny and clever and a perfect definition of a mashup but it’s also mean and off-mark. While many, including many feminists, have issues with Senator Clinton – this 1984/Apple Commercial version isn’t representative of most of them. Accusations of opportunism and flabbiness on the war are not the same as totalitarianism. True, she voted for the Patriot Act, but so did all but two Senators – and one of them didn’t vote at all!

Now, I remind myself – we still remember who voted against the Tonkin Gulf Resolution (Senators Wayne Morse of Oregon and Ernest Gruening of Alaska) and that was in 1964 so maybe this vote will last too. Anyway, I don’t know where I’ll land politically this year – I’m really just thinking about the power of the kinds of media manipulation (in the technical sense) that are possible today. How will we ever help newer voters figure out how to determine the truth? Are they so much more evolved than we are in a media sense that we needn’t worry, or is the dismal lack of critical thinking work in current No Child Left Behind education going to affect how people think in the voting booth as well as our educational standing in the world?

Thoughts?

BILL CLINTON AND FOX

I missed the Fox interview. It was the second day of Rosh Hashana and I was at services. What a day to miss the Sunday talk shows! If you haven’t seen or read the encounter between Chris Wallace and Bill Clinton, you can read and watch it all here on AlterNet. Wallace asked the former President about terrorism and he really let him have it. It’s tough to watch because in some ways he seems to go over the top but it also was a great relief to hear him – if you have fond memories of those years — finally answer the criticism aimed at him. I have always been frustrated by the Orwellian skills of the right in dealing with the redefinition of reality. Whether you agree with them or whether you don’t — the language that they use often serves their issues more than it serves the truth.

If it’s something that interests you — take a look at these pieces about it.

USAToday Blog conversation

The Washington Post’s Howard Kurtz

The Center for American Progress

Some analysis of media appearances of Bush administration re terror

What did you think?