Observers in both the Trad Media and in the Series of Tubes have debated to what degree the November 2nd mid-term election this year will bear a relation to the mid-term election of 1994, when the Eye of Newt foresaw and then delivered a severe rebuke to the first two years of the Clinton Administration. Will the Republicans re-take the House and Senate? Will it mean that President Obama and the Democratic Party "over-reached"? Will a massive Democratic defeat reveal that the Professional (and Amateur) Left failed to "buck up" and either reward the Democratic leadership for its failures or swallow hard and come to the realization that "somewhat better" is preferable to "much, much worse"? In the last question, it's possible to see how this year's election bears a far stronger resemblance to 1968 than it does to 1994.
Come back with me now to 1968, the year of "The White Album" and the last World Series not preceded by division playoffs. I was 16 and a passionate supporter of Bobby Kennedy for President. My parents, German immigrants and more progressive than I was (though I'd catch up soon enough), were avid followers of Eugene McCarthy. But then Bobby was murdered and the Democratic nomination went to Hubert Humphrey in the chaotic Democratic Party convention in Chicago. Not only did my family (part of that year's Amateur Left) feel let down by the result, we were outraged at what Connecticut senator Abe Ribicoff called "Gestapo tactics in the streets of Chicago," when anti-war demonstrators and McCarthy delegates sitting in an office building were gassed and beaten by Mayor Daley's police.
Now there was a reason to sit out an election! If you feel that the promises of Hope and Change from two years ago ring a bit hollow today, imagine your candidate of choice not only being defeated but being shot to death, and his eloquent calls for peace and justice replaced by rationalizations for why supporting the war being waged by President Johnson was the right thing to do. Hope was dead, buried in Grant Park.
So many on the Left did sit out the election, and the result was President Richard Nixon.
As it happens, in the last fortnight of the campaign many unhappy Democrats came to the realization that Hubert Humphrey, with his long and honorable Progressive resume (his civil rights speech at the 1948 Democratic convention is one of the signal moments in 20th century social progress), was far preferable to the man who was counting on a Southern Strategy for his election. Humphrey began to close the gap, thanks in part to people like my parents, who, after listening patiently to my many exhortations on why a better candidate was preferable to a worse candidate, decided on Election Day to vote for Hubert Humphrey. Pollsters later declared that if the election had been held on Thursday or Friday that week instead of Tuesday, Humphrey would have won, so quickly had he closed the gap in the final hours of the campaign.
But the election was held on Tuesday. Nixon won, and the country got Attorney General John Mitchell and Haldemann and Erlichmann and Kissinger and four more years of war in Vietnam and Cambodia. And the country was denied the Progressivism of Humphrey and the extension of the Great Society. In fact, Nixon began the dismantling of Great Society programs, a project that was to be intensified in the Reagan years and will be vastly stepped up if the Republicans take over Congress this year.
I think all of us here can count the ways President Obama and the Democratic Party have left us feeling disappointed and mystified at their ability to be bamboozled by Republican tactics and misrepresentations. The last two years have been far less satisfying than we'd hoped. But I think that the direction the party has been lurching fitfully toward has been the right one, and I know that a Republican Party of Boehner and McConnell and Bachmann and -- God forbid! -- Angle and Paul and Buck and Rubio would take the country in a radically wrong direction.
Will this be 1968 again? Will we turn away from what, in hindsight, we discovered was a very fine public servant because of quite understandable disappointment? Will we and the country suffer irredeemable loss from that decision? Or will we decide that a better choice is preferable to a worse choice?
I was 16 in 1968. The Beatles were still making music. My Cardinals made the World Series. In many ways, it was a wonderful year to be alive. But I fervently hope we don't make the same political calculation we made then. The country and the world can't afford it.