What A Non-Obama Ticket Might Mean For Future Majority (Part 3)

Believe it or not, Mike Bloomberg comes into play in this post about “Clean for Gene” and 1968. Here is my opinionated examination of the context of the tumultuous race and then my even more opinionated thoughts on how it might apply to hypotheticals involving Barack Obama.

3. "Clean for Gene" & R.F.K. - Eugene McCarthy believed he had no hope of beating President Johnson from the left in 1968, but he did it anyway. Gene announced that he was running to be the voice of the movement for a negotiated settlement to the Vietnam War.

Subsequently, his candidacy took off on College Campuses across America. In New England, where there is a citizen-to-college ratio of roughly 1:3, young volunteers were the key to McCarthy's surprise finish in the New Hampshire primary. That fall, antiwar students in New England and elsewhere went "Clean for Gene," cutting their hair and shaving off their dirty hippy beards in order to canvass and GOTV for McCarthy.

When McCarthy won 20 of the 24 NH delegates, President Johnson crapped his pants. Four days later, previously chicken Robert F. Kennedy announced he wanted in on that action. After the new year, LBJ folded. McCarthy was still huge on campus, as Kennedy once joked, “Gene gets all the A students and I get all the C students.” As somebody who banked on his youthfulness and intelligence, Kennedy bristled at losing the support of the intelligentsia and college campuses.

More after the bump

Still, with his money and quick campaign infrastructure, high name recognition and institutional connections, Kennedy started to beat McCarthy in subsequent primaries. He was getting slightly better on campuses too - but the emotional connection, the most intense response pundits had ever seen, was of Kennedy to inner city youth where he stood as a hero and drew enormous crowds, “I appeal best to people who have problems,” Kennedy said to Bill Moyers.

Compared to Eugene McCarthy, Robert F. Kennedy's campaign had a paradigm shifting, revolutionary feel as he incorporated migrant workers rights and, after Martin Luther King's assassination, R.F.K. also went full bore on Civil Rights, social progress, and an immediate end to the war.

Well, we know where bravery like that gets you in America… and so, after Kennedy was shot in head and killed, the Democratic party went into a tailspin.

The Clean for Gene “A-students” had so demonized and alienated many of the Kennedy movement as opportunists who had stolen away Gene’s front runner status and anti-war flag, that after the assassination, McCarthy failed to win them back before the convention.

The uninspiring centrist Vice President swooped into the bitterly contested convention in Chicago and effectively unplugged McCarthy’s microphone. Brazenly, he said to a public whose cries for change had made his own boss LBJ retire in ignominy, “you didn’t want a Johnson-Humphrey ticket, then how about Humphrey...Muskie?” The result was far from surprising; the last thing angry, independent voters wanted was more of the Johnson Administration. Thanks in part to {(or despite) – analysis differs} Independent presidential candidate George Wallace siphoning off former Dixiecrat voters, Nixon won… and thousands died.

I've tossed out a lot of hypothetical variables on this one that I am loathe to consider. Forgive me, it's just such an incredible story of the most insane year in politics. I won’t waste time with a Jeromesque fantasy of a brokered convention where Bill Clinton swoops in, takes the stage at 4:00 AM holding a puppy and threatens to wring it’s neck if all of his past favors aren’t repaid in the next 2 minutes on the next ballot.

Troubling similarities to note however, include the recent increase in tension between Obama’s youth movement and the Edwardians, and even some pot shots between Obama and Hillary. Nevertheless, I don’t think that Obama’s masses would declare open war on Denver’s Police Department and try to storm the convention hall if Obama isn't on the ticket. Call me crazy.

I also notice that some of the most bitter Edwardians speak of Obamarama as having usurped from Edwards the role of "Transformational Change-Agent." The Dems and those two camps especially need to play nicer, methinks.

But really, what I find interesting about this scenario, instead, is the part George Wallace played in electing Nixon. The Independent Presidential run of the segregationist Alabama Governor gave Dixiecrats and other conservative non-Republicans another voting choice.

There is debate as to whether Wallace’s 10 million voters, largely from the rural south, would have voted for a moderate Republican from California. The deep south had been a Democratic stronghold based on political family legacies tracing back to the time of the Civil War when the liberal North was Republican and the racist south was Dixiecrat.

Certainly, many racist southerners were helped along in their party transition to Republican by Barry Goldwater’s 1964 dictum that Conservatives are different from Republicans.

If Obama does not make the ticket, Mike Bloomberg running as an Independent and Obamaesque ex-post-party figure will mean trouble for the Democrats.

Bloomberg will also be a blow to America's already injured ability to comprehend political reality, because he'll argue that the two conflicting worldviews that drive the two competing party platforms, as well as the out-and-out “culture war” between them (as declared by the right), can just suddenly turn into a rainbow.

Bloomberg will benefit most from McCain losing and Obama losing. It might be a Wallace in reverse. All Bloomberg would have to do is throw his own convention in September that mishmashes Obama & McCain’s rainbow rhetoric): “Hey America, if you wanted to get beyond partisan politics but the nasty party bosses wouldn’t let you, guess what: you have another option, me, Billionaire Mayor Mike.”

The question then becomes which of the adrift believers, the McCain-loving Independents (who are really Republicans), or the Obama-loving ex-post-partisans (who are really Democrats) would be more likely to vote for a short, Jewish billionaire from New York City and Boston.

Call me crazy but there’s something about the makeup of the Obama voter that makes me think that they would be more willing to vote for a non-white and/or non-Christian from the Upper East Side.