The haunting of the Democrats

The party is caught in an excruciating Catch-22. Whether it chooses the establishment figure or the liberal reformer, history offers many paths to defeat.

By Andrew O'Hehir

Read more: Democratic Party, Andrew O'Hehir, Hillary Rodham Clinton, Gary Hart, Opinion, Barack Obama, 2008 election

Salon composite / Reuters photo of Sen. Barack Obama

April 21, 2008 | History, in Marx's famous dictum, tends to repeat itself: the first time as tragedy and the second time as farce. So what do you call it the third time around? A bad sitcom? A bad marriage? A bad dream? All three of those seem like viable ways of describing the Democratic Party's current predicament, locked in an endless and self-destructive struggle with itself, like a would-be Buddhist penitent unable to atone for eons' worth of bad karma.

Even in the annals of Democratic ritual suicide, the 2008 campaign is something special: It's not just that the protracted and painful nomination struggle between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton repeats all the classic themes of intra-Democratic conflict -- left vs. center, reformer vs. the Establishment, pragmatist vs. idealist, call it what you will -- up to and including the fact that the differences between the candidates are mainly semiotic rather than substantive.

In his recent Salon article, Michael Lind identifies the split between dueling Democratic wings of the 1950s, specifically between hard-headed pragmatist (and Cold War hawk) Harry Truman on one side and liberal idealist (and Cold War dove) Adlai Stevenson on the other. Like almost any comment anybody makes about this split, that's an invidious comparison, and Lind is clearly advocating one side of the equation. Truman won an election as the nominee of a divided party (against the odds) and Stevenson lost two of them (against even greater odds). But let's let that stand, since Lind's dating of the emergence of this division is clearly correct: The last president to command enthusiastic support from all sides of the Democratic coalition was Franklin D. Roosevelt.

Before this year's historic campaign, poisoned at the root by overt and ugly sexism and covert and coded racism, Democrats have never been asked to choose quite so nakedly which absolutely necessary demographic they would like to do without. Here is the question, a cynic might suggest, that the Democratic Party must answer this summer: Do we want to lose because we drove away blacks or because we drove away white women? (Recent polling data suggests another cynical question: Do we prefer the candidate Americans believe is a liar or the one they believe is a Muslim?)

We've all seen this movie before, whether we realize it or not. If we're not quite sure how it's going to end, the characters and situations all seem strangely familiar. Beginning with the debacle of 1968, every Democratic campaign for four decades has followed pretty much the same template, even if the labels have shifted with the tide. The quadrennial conflict between liberals and moderates, outsiders and insiders, let's-win-an-election realists and let's-save-our-party dreamers -- supply your own dichotomy here -- reflects the fatal uncertainty of a political party that lacks any clear constituency or ideological focus. Even as the Democratic Party encompasses the views of a plausible majority of the population, its unresolved internal struggles have time and again undermined its ability to win elections or (when it happens to stumble to victory) to govern effectively.

To get specific, the 2008 Obama-Clinton contest offers eerie echoes of two of the most traumatic -- and defining -- campaigns of recent Democratic history. Neither of them is likely to give party faithful the nostalgic warm fuzzies. First, and most explosive, there's the comparison increasingly drawn on the right (and lately among a handful of Democrats) between Obama and Sen. George McGovern, who played the paradigm-shaping role of reformist outsider in 1972. Of course it's meant to be a toxic metaphor, suggesting that Obama is a dewy-eyed Pied Piper leading his followers into a November electoral catastrophe. Let's set that silliness aside right now. Whoever the Democrats nominate will not be facing a popular incumbent but an awkward Republican nominee who has embraced an unpopular war and remains unloved by his own party's base. One should never underestimate the Democratic ability to lose elections, but ain't nobody carrying 49 states this fall.

Get past that, though, and the McGovern parallels are seductive. The South Dakota senator was a heartland American from central casting -- a preacher's kid turned decorated bomber pilot turned Methodist minister. McGovern was far from the most leftward candidate in the race, which in its early stages included antiwar veteran Eugene McCarthy and black New York congresswoman Shirley Chisholm. As Hunter S. Thompson describes the field in his legendary "Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail '72," McGovern initially appeared earnest, sincere and not especially ideological. Many left-wing activists saw him as too mainstream (a charge that was not much heard later). But his left-populist views, notably the fact that he had opposed an unpopular foreign war almost from its inception, meant that he began his long-shot 1972 campaign supported by a burgeoning nationwide network of young, liberal volunteers.

In early primary and caucus states, it was McGovern's superior ground-level organization that ambushed Sen. Edmund Muskie, the Establishment-backed, well-funded front-runner. In fact, McGovern and his campaign manager (a young man named Gary Hart, about whom more later), often credited as the men who put the Iowa caucuses on the political media map, devised a strategy to win them based on a committed core of activists rather than a broad base of support.

Muskie was widely seen as more experienced, more responsible and more electable, but was also widely loathed by younger and more liberal voters because of his views and voting history on -- yes -- a controversial overseas war. To coin a phrase, Muskie was for the Vietnam War before he was against it. As the running mate of the 1968 Democratic nominee, Vice President Hubert Humphrey, Muskie had kept silent while Humphrey struggled to justify Lyndon Johnson's massively unpopular escalation of the war. By 1972 everyone in American politics (including incumbent Richard Nixon) wanted out of Vietnam, and early in the campaign Muskie held a press conference where he apologized for his previous views and pronounced himself a born-again antiwar candidate.

Thompson observes that Muskie's awkward public apology put him permanently on the defensive against McGovern, who had opposed the war vigorously since 1964. (Actually, he had voted for the Gulf of Tonkin resolution that year, but recanted his support a few months later after learning that the alleged attack on two American destroyers was, in his words, "a total fiction.") You can bet the ranch that someone in Hillary Clinton's campaign -- quite possibly the candidate herself, who was a McGovern volunteer in Texas, alongside her Arkansan boyfriend -- has reflected on the Muskie debacle and vowed to avoid any public apology.

With younger antiwar voters flocking to McGovern on the left and Nixon's dirty-tricks squad sabotaging him from the right -- Republican operatives apparently concocted a letter alleging that Muskie had laughed at a derogatory comment about French-Canadians (!) -- Muskie may or may not have broken down in tears during a New Hampshire news conference. But male Granite State tears in 1972 do not have the same sociocultural resonance as female Granite State tears in 2008, it seems. Seen as emotionally unstable and losing ground rapidly, Muskie was driven from the race.

Next page: Obama won't give his convention acceptance speech at 3 a.m., and he won't select a running mate with a documented history of mental illness