Clinton's reference to 1968 was just dumb
Whatever she really meant, Hillary Clinton's reference this week to the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy was just plain dumb.
It's created quite a stir, as the New York Times reports today.
At worst, Clinton was suggesting the same thing could happen to Barack Obama so she has to keep her campaign machine running just in case.
Kennedy was murdered by Sirhan Sirhan at he Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles after midnight on June 5, 1968, after winning the Democratic presidential primary in California.
Clinton offered a more benign explanation that she only meant that the 1968 Democratic presidential contest was still unsettled in June -- so why all the pressure for her to drop out so early this year?
Even assuming that is the point Clinton was trying to make, using 1968 as a model for 2008 isn't very smart. The presidential campaign of 40 years ago was a total disaster for Democrats from start to finish. In no way was it analogous to circumstances today. In fact, it was more like a polar opposite.
A very unpopular war was going badly in 1968, and the president in charge of it was reviled. Chants of "Hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?" rang outside the White House. That was Democrat Lyndon B. Johnson. Unlike George W. Bush today, Johnson was eligible to run for re-election. But on March 31, he declared he would not seek the nomination.
That announcement, by the way, put the 1968 campaign on a much later schedule than the 2008 time frame.
Up to that point, first Sen. Eugene McCarthy, then Kennedy, had launched their own bids for the nomination. After Johnson's withdrawal, Vice President Hubert Humphrey entered the race.
The process was much different then, with only a dozen or so states holding primaries. Candidates appealed to party leaders in other states for support. McCarthy and Kennedy competed in the primaries; Humphrey did not, but he began amassing delegates anyway. In fact, even after Kennedy's (narrow) win over McCarthy in California, it was Humphrey who already was leading the chase and probably would have nailed down the nomination at the late-August convention in Chicago even against Kennedy.
The assassination did add to the chaotic conditions that roiled the country in 1968. Chicago turned into a battlefield when the Democrats arrived, horrifying Americans watching on television. Humphrey had the support of powerful party insiders like Mayor Richard Daley but couldn't sufficiently distance himself from Johnson's war policies. The road to the White House was paved for Republican Richard Nixon, whose theme of restoring law and order and pledge to end the war resounded with voters. Four years after Johnson's landslide victory, Democrats limped to a dismal showing in November 1968.
This year the Democrats are the ones promising to end the war and are trying hard to link the Republican candidate to the policies of the unpopular lame duck president. Only four years after a Republican victory, they are in a strong position to recapture the White House.
I don't see what role Hillary Clinton thinks she plays in her comparison to 1968. It can't be that of Eugene McCarthy, because he didn't race to the nomination after Kennedy's death. Maybe that of Hubert Humphrey, who didn't win any primaries but accumulated the most delegates anyway, thanks to sway with party bosses? But Humphrey ended up as a flawed and failed candidate in the fall.
Or perhaps she'd prefer the Richard Nixon role. After all, he ended up winning the general election.
Nixon did compete in most Republican primaries and did well, but he did not win the cumulative popular vote. The candidate who did was another Californian, Ronald Reagan. As we know, however, Reagan would have to wait 12 years before gaining the GOP nomination.
Frankly, I doubt Clinton thought very long or hard before referring to Robert Kennedy and 1968. She's apologized for the insensitivity of the remark, but really it was just dumb.
Comments (6)
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First of all, Hillary didn't apologize. She employed the tired but pervasive "if" formulation used by politicians, actors, and athletes who want to sound like they're apologizing without actually doing it. Instead of saying, "I'm sorry for what I said," she effectively said, "I'm sorry if you were offended."
Second, she apologized to the Kennedys, not to Obama. I'm not saying she should have apologized to Obama, but I took her comment less as an insensitive remark about Bobby Kennedy than an interesting warning/wish/whatever about late-in-the-game political assassinations. I don't really believe that she was dreaming aloud of an Obama assassination, but if anyone should be apologized to, it's him.
And finally, I don't think it's really true, as she claimed, that Bill Clinton didn't wrap up the 1992 nomination until June. I don't remember it that way, and for what it's worth, this Wikipedia entry says that Bill "effectively won the Democratic Party's nomination after winning the New York Primary in early April." Because of the Kennedy/Obama thing, no one's commented on this claim, and yet I think it's flat wrong.
Posted on May 24, 2008 4:45 PM
Doug, I take that back, partly. Hillary's claim is probably accurate in a Clintonian sense, i.e. a narrow and meaningless one. You noted sensibly that 1968 was very unlike 2008. Well, so was 1992 in one very relevant sense. The current system of pledged and super-delegates was in place in 1992, but lest we forget, until this year no one seriously counted delegates.
(This is precisely why Florida and Michigan chose to defy the national parties this year and move their primaries into January. They believed that the process was more about momentum than delegates, because that's how it had been for years. Therefore, they were willing to forgo having their delegates count in order to affect the candidates' momentum. But then a surprising thing happened. What mattered flip-flopped, as this year's close primary fight came to be more about delegates than momentum. Unsurprisingly, Florida and Michigan now wish they could undo their earlier gambits, but that's an issue for another blog entry.)
So Hillary's claim is probably narrowly accurate because Bill might not have won a majority of pledged delegates until June 1992. But it's not meaningfully accurate because no one paid much attention to precise delegate counts that year. By June, everyone had known for months that he'd be the nominee.
Now, I guess if Bill had been assassinated in June, it would have been a different story. Maybe that was Hillary's point after all.
Posted on May 24, 2008 5:06 PM
Hillary made this same comment months earlier in an interview and nothing was said. This time the Obama spokesman tried to stir something. It was only said in a historical view and so shame on Obama.
Posted on May 24, 2008 5:40 PM
I should have done more research before spouting off, but fortunately my speculation was right, according to this ABC News piece.
Posted on May 24, 2008 11:49 PM
Jack,
Thanks for your comment. I agree Hillary was trying to make a historical analogy but, as I outlined originally, and Andrew provided additional evidence for, there's no similarity between present circumstances and 1968 or 1992.
Posted on May 25, 2008 4:52 PM
Andrew was certainly correct that Hillary made a non-apology. What she said was:
"I regret that if my referencing that moment of trauma for our entire nation, and particularly for the Kennedy family, was in any way offensive. I certainly had no intention of that, whatsoever,"
Or, "I regret that you took offense at my comments"...
Doug is also tight...Hillary's comment was just dumb, serving no purpose. What did she have i her mind, when she said:
"We all remember, Bobby Kennedy was assassinated in June in California, I don't understand it,"
This isn't even a complete statement. What did she not understand about the assassination?
Posted on May 25, 2008 8:13 PM