In his column in today's Washington Post entitled Return to Grant Park Harold Meyerson takes note of the place of Grant Park in Chicago as the place where it will happen on Tuesday. Not like 40 years ago though.
The Democratic Party will return next Tuesday night to the place where, 40 years ago, its last governing coalition ingloriously died -- in all likelihood, to proclaim its rebirth... the choice of Grant Park is also historically -- even poetically -- resonant. For it was in Grant Park on a hot summer night during the tumultuous 1968 Democratic convention that the New Deal era in American politics was dispatched to oblivion through the efforts of antiwar demonstrators and the Chicago police, whose conduct that evening a subsequent government report termed "a police riot."
Meyerson attributes the collapse of the coalition to four factors thar persist into this campaign. Let us examine this further below the break.