A well-known politician emerges out of the shadow of eight years of Democratic rule, hoping to secure another term in the White House for the party. Has well-respected Senate experience, understands global politics real well, highly identified with key Liberal constituencies, and has some thread-worn but credible links to progressive causes from a previous generation. But the opposing party’s candidate knows how to use the era’s media masterfully, and leverages it to pull out populist support from under the Democrat by playing the race card, class warfare, and media resentment. The campaign is run by the old playbook masterfully — but it fails to mobilize both older populists and younger voters who had had their hearts set on a highly charismatic progressive candidate.
2016? No, 1968. And the Democrat, Hubert Horatio Humphrey, Vice President of the United States, loses in a squeaker to Richard Milhous Nixon, a far-right politician who re-fashioned himself into a palpable alternative by mastering the media of the time — television — in sly and subtle ways that the Democrats just couldn’t figure out. And because they couldn’t figure it out, Democrats don’t turn out as they should, and some even vote for Nixon — enough to make the difference.
Having lived through this nightmare, I am surprised that I hadn’t recognized its outlines more clearly earlier. Maybe I really wanted HRC to vindicate HHH — forgetting that the Trump campaign had modeled their candidacy in many ways on the Nixon strategy, and ignoring how much the Clinton campaign — and the Democratic Party — had made the same false assumptions about how to reach a coalition of progressive voters, centrist voters, and populist voters that the preceding Democratic president had done so well. In both instances, the Democrats vastly underestimated the depth of populist resentment against insiders claiming to represent their interests — especially on matters of race and social values — and assuming that they could keep the coalition glued together. They thought that they could do it with traditional campaigning and a smattering of new media, but they were dead wrong — and spent boatloads of resources in the least-trusted communications channels.
The coalition that brought Lyndon Baines Johnson to office in the 1964 election was unusual, and a lot more like the Obama coalition than we may like to think. Civil rights legislation had been mired in Congress, but with the assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy on November 22nd, 1963, Johnson had a rare opportunity to draw to his side traditional Democrats, populists who were for God and country in the Cold War, and African Americans, whose civil rights cause key could now wrap in the memories of JFK. That coalition produced a landslide victory for LBJ, but after fractious years of war in Vietnam, economic problems at home, racial strife that frustrated African Americans and frightened populist White voter backlash against the implementation of civil rights, Humphrey just couldn’t seem to sound a unifying note with enough conviction and clarity that people would trust him. He was a good man and a very good politician, but now the Johnson legacy was tarnished, and he couldn’t become “his own man” effectively.
Hillary Rodham Clinton faced many of the same issues, and made many of the same mistakes. She managed to be the lightning rod for the most unpopular aspects of Obama’s policies, which severely limited her ability to reach out to populist and progressive voters in particular. The truth of the matter is that, like Johnson, Obama had inherited a messy international situation from his predecessor JFK, and in both instances a decision to double down on the establishment view of how to prosecute a war was ultimately a fatal decision in terms of both each one’s legacy and their ability to hand over success to his possible successor from their administration. In both instances, their cornerstone domestic legislation — civil rights for LBJ, healthcare for Obama — fulfilled major promises to the progressive wing of the Democratic Party, with nothing but political headaches in the short term as the result of those decisions, and yet another political boat anchor around their potential successor’s ability to communicate sincere support to populists and mainstream Democrats.
OK, now what? The deed is done, the notion of an “Obama coalition” was largely a myth, or at least improperly analyzed by Clinton campaigners, who took a largely “F the midwest” approach to pretty much everything. Done and dusted. Next is 2020 from a presidential standpoint. So, the question becomes, will 2020 be a replay of 1972, in which angry progressives and dirty tricks against a mainstream Dem hand a largely undeserving Republican candidate a landslide victory, or will it be something else altogether?
Unfortunately, the odds strongly favor a replay of 1972 at this point. The marches in the street that we’re seeing seem to be a replay of angry anti-war demonstrations of the late 60s and early 70s, likely to lead to highly disillusioned youngsters pulling out from the political process, and populists continuing to be alienated from both them and minorities. Mainstream/corporatist Democrats, weirded out by the failure of Democrats to figure out the White House, will pull back and maybe dip their oars in the water come 2020 with a safe candidate — Tim Kaine, say, much as Edmund Muskie seamed like a safe east-coaster insider in 1972. Kaine will implode one way or another, and a weak and radicalized Democratic party will nominate a popular progressive with key flaws, as Democrats did with George McGovern in 1972, who gets shellacked in the general election by failing to understand how to play to the key elements of the Democratic coalition — mainstream suburbanites, minorities, urban progressives, and populists.
I am not saying that this cannot be undone, but my guess is that it will take a radical set of circumstances to overcome it — and a candidate who can bridge the progressive-populist-minority trifecta at least as well as Obama, hopefully pulling along the suburbanites with them. I’d like to think that this could be Elizabeth Warren, but since she’s such an obvious choice, be sure that Republicans will be doing everything that they can to lay bear traps for her along the way. It is not very encouraging. But, then again, democracy has always been a contact sport — and it’s about time to get savvy people with sharp elbows into the mix. While there is still a democracy to be had.