HRC = Humphrey's Replayed Campaign. Denver 2008 = Chicago 1968.

David Zephyr

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Sun Mar-09-08 03:39 PM
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HRC = Humphrey's Replayed Campaign. Denver 2008 = Chicago 1968.

HRC = Humphrey's Replayed Campaign. Denver 2008 = Chicago 1968.

This summer in Denver is beginning to look a lot like Chicago in 1968.

The parallels are so striking, so glaring that they are almost eerie.

In 1968, our country was deeply divided over a war that was waged built on fabricated intelligence and outright lies cooked up in the White House by a President from Texas. Texan Lyndon Johnson's administration had earlier lied to the American people in order to wage a large war in Vietnam. Congress went along with Johnson passing the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution paving the way for Johnson's war. Sadly, only two Democrats in the U.S. Senate opposed war resolution while most Democrats in Congress didn't want to look unpatriotic and, therefore went along with the Texan's war and lies. Fear-mongering -- that a "domino effect" of communism was taking place and that Vietnam was the central war to save western democracies -- was the daily bread from the White House fed to Americans by sympathetic news outlets.

In 1968, after the assassinations Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Senator Robert Kennedy, the Democratic Party's convention is Chicago was railroaded into nominating Hubert Humphrey, a Democrat and supporter of the unpopular war.

However, even though the brave, anti-war voices of Dr. King and Bobby Kennedy had been eliminated, the anti-war sentiment was alive, growing and organizing. And that growing force could smell the stench of the fix that was going to take place in Chicago at the national convention. The cry went out: On to Chicago! The stealing of the presidential nomination in 1968 by the pro-war party establishment away from the anti-war faction resulted in tens of thousands of young people, college students and a mix of both white and black young activists protesting at the convention and eventually rioting in the streets. And the whole world watched.

Young, fearless activists such as Tom Hayden and Bobby Seale and others took up the call of "Please Come to Chicago" and the voices of youth and minorities rose up that summer to denounce the farce of the establishment's trickery at the convention.

Fast forward to 2008, 40 years later:

Once again our nation is saddled with and mired within an very unpopular war cooked up by still yet another Texas president and assisted by a pro-war national news media. The war, this time in Iraq, was authorized by Congress and supported by many Democrats, who, like their cowardly predecessors back in 1964 were afraid to appear unpatriotic when they should have stood against the war with the few brave Democrats who knew better.

The Iraqi War and the Vietnam War were both initiated on bald-faced lies to the American people. And as with Vietnam, fear-mongering nearly paralyzed our nation as we were told over and over that Iraq was the central war to save western civilization from terrorists.

And here is where the parallels become most troubling to me:

Once again we have our party divided between a pro-war candidate and an anti-war candidate. Of course, the pro-war candidate of 1968, Hubert Humphrey was politically skilled enough to say he wanted to end the war that he had assisted in getting us into. Does that sound familiar? Today, in 2008, we have our own Democratic candidate who also assisted our current Texan president with his catastrophic war who is equally skilled enough to say that she wants to end the war...the very war that she authorized!

And once again, the anti-war faction within the Democratic Party is watching the establishment and the media scrambling with desperation to figure out how to overcome the will of the voters and how to trick the system in order to nominate the pro-war candidate. Just like 1968, the establishment is in a fever to steal another nomination by hook or crook.

As in 1968, young people and minorities are once again involved, active and will not sit by idly this summer and watch another railroaded convention by party hacks deliver a stolen nomination to a pro-war candidate. They will travel from every city in this country to Denver by bus, by car, by train and by foot if necessary this summer to let their voices be heard. Chicago 1968 could seem mild by comparison.

In 1969, a young, ambitious William Clinton composed his now-famous letter to keep himself out of Vietnam writing that he wouldn't resist the draft because it would hurt his future "political viability". But just one year earlier, in 1968, Bill was in the employment of an anti-war U.S. Senator when the Democratic National Convention took place. In Clinton's self-serving autobiography, he sheepishly told one of his famous stories as to "why" he had not gone to Chicago that fateful week, why he'd been missing in action. Bill had dodged that question over and over for decades: "Why weren't you in Chicago, Bill?" Well, Bill's fable was that his mom had asked him to get to know one of her boyfriends better and Bill had agreed to go fishing that week in Arkansas on a remote river. Clinton writes how he spent that week wishing he could have been with the other "kids" (Tom Hayden was older than Clinton then) in Chicago. Of course, like so many of Bill's stories, there is no way to prove or disprove his tale of why he was not there. Of course, I know why. He didn't want to be faced with having to choose sides because as before it would hurt his "future political viability."

But this summer Bill Clinton's past from that week in 1968 may be coming back to haunt him in ways that even Shakespeare would have chronicled. Will the real Bill Clinton be working super delegates to steal the nomination from a young African-American candidate who opposed the war that Bill and his wife supported? Will Bill Clinton be leveraging back room deals to overturn the expressed majority of Democratic voters who gave Senator Barack Obama more than 600,000 more votes than his opponent? Will the candidate who won twice as many state contests as the Clintons be railroaded? Will the candidate who won more pledged delegates be robbed of his rightful moment in history?

And the more important question is this:

Do Bill and Hillary Clinton really believe that millions of young people, black and white, are going to stay home that week in Denver while they replay Hubert Humphrey's campaign parlor tricks?

Bill Clinton might finally find himself in Chicago 1968 after all. And this time he won't have "gone fishing" because this time we will know where he stands, won't we?

Denver 2008!