The Huck-a-boom

Digby writes an excellent post about Huckabee's victory in Iowa, and how he's the only candidate that manages to be inspiring to any segment of the Republican base. The establishment is raging against him, but it might not work this time. At the end she mentions "This might be their 1972." I think that's an extremely apt comparison.

It's important to understand why McGovern got destroyed that year. It certainly wasn't because he was such a dirty fucking hippie. It's because the establishment, having proven unable to stop him with their lame cast of characters, knee-capped him. I wrote about this during the Lieberman-Lamont primary.

FACT: The McGovern campaign of 1972 had its most vociferous opponents on his own side of the aisle. Ed Muskie was the favorite going into that year's election. The DLC's Al From was running a subcommittee for him at the time. Henry "Scoop" Jackson was one of his opponents that year. Jackson's top campaign advisor was Richard Perle. It was Jackson, not the Republicans, who used the phrase "acid, amnesty and abortion" to describe the McGovern platform. His people-powered campaign represented a major threat to the institutional forces of the party (sound familiar?). After winning the Wisconsin Primary, the powers that be drafted Hubert Humphrey and sent him into the race as the "Anyone But McGovern" candidate. In a famous debate, Humphrey suggested very directly that McGovern's plan to reduce defense spending would "sweep the Army and Navy off the table." ALL of these smears and slurs were used by the Nixon campaign in the fall. They ALL came from inside the party, from the wing that is now largely the modern neoconservative movement.

Establishment Democrats never came on board with McGovern's campaign, fighting him at the convention tooth and nail. The reason McGovern's amazing "Come Home, America" nominating speech happened at 3am ET was because of the massive floor fight engaged to knock him out of the race. Humphrey supporters tried to change the rules with respect to California's delegates after agreeing to the rules in the first place. This futile attempt took up weeks leading up to the convention, and lasted all night on the floor. Party rules mandated that a Vice Presidential candidate come out of the convention, and honestly the McGovern campaign was too busy securing the nomination to even consider it. They went through many choices because establishment figures were pressured not to join up with him. Boston Mayor Kevin White was on the verge of receiving the nod, but the Kennedy clan found him unacceptable. This chaos led to the choice of Maryland Senator Tom Eagleton, who had a history of mental illness and was eventually dumped from the ticket. More than anything, this stalled any momentum they could have gained. Intra-party squabbling was a major part of all of this. George Meany, an old lion of the establishment, refused to let the AFL-CIO endorse McGovern. Labor was a far bigger factor in elections at the time.

The Democratic Party had a vested interest in sandbagging the McGovern campaign then, as surely as its offspring today have a vested interest in using McGovern as an example of a liberal hippie counterculture that would destroy the party. It was done to protect little fiefdoms, to ensure corporate dominance and to keep intact the warmaking machine.

Despite all that, there was no stopping McGovern from getting the nomination because the people decided in the primaries, and they dismissed the establishment figures cautioning against him. They were mad and tired of being taken for granted. It's perfectly analogous to Huckabee today. I don't care how much Swift Boat money John McCain gets, that won't change the mind of a Southern evangelical. As Digby says:

They've been voting for religious phonies for a couple of decades now in the hopes that he would advance their religious agenda and represent their values. This time they have the real thing and they know it. And they could not care less what moneyed elites like Chris Matthews and Joe Klein --- or Rush Limbaugh --- think about it.

Huckabee's not losing. I'm telling you.