The 2008 Presidential Race: A 1972 Redux?

[robertpaulsen]

The 2008 Presidential Race: A 1972 Redux?

by Stephen Zunes
The desperate tactics employed by Senator Hillary Clinton to capture the Democratic presidential nomination from Senator Barack Obama contain some remarkable parallels with the efforts of another favored candidate of the party establishment to block the nomination of another insurgent Democrat 36 years ago. In both cases, the establishment candidate — with little chance late in the primary campaign of obtaining enough delegates to secure the nomination — committed to a strategy of not only trying to twist the rules so to pull off a coup at the convention, but engaging in systematic attacks against the front-runner in ways that appeared to be designed to weaken him in the very areas that would most benefit the Republicans in the general election campaign.

In 1972, the leader late in the Democratic primary race was South Dakota Senator George McGovern who — like Obama — had galvanized youthful voters, anti-war activists, small donors and other party progressives in a grass roots campaign that had brought new life and energy into a party which had narrowly lost the election four years earlier with a weak pro-war candidate at the helm. At the start of the campaign, the Republicans had looked vulnerable in November, with an unpopular war dragging on and an incumbent administration beset by scandals. However, as the liberal Midwestern senator defied expectations by running up a string of primary victories, former Vice-President Hubert Humphrey — who, like Clinton, seemed to feel that he was owed the nomination and the chance to be president — sought to both discredit McGovern in the eyes of voters and re-write the rules for seating state delegations at the party’s convention that summer.

The Credentials Fight

In 1972, rather than a winner-take-all system as in previous statewide presidential primary elections, Democratic Party reformers successfully encouraged virtually all primary states to agree to divide their delegates roughly proportional to the popular vote. In the case of California, however — then the last major state to vote in the primary calendar, in which Humphrey had been predicted to win a plurality — Humphrey’s supporters prevailed over McGovern backers and other reformers in rejecting proportionality, getting the state party to agree that all of California’s delegates be assigned to the winner of the primary.

Much to the chagrin of the party establishment, however, it was McGovern who ended up winning the California primary and all of the state’s delegates. Several weeks later, however, Humphrey and his influential supporters convinced party leaders to retroactively assign the delegates proportionally. This dispute was critical since, if McGovern was able to keep all his delegates, he would have a sufficient number to be nominated on the first ballot. With California’s large delegation split proportionally, however, he would fall just short of an overall majority, thereby enabling party bosses to hand the nomination to Humphrey on the second ballot. With the credentials battle still undecided, two separate delegations came from California to Miami for the convention, with neither delegation allowed to be seated until the convention as a whole voted on the issue the night before the balloting for president. Despite this desperate effort to, in McGovern’s words, “put Humpty-Dumpty together again,” the delegates in the convention hall voted to allow McGovern to keep all of his delegates. As a result, Humphrey withdrew his name from consideration and McGovern was nominated by an overwhelming majority.

http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2008/05/02/8666/