A lot of people who weren’t alive to witness the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago are wondering if it’s legendary chaos. I evaluated that possibility at New York:
When the Democratic National Committee chose Chicago as the site of the party’s 2024 national convention a year ago, no one knew incumbent presidential nominee Joe Biden would become the target of major antiwar demonstrations. The fateful events of October 7 were nearly six months away, and Biden had yet to formally announce his candidacy for reelection. So there was no reason to anticipate comparisons to the riotous 1968 Democratic Convention, when images of police clashing with anti–Vietnam War protesters in the Windy City were broadcast into millions of homes. Indeed, a year ago, a more likely analog to 2024 might have been the last Democratic convention in Chicago in 1996; that event was an upbeat vehicle for Bill Clinton’s successful reelection campaign.
Instead, thanks to intense controversy over Israel’s lethal operations in Gaza and widespread global protests aimed partly at Israel’s allies and sponsors in Washington, plans are well underway for demonstrations in Chicago during the August 19 to 22 confab. Organizers say they expect as many as 30,000 protesters to gather outside Chicago’s United Center during the convention. As in the past, a key issue is how close the protests get to the actual convention. Obviously, demonstrators want delegates to hear their voices and the media to amplify their message. And police, Chicago officials, and Democratic Party leaders want protests to occur as far away from the convention as possible. How well these divergent interests are met will determine whether there is anything like the kind of clashes that dominated Chicago ’68.
There are, however, some big differences in the context surrounding the two conventions. Here’s why the odds of a 2024 convention showdown rivaling 1968 are actually fairly low.
Horrific as the ongoing events in Gaza undoubtedly are, and with all due consideration of the U.S. role in backing and supplying Israel now and in the past, the Vietnam War was a more viscerally immediate crisis for both the protesters who descended on Chicago that summer and the Americans watching the spectacle on TV. There were over a half-million American troops deployed in Vietnam in 1968, and nearly 300,000 young men were drafted into the Army and Marines that year. Many of the protesters at the convention were protesting their own or family members’ future personal involvement in the war, or an escape overseas beyond the Selective Service System’s reach (an estimated 125,000 Americans fled to Canada during the Vietnam War, and how to deal with them upon repatriation became a major political issue for years).
Even from a purely humanitarian and altruistic point of view, Vietnamese military and civilian casualties ran into the millions during the period of U.S. involvement. It wasn’t common to call what was happening “genocide,” but there’s no question the images emanating from the war (which spilled over catastrophically into Laos and especially Cambodia) were deeply disturbing to the consciences of vast numbers of Americans.
Perhaps a better analogy for the Gaza protests than those of the Vietnam era might be the extensive protests during the late 1970s and 1980s over apartheid in South Africa (a regime that enjoyed explicit and implicit backing from multiple U.S. administrations) and in favor of a freeze in development and deployment of nuclear weapons. These were significant protest movements, but still paled next to the organized opposition to the Vietnam War.
One reason the 1968 Chicago protests created such an indelible image is that the conflict outside on the streets was reflected in conflict inside the convention venue. For one thing, 1968 nominee Hubert Humphrey had not quelled formal opposition to his selection when the convention opened. He never entered or won a single primary. One opponent who did, Eugene McCarthy, was still battling for the nomination in Chicago. Another, Robert F. Kennedy, had been assassinated two months earlier (1972 presidential nominee George McGovern was the caretaker for Kennedy delegates at the 1968 convention). There was a highly emotional platform fight over Vietnam policy during the convention itself; when a “peace plank” was defeated, New York delegates led protesters singing “We Shall Overcome.” Once violence broke out on the streets, it did not pass notice among the delegates, some of whom had been attacked by police trying to enter the hall. At one point, police actually accosted and removed a TV reporter from the convention for some alleged breach in decorum.
By contrast, no matter what is going on outside the United Center, the 2024 Democratic convention is going to be totally wired for Joe Biden, with nearly all the delegates attending pledged to him and chosen by his campaign. Even aside from the lack of formal opposition to Biden, conventions since 1968 have become progressively less spontaneous and more controlled by the nominee and the party that nominee directs (indeed, the chaos in Chicago in 1968 encouraged that trend, along with near-universal use of primaries to award delegates, making conventions vastly less deliberative). While there may be some internal conflict on the platform language related to Gaza, it will very definitely be resolved long before the convention and far away from cameras.
Another significant difference between then and now is that convention delegates and Democratic elected officials generally will enter the convention acutely concerned about giving aid and comfort to the Republican nominee, the much-hated, much-feared Donald Trump. Yes, many Democrats hated and feared Richard Nixon in 1968, but Democrats were just separated by four years from a massive presidential landslide and mostly did not reckon how much Nixon would be able to straddle the Vietnam issue and benefit from Democratic divisions. That’s unlikely to be the case in August of 2024.
Chicago mayor Richard J. Daley was a major figure in the 1968 explosion in his city. He championed and defended his police department’s confrontational tactics during the convention. At one point, when Senator Abraham Ribicoff referred from the podium to “gestapo tactics in the streets of Chicago,” Daley leaped up and shouted at him with cameras trained on his furious face as he clearly repeated an obscene and antisemitic response to the Jewish politician from Connecticut. Beyond his conduct on that occasion, “Boss” Daley was the epitome of the old-school Irish American machine politician and from a different planet culturally than the protesters at the convention.
Current Chicago mayor Brandon Johnson, who was born the year of Daley’s death, is a Black progressive and labor activist who is still fresh from his narrow 2023 mayoral runoff victory over the candidate backed by both the Democratic Establishment and police unions. While he is surely wary of the damage anti-Israel and anti-Biden protests can do to the city’s image if they turn violent, Johnson is not without ties to protesters. He broke a tie in the Chicago City Council to ensure passage of a Gaza cease-fire resolution earlier this year. His negotiating skills will be tested by the maneuvering already underway with protest groups and the Democratic Party, but he’s not going to be the sort of implacable foe the 1968 protesters encountered.
The 1968 Democratic convention was from a bygone era of gavel-to-gavel coverage by the three broadcast-television networks that then dominated the media landscape and the living rooms of the country. When they were being bludgeoned by the Chicago police, protesters began chanting, “The whole world is watching,” which wasn’t much of an exaggeration. Today’s media coverage of major-party political conventions is extremely limited and (like coverage of other events) fragmented. If violence breaks out this time in Chicago, it will get a lot of attention, albeit much of it bent to the optics of the various media outlets covering it. But the sense in 1968 that the whole nation was watching in horror as an unprecedented event rolled out in real time will likely never be recovered.
Kerry ought to prepare policy speeches of equal length as Bush’s, and let the campaign demand equal coverage. It does not have to be immediate response as per Saturday Radio messages — but it ought to be roughly equal venues.
I have been quite supportive of Kerry’s apparent tact of remaining fairly silent on many apparent matters, but in the past week I have wanted Kerry to be much more critical of the apparent origin of the “torture” policy in the memos that passed between Bush and Gonzalas, that apparently assumed you could change the law of the land by simply declaring it “Quaint” and an old paradigm. Let’s get something straight. When a President participates in negotiating a treaty (as Harry Truman did in the 1949 Geneva Accords) and then recommends them to the Senate as a Treaty — and the Senate passes the treaty, it is the law of the land — period punct. If you want to change it, you have to go to congress, etc., etc. It might help if someone started talking about Article VI of the constitution — which is where you find the Treaty is Law language. Kerry really needs to offer an analysis not only of the Abu Ghraib pictures — but of the essentially passive manner in which Bush allowed illegal assumptions to filter down the chain of command.
Yeah, Carpe-
What’s the use in voting? I’m sure there’s a good episode of American Idol on tonight.
Carpe, I agree with you (except maybe for #5 and 6). And as reignman mentioned, the upcoming speeches on Iraq and the media fawning over those speeches, and the usual negative media coverage or non-coverage of Kerry and the Democrats, will make Bush rebound in popularity. It’s still his election to lose.
Look, Bush is gonna win, and here’s why:
1. Diebold
2. Florida is in the fix
3. The media is his buddy
4. We are no longer a democracy. That quaint notion ended
in November 2000.
5. Osama Been Forgotten will be found at the GOP covention in prime time and presented to Rudy The Hero Guliani as a trophy.
6. Conan the Barbarian will be out stumping for Bush, so all the star struck morons will think they’re voting for Der Terminator.
7. We’re a fascist country now, so hells bells, lets have more war.
Just my opinion cuz I have no faith left in the Murican peeplet anymore.
News: Bush falls off bicycle.
That’s what happens when you take off the training wheels.
I’m not so sure I agree with the premise that Democrats have been swinging between poles of despair and optimism. I believe that there is a certain amount of that which is simply a reaction to the way in which stories are reported. Understand that your average reporter, when he or she reports that the polls have the candidate in a dead heat, does not mention that this is a poor position for an incumbent president. Then the news changes and the polls figures change and it is reported as “President Bush’s position in the polls is weakening considerably on the heels of a report that…” Media loves scandal and shock and drama. Most of the Democrats I know are pretty level-headed. They take exactly the tone you suggest: cautious optimism.
Agreed. Bush will get a bump from his newest speech deal on Iraq. He’ll get another once Iraq gets its soverignty. He’ll probably do something on the 4th of July. He’ll get a bump at the convention, and another on 9-11, 04. But come the debates, Bush won’t be able to stop millions of dissatisfied Americans tuning in, and listening to what Kerry has to say, or at least what SNL does.
For those who need a quantitative analysis for their comfort blankie…
Check out this in Salon By James Galbraith…econometricists kick ass when it comes to numbers..
http://www.salon.com/opinion/feature/2004/05/22/polls/print.html
Coming to our senses?
What the president’s declining approval ratings suggest about Americans’ judgment — and the prospects for redefeating Bush.
– – – – – – – – – – – –
By James K. Galbraith
May 22, 2004 | So you think the Abu Ghraib prison torture scandal has broken the back of President Bush’s popularity? Well, I did too. But then I did a reality check.
Last February I ran an experiment with the first 37 months of Bush’s approval ratings…
Tick, tock — no matter what Bush said or did, Americans seemed to come to their senses about him at a steady rate. Except, of course, in the presence of a galvanizing foreign event or crisis.
Americans could be coming to a deeper judgment on Bush — perhaps about his competence, or trustworthiness, or character. And we could be coming to that judgment as a whole people. It could be that we are not irrevocably divided down the middle between blues and reds. Maybe some of us just take a bit longer than others to think things through.
The optimism is warranted and it really has little to do with horserace numbers or with history.
Especially not with history for the Bush presidency since 9-11 is fundamentally AHISTORICAl.
This leads to the fundamental reason for optimism. The Great National Coma is over. Iraq is a disaster and will continue as such. The economy is nowhere near as strong as the stock peddling pundits would have us believe and most importantly THE NATIONAL COMA IS OVER. Bush has made enemies not only of democrats, but lazy media who think they’ve been had, Chinese, Japanes, Russians, Europeans, Arabs, the entire Muslim world…a list as long as your arm.
The National Coma is over. Kerry must strike and strike hard. Whne I say SOON but that is the art of politics not the science…
THE NATIONAL COMA IS OVER:
“Not to get personal about it, but the president’s capacity to lead has never been there In order to lead, you have to have judgment. In order to have judgment, you have to have knowledge and experience. He has none.
The emperor has no clothes. He is SO gone” Nancy Pelosi
I think these articles make good points. Let Bush hang himself. We need to register voters and work , work , work.
The Kerry campaign can win big if we organize and keep the pressure on Bush. But we cannot appear to be too greedy. Save that for after the election.