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.
You know what is the sad part? It’s how the media like MSNBC tried to sell this glitz of the “transfer of power” they had the graphics for it and everything. I bet they are sorry they did that.
…On the other hand, I’m not going to state confidently that Bush is finished. We’re at the point that state-by-state numbers start to become important, and that electoral story is still ambiguous, especially if the fix is in in Florida to the extent that it seems to be; I don’t think the election is going to be completely rigged nationwide, but I’m cynical enough to think that Kerry can’t count on getting Florida even if he wins over a considerable majority of public opinion there.
And if Kerry can’t get Florida, this election is going to be won and lost in the old industrial/mining states: the Great Lakes area, Pennsylvania and West Virginia. Those states are still up for grabs.
Marcus, I can’t see the up trend for Bush that you’re seeing in those Pollkatz charts. The aggregate trend looks like it might be flattening out a little, especially in the disapproval figures, but that’s to be expected as the numbers start to cut into Bush’s base– these people are going to be harder to persuade. No use wailing about it; it’s true in every election.
Also, the slowdown doesn’t mean that we’re approaching an absolute floor; something similar seemed to be happening in the fall of 2003 (and was hysterically identified as a “Bush bounce”), but after the real Bush bounce that followed the capture of Saddam Hussein, somehow the numbers didn’t respect that floor any more, and sank lower.
The rest is just noise, and the usual spread between different polls because of methodological systematics. That the most recent numbers on the chart happen to be near the top of that band doesn’t mean anything. Even Zogby has had high outliers before.
> I think conventional wisdom, while often
> off-base, is correct in this instance: an incumbent
> president doing under 50% is headed for defeat.
> And, except for one outlier Annenberg poll, Bush
> hasn’t seen the number 50 since March or April.
Yeah — but the approval/disapproval ratings still seem to be heading his way now. Check these two charts, and it seems he is almost back in 50-50 territory.
http://www.pollkatz.homestead.com/files/pollkatzmainGRAPHICS_8911_image001.gif
http://www.pollkatz.homestead.com/files/pollkatzmainGRAPHICS_9432_image001.gif
I really, REALLY wish “Shrub” will be looking for another job next February, but I still can’t truly believe he is “finished” as Ruy seems to think.
MARCU$
Personally, I think the Republicans are starting to realize that they are in bigger trouble than they once thought they would be. ABC’s The Note ran over a few items yesterday that led me to give this idea a little more weight, but the real indication was that the campaign has hired a private investigation firm to dig up stuff about Kerry’s military past. They are becoming desparate.
Cherry,
You have to figure that, absent some McGovern-like loss, Bush is going to get at least 45% of the vote, just like Kerry will. Where the other 10-20% each side is competing for will land will become clearer as we approach election day.
Ruy, I’m surprised to see that you’ve yet to comment on the Kerry/Edwards team’s new invocation of “values” in the context of material issues like health care, education, taxes. Sounds like they read your last book.
Cherry, challengers have not infrequently come into office with less-than-majorities in multi-party splits (Lincoln, Wilson, Nixon, Clinton), but you don’t want to bet on that as a re-election strategy. Wilson and Clinton did both get just under 50% the second time around, but most evidence there was that the splinter parties cost them the majority, not that they shifted the outcome of the election. The Nader scenario — enough lefties staying with the egomaniac to let Bush win, despite identifying far more closely with challenger Kerry — doesn’t have much precedent.
I think conventional wisdom, while often off-base, is correct in this instance: an incumbent president doing under 50% is headed for defeat. And, except for one outlier Annenberg poll, Bush hasn’t seen the number 50 since March or April. (I’d also suggest that the apparent sudden softening of the not-all-that-great-to-begin-with economic figures could bring the number down as summer progresses)
I think a lot of people would think that it’s “unpatriotic” to disapprove of “the way Bush is handling terrorism”. This may sound irrational, but do you think everybody who answers polls gives completely rational, non-emotion influenced answers? On less “patriotically” oriented questions, such as “do you think Bush deserves another term”, W consistently gets about 46% yes, 51% no. This number is rather telling…
My personal pulse taking of R feelings (e.g., right-wing blogs) find that “conservatives” are lukewarm about him. One person posted this thought: “We have a R house, R senate and R president. How come we still don’t get conservative policies?” You can fool some of the people all of the time…
I don’t think those polls are bad for Bush. It shows he has a 45% hardcore supporter base. Bill Clinton here is his blog won the election in 92 with a minority of the votes against Bush sr. and Perot. I don’t think Bush is going for the landslide, he’s going for the win, however small it is.
I was watching Jon Stewart late last night riffing off of W’s “Americans are Safer” speech. He repeated it like six or seven times.
Stewart was asking based on what? The fixed report that says terrorisim acts have hit an all time peak? The ongoing slaughter in Iraq? Ridge’s vague terror alerts?
I think much of the poll numbers are driven by people who might not be stupid, but stupified.
I find this puzzling, too, Alan. Do you think it is due in part to the terror alert stuff that the administration has been doing re the election? Perhaps there are people who think that this shows decisiveness or that talking about terror is the same as doing something about it?
He was bound to get a bump from the faux-handover and also the media’s glee in ignoring the constant deaths of our soldiers.
I keep reading that Bush has a lead over Kerry by 2-6 points on who people trust on the “war on terror.”
How is this reconciled against these reports?