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.
There’s no way in hell Obama’s going to pick Nunn for VP. There’s no reason to say why; anyone with half a brain knows why and it doesn’t need to be explained. Nunn’s just another old man in a country that’s had enough of old men.
Well, Steve Kornacki at the New York Observer offers one explanation — Nunn is Sistah Souljah:
“That Mr. Nunn is from a Southern state doesn’t hurt, and that some on the left have begun carping about his conservative record on social issues like gay rights is actually a political plus, too – a chance for Mr. Obama to reach out to center-right swing voters who roll their eyes at the liberal interest-group establishment.”
http://www.observer.com/2008/obama-and-cheney-option
Yeah, all of those soldiers who got early discharges for being part of the “liberal interest-group establishment” (for which read: queer) WILL just carp carp carp. They didn’t just start doing it, though. Where’s Karnacki been since the mid 1990’s? Apparently the choice of Nunn will reassure anybody troubled by the fear that Obama might have actually meant it about gays and lesbians being citizens too.
I actually agree with Karnacki on that point. It’s just what I’ve said before — if Obama picks Nunn, I won’t believe him on gay issues either. I’m already a skeptic.
“Lieberman’s position on military ballots in FL was dictated to him by the Gore campaign. It was only a “surprise” to those hard-line lawyers who were out of the Gore political loop. Moreover, Gore probably wouldn’t have even been in the position to win FL without Lieberman’s presence on the ticket (look at the 2000-2004 numbers in South Florida).”
I suppose I could have intuited the latter, but I’m happy to know the former. Lieberman’s statement at the time infuriated me. I honor our servicemen, but I don’t happen to think that the vote of a peacetime soldier in Germany is more important than that of a WWII veteran in Florida — and the latter were expected to follow the rules, sign their absentee ballots, and get them postmarked before Election Day.
Ducdebrabant:
I don’t think there’s any real chance of Nunn going on the ticket unless he offers something like the “repentence” you are suggesting.
Have to quibble with one of your analogies, though: Lieberman’s position on military ballots in FL was dictated to him by the Gore campaign. It was only a “surprise” to those hard-line lawyers who were out of the Gore political loop. Moreover, Gore probably wouldn’t have even been in the position to win FL without Lieberman’s presence on the ticket (look at the 2000-2004 numbers in South Florida).
Look, I hold zero brief for Lieberman these days; I seem to be “to the left” of a lot of Democrats who think he should be stripped of his committee assignment if he keeps attacking Obama; I think the mere act of endorsing McCain is enough grounds for booting him out of the Caucus as soon as is practicable.
But that doesn’t mean we have to accept a lot of revisionist history about Lieberman’s responsibility for Bush. If anything, Gore lost FL when he failed to push for a statewide recount from the get-go, as a lot of us felt at the time.
Thanks for the comments.
Ed Kilgore
It’s been pointed out to me on another site that a repentant Sam Nunn would be a very dramatic development and a real boost to gay people. So it would. The repentance is missing, though. He makes no apologies, offers no regrets, makes no promises, refuses to state a present position, and then he does something really surprising. He has the gall to claim credit for the fact that gay men and women, thanks to DADT, no longer have to lie on enlistment forms as they did pre-DADT. Thanks to DADT, perhaps, but very little thanks to Sam Nunn, who wanted to keep things exactly as they were. Neither DADT nor anything resembling it was his original position. If he’d had his way completely, they’d still be lying on enlistment forms and, I suppose, still be getting dishonorable discharges. You know, instead of just discharges. He’s a long way from admitting he was wrong, and that is a bottom line prerequisite in my view.
Sam Nunn could be a mistake if the Obama campaign is serious about winning Colorado, New Mexico or possibly Nevada. 2004 exit polls in Colorado indicated that 4% of voters were gay/lesbian. Many gay men (less so lesbians) hold a surprising positive view of McCain, particularly in these Western states. Placing someone like Nunn with such a distinguished pedigree of heterosexism/homophobia could prove a mistake. Why risk Colorado, New Mexico or Nevada (all will be very close) on the off chance you might pull in Georgia. At the very least, Nunn will need to do some explaining to these voters as to why he now thinks “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” should be revisited, and what are his current views.
More importantly, elevating a conservative, Southern white male into the future leadership of the Democratic Party is a mistake for 2016 and beyond. The Democrats need to look West, Northwest, and Southwest as they consider their future, not to the remnants of the old Democratic base in Dixie.
Perhaps Bowers is easier to differ with than Jonathan Capehart, whose article “Don’t Ask Nunn” was in the Washington Post last Wednesday:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/06/10/AR2008061002527.html
It may have been just a matter of time, but not quite as much time as it took Bowers. The comparison of Nunn to Lieberman may fail in one way, but unless Nunn enthusiastically embraces Obama’s program, I’d be very much worried about his independence turning into obstruction. He turned on a President of his own party already, when he was in the Senate, and what is the Vice President but President of the Senate? Another surprise like Lieberman’s jumping to the Republican position on putative military ballots in Florida without signatures or dates is not something I would care to see.
Nunn of course deserves credit for his work on non-proliferation.