In connection with the 50th anniversary of the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy, I offered these thoughts at New York:

Fifty years ago today, I awoke to a radio that was playing the famous recording from Mutual Broadcasting System reporter Andrew West, who was an eyewitness to Robert Kennedy’s assassination at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles:

“Senator Kennedy has been … Senator Kennedy has been shot! Is that possible? It is possible, ladies and gentlemen! It is possible! He has … Not only Senator Kennedy! Oh my God! … I am right here, and Rafer Johnson has hold of the man who apparently fired the shot! He still has the gun! The gun is pointed at me right this moment! Get the gun! Get the gun! Get the gun! Stay away from the guy! Get his thumb! Get his thumb! Break it if you have to! Get the gun, Rafer [Johnson]! Hold him! We don’t want another Oswald!”

Moments before being fatally shot by Sirhan Sirhan, Kennedy had said to the celebrating crowd at the Ambassador: “It’s on to Chicago, and let’s win there!” That year as in most years, the California primary was the last on the schedule, and RFK was pointing toward the twilight struggle over delegates that would precede the national convention in late August.

It has been widely surmised in the years since, with the special intensity of a counterfactual myth that can neither proved nor disproved, that had Kennedy not been assassinated that night, he would have gone on to win the Democratic presidential nomination and then the presidency, sparing America and the world from years more of bloody conflict in Vietnam, and from the Nixon presidency with its polarization, corruption, and eventual disgrace.

In fact, our best guess from this distance (reinforced by serious examinations of the issue from RFK biographer Evan Thomas and historian of the 1968 election Michael A. Cohen) is that Kennedy’s odds of winning the nomination were slim by the time of his death. His antiwar rival Eugene McCarthy was in no mood to get out of his way, and the Johnson-Humphrey administration had an iron grip on delegates from many of the 33 states that did not hold primaries (and even some that did, but which did not bind delegates to primary results). Kennedy himself seemed to believe his only chance to win was by reconstructing his late brother’s alliances with old-school urban political bosses like Chicago’s Richard Daley, and it’s at best a wild conjecture that they would have defied LBJ and the unions that were so close to Humphrey to take a flyer on Bobby.

And even if Kennedy had won the nomination, he, like Humphrey, would have led into the general election a divided party that had done horribly into the 1966 midterms and had lost much of its white southern wing to George Wallace. It’s anybody’s guess as to whether RFK’s countercultural associations would have alienated fewer Democrats than Humphrey’s tardy establishment of an independent position on Vietnam. And there’s no telling what LBJ might have done to complicate life for the bitter rival he loathed and feared for so long.

Even RFK aide Jeff Greenfield, who wrote an alternative history account of a Robert F. Kennedy presidency, concedes that on this day 50 years ago the path to that actually happening was rocky and uncertain:

“’We were losing altitude,’ de facto campaign manager Fred Dutton reflected later, looking back at the political terrain Kennedy was facing. In fact, the day of the primary, Dutton was skeptical enough of our chances to suggest that RFK would take the vice-presidential slot if offered.”

There is a reason for the persistent myth of the world we lost to RFK’s assassin, that goes beyond loathing for LBJ or Humphrey or Nixon or the policies they embraced. And it involves more, I think, than just general Kennedy/Camelot nostalgia. For a whole generation of progressive political activists and journalists, there was a glimmer of something different in RFK than the more conventional politics of his brothers Jack and Ted — an ability to both put together a mind-bending coalition of minority and white-working-class voters that would blow up the racial politics the GOP was beginning to aggressively embrace by 1968 and to keep the fraying New Deal majority alive.

This coalition was glimpsed by some journalists watching Kennedy win African-American and Polish-American voters in Indiana, and others examining his California victory and its heavy reliance on a black-brown-and-white working-class support base that eschewed the McCarthy-loving suburbs. Without exit polls and other modern tools, it is difficult to discern how broad RFK’s 1968 voting coalition actually was. But the fact that Kennedy was later adopted as a patron saint for all sorts of left-of-center folk (both left-bent radicals and centrist “New Democrats”) who were tired of the old-time religion of interest-group liberalism suggests that he might have been onto something new. Indeed, in a critical 2000 book about the RFK myth, Ronald Steele suggested just that:

“He was the link between two competing visions: the welfare state world of the New Deal and the ‘middle way’ of latter-day New Democrats like Bill Clinton.”

Indeed, in the real world of politics without RFK, it has often been southern-bred centrists who have been been able to put together solid biracial coalitions that maintained minority enthusiasm and reached deep into the white working-class. No Kennedy coalitions were more mind-bending than that of Jimmy Carter in 1976, who had equally devoted support from African-Americans and former Wallace supporters — albeit only in his native South. Bill Clinton had some of the same appeal. But so too (mostly outside the South) did Barack Obama in 2008.

It may be significant or incidental that Carter lost a lot of his white working-class support in 1980 (after surviving an intraparty challenge from RFK’s brother) as did Obama in 2012. And then in 2016, Hillary Clinton lost in no small part because she did very poorly among white working-class voters while suffering from low turnout by minority voters as well. In terms of the enduring myth of RFK, HRC was the anti-Bobby, or at least the representative of a party that was struggling with both its New Deal and more recent constituencies.

And that’s partly why Bobby Kennedy remains so fascinating a character. In trying to build a multiracial coalition that includes a robust share of the still-very-large white working class, there remains the ancient formula of the social-Democratic Left: a class-based appeal that eschews all cultural or identity issues and simply pounds away at the need to defend and extend the universal benefit programs, progressive taxes, and anti-corporate regulations and trade policies that presumably all poorer folks support or ought to support. It seemed to work pretty well for Bernie Sanders in the 2016 primaries, and in all honesty, it has never really been tried by the national Democratic Party since the days of the actual New Deal.

But for progressives who, for one reason or another, don’t think white working-class losses or lagging minority turnout are the product of too little “populist” agitation or too much talk about the racial or cultural issues that voters seem to care greatly about, there is a persistent craving for something less formulaic and more poetic. Is it possible to develop a message that transcends group tensions by a higher appeal to common values and aspirations that cannot be captured by tax or benefit distribution tables or the lashing of a common corporate foe? Fifty years after the fact, the abiding myth of Bobby Kennedy is a testament to that abiding hope.

The following article by TDS contributing editor Andrew Levison, author of The White Working Class Today: Who They Are, How They Think and How Progressives Can Regain Their Support and other books and articles focusing on the working-class in American politics, is cross-posted from a TDS e-blast:

Well, OK, it’s not exactly top secret.

What actually is available is a new book that on the surface appears to be an in-depth sociological portrait of Trump voters in a wide range of Rust belt cities, small towns and rural areas. It presents the conclusion that, contrary to popular stereotypes, these folks are really all just basically decent Americans–heartland populists who voted for Trump out of a mixture of patriotism, legitimate economic grievance, defense of traditional values and anger at condescending coastal elites.

At first glance the book, The Great Revolt–Inside the Populist Coalition Reshaping American Politics, looks like a substantial and indeed an impressive piece of ethnographic research. One of the authors, a professional journalist, is described as having traveled 27,000 miles across the upper Midwest in order to interview over 300 people. The book includes 23 extended profiles of individuals, each one presented in substantially greater depth than the usual journalistic dispatches that one encounters in articles in newspapers and magazines.

But there’s something about these profiles that’s just a little bit odd. Not a single one of the 23 subjects who are profiled expresses even the most microscopic iota of prejudice or bigotry toward any group–not African Americans, not Latinos, not Muslims, not GLBT individuals. In the book they and the over 300 interviewed people that they represent are all described as being just decent, hard-working, “salt of the earth” Americans–Norman Rockwell illustrations come to life. Most of the people interviewed, in fact, are either Obama-Trump voters or independents and not one is a firm Rush Limbaugh ideological conservative.

Since the book clearly gives the reader the impression that it is presenting a representative group of “typical” Trump voters, and not a carefully selected subgroup of tolerant, non-racist Trump supporters, this is, to put it mildly, more than a tad improbable. Interviewing over 300 “typical” Trump supporters without encountering a single racially prejudiced individual is statistically about as likely as interviewing 300 attendees at the annual National Book Awards ceremony and not finding a single English major or interviewing 300 people at a Grateful Dead concert and not finding anyone who had ever smoked marijuana.

But when the book is viewed, not as sociology, but as a market research document prepared for the major GOP advertising agencies, it suddenly becomes both extremely interesting and profoundly important for Democratic candidates to study and understand.

When a major business corporation like Ford or Apple begins to plan a massive ad campaign for a new product like their latest model car or home entertainment system the company’s ad agency usually starts by doing a substantial amount of focus group and interview research in order to prepare a series of “target customer profiles”— detailed descriptions of the intended audience. These profiles are designed to guide ad copywriters about how to talk to them. These documents typically analyze how the people in the target audience see themselves and how they want to be seen by others, about what things they value and care about in their lives and about their trials and disappointments in the past and their dreams and hopes for the future. The goal of these documents is not to create a totally objective psychological profile but rather a picture of how these customers like to think about themselves and how to use this information to sell them goods.

Seen this way, the book suddenly makes sense. It is organized into seven categories that the authors call “archetypes” but the labels they attach to these categories clearly locate them in the familiar world of market research and market segmentation e.g. “Red Blooded and Blue Collared,” “Rotary Reliables,” “Rough Rebounders.” These are the typical kinds of names that ad agencies give to defined submarkets within an overall target audience, groups that they intend to individually target with special ads and other messaging.

As a result, what the book actually provides is seven detailed customer marketing profiles–guides for how a GOP candidate should craft his or her ads to appeal to the non-racist sector of Trump voters who will not vote for Trumpist candidates in 2018 simply because such candidates offer an explicitly racist or conservative ideological platform.

In the wake of the sudden, shocking, self-immolation of New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman’s political career, I thought a bit about the broader implications and wrote it all up for New York:

[P]erhaps we should no longer be shocked by incidents like this. Here’s Esquire’s Charles Pierce [on the subject]:

“The downfall of New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman completes the unholy trinity of prominent liberal New York politicians whose careers went into the acid bath because, at one level or another, they failed to see women as actual human beings. Eliot Spitzer got involved with a prostitution ring. Anthony Weiner used women as sounding boards for his own pleasure. And Schneiderman, allegedly, physically assaulted his romantic partners. And, in this, again, political pundits learn the lesson that gets drummed into every sportswriter over and over: none of us really know these guys.”

It’s not like you could see Schneiderman’s disgrace coming via some misogynistic political impulse. As David Freedlander notes, he was a progressive role model:

“Schneiderman was the scion of a wealthy Manhattan lawyer who donated generously to causes like Planned Parenthood and public radio. He came up through the world of public interest law, one of those do-good types who keep protesters away from abortion clinics and government running with a minimum of corruption.”

But even if he is a lefty “golden boy” rather than a right-wing “good old boy,” Schneiderman is, after all, a boy. And at some point, people should begin to wonder if placing big bets on male politicians at this particular juncture of history is a mite risky, all else being equal. Indeed, if equity or fair representation isn’t a good enough reason for 2018 to be a “Year of the Woman,” the significantly lower likelihood of female candidates turning out to be abusive could be the clincher, at least until pre-#MeToo-movement generations have passed from the scene. I’m not talking about any sort of ban or crusade against members of my own gender, but just a long look at the growing number of celebrities facing a reckoning and a realistic assessment of the odds of a random politician conflating power with opportunities for coercive sex.

This is true even at the highest levels of politics and government. This isn’t the sort of thing that tends to make it into print, but I cannot tell you how many times progressive friends and acquaintances (including serious feminists) have told me that after what happened to Hillary Clinton in 2016, Democrats would be foolish to run another woman against Donald Trump in 2020, encouraging the same kind of sexist voter reactions and media coverage that beset HRC. From that perspective, the ontological necessity of denying Trump a second term outweighs another assault on the country’s most important glass ceiling; let Nikki Haley or (shudder) Joni Ernst become the first woman to serve as president and defang electoral sexism once and for all.

The reckoning, though, ought to make Democrats think less about the perils of a female nominee and a more about the potentially serious consequences of a male nominee who may, like Schneiderman, have a hidden habit of treating his success as a license to act in a beastly manner out of the public eye. Yes, all human beings, and certainly all politicians, are in some respects weak and fallible. But let’s face it: the kind of sins that tend to lose elections are not equally distributed between the sexes.

In her vox.com article “A Democrat getting outspent 17-1 is now neck and neck in deep-red Pennsylvania: “It’s enthusiasm I haven’t seen for a Democratic candidate for a long time” Ella Nilsen provides an update on Conor Lamb’s campaign. As Nilsen explains,

For the first time in nearly 15 years, Republicans in Pennsylvania’s 18th Congressional District are starting to get nervous…On its face, the March 13 special congressional election in the southwest corner of Pennsylvania should be a breeze for the GOP. The Cook Political Report rates the district R+11 (due in part to partisan gerrymandering that the state Supreme Court recently ruled unconstitutional).

…Focused on recapturing blue-collar workers, Lamb’s campaign represents one school of thought — going back to labor-liberal economic values and working with unions to retake territory in Midwest and Rust Belt states that voted for Donald Trump in 2016. Others say the party must look to its future: voters of color and young people who represent its energized base, like it did to pull out a win for Doug Jones in Alabama’s December special election for US Senate.

Yet, “Republican and Democratic operatives in Pennsylvania agree on two things,” writes Nilsen. “Lamb is still very much the underdog in this race, but by getting support from unions that used to back Murphy and capitalizing on national Democratic enthusiasm, he has a fighting chance.” Also,

A recent Monmouth poll shows the Republican with a slight lead, hovering around 49 percent to 46 percent (models with lower turnout give Saccone a slightly larger lead). Given the steep odds, these numbers are extremely good for Lamb,” who is getting high marks for generating voter enthusiasm, while worried Republicans afre pouring money into defeating Lamb.

As for Lamb’s focus on key issues, Nilsen writes that Lamb’s platform addresses “jobs, protecting entitlements like Social Security and Medicare, organized labor, and helping end the heroin crisis currently ravaging the state…A practicing Catholic, he says that while he personally opposes abortion, he supports Roe v. Wade as the law of the land. As a veteran, he is also pro-Second Amendment.”

If Lamb has an edge going forward, it is likely from his strong support from labor unions. PA-18 includes 87,000 union members, including “energy workers,” building trades and teachers. Also, “Steelworkers are active, and although the district’s last coal mine recently closed down, tens of thousands of retired union coal workers and their spouses remain in the area.” According estimates, they could make up 20 to 30 percent of the electorate.

Lamb’s campaign is doing well in fund-raising. But so far Republicans have spent an estimated $4.7 on TV and radio ads, compared to the Lamb campaign’s $300K. Those who want to help the Democrat level the playing field can contribute to his campaign here.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren made a major speech this week that not only affects her political career, but is an instructive example of how to deal with Republican racial slurs. I wrote about it at New York.

The president’s inveterate use of the name “Pocahontas” in mockingly referring to U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren is a bit more than an example of Trumpian boorishness or of his habit of giving people derogatory nicknames. He’s picking up on a slur that certain Massachusetts opponents of Warren have been using since 2012, when the conservative Boston Herald found out Warren had self-identified as having a Native American background in a Harvard faculty directory back in the 1990s. Subsequent digging by various unfriendly and neutral sources discovered that Warren had no formal ties or right to identify with the Cherokee tribe she had been told was prominent in her mother’s Oklahoma background — but also that there was no evidence the highly regarded law professor had ever benefited from a Native connection.

Still, attacks on Warren for exaggerating her Native background struck a conservative chord by raising the familiar targets of diversity, affirmative action, and “political correctness,” then and now. Staff of her 2012 Senate opponent Scott Brown were caught on camera doing various pseudo-Native war chants at a campaign rally. By 2016, one of the most aggressive weaponizers of the “Pocahontas” slur, the hammerheaded Boston radio personality Howie Carr, introduced Donald Trump at a campaign rally with similar war whoops.

This nonsense has created a dilemma for Warren. Does she go out of her way to publicly confess her extremely minor misconduct in the faculty-directory listing, thus fanning the “scandal?” Does she ignore it entirely? Or does she find an effective way to fire back?

A Warren speech today to the National Congress of American Indians showed she has decisively settled on firing back.

For one thing, she’s insisting that Cherokee heritage was indeed part of her family’s life, even as she acknowledges that only tribes themselves can establish Native status.

“[M]y mother’s family was part Native American. And my daddy’s parents were bitterly opposed to their relationship. So, in 1932, when Mother was 19 and Daddy had just turned 20, they eloped …

“They’re gone, but the love they shared, the struggles they endured, the family they built, and the story they lived will always be a part of me. And no one — not even the president of the United States — will ever take that part of me away …

“I’m here today to make a promise: Every time someone brings up my family’s story, I’m going to use it to lift up the story of your families and your communities.”

At the same time, Warren ripped into Trump’s derisive references to her — which at one point he irrelevantly repeated during an Oval Office ceremony honoring Native military veterans — as an example of age-old racist distortions of Native history. After briefly recounting the actual tale of the actual Pocahontas, Warren offered this indirect jab:

“Indigenous people have been telling the story of Pocahontas — the real Pocahontas — for four centuries. A story of heroism. And bravery. And pain.

“And, for almost as long, her story has been taken away by powerful people who twisted it to serve their own purposes.”

Including you-know-who.

Warren later took a more explicit shot at Trump and at his favorite predecessor:

“It is deeply offensive that this president keeps a portrait of Andrew Jackson hanging in the Oval Office, honoring a man who did his best to wipe out Native people.”

And she linked advocacy for Native Americans to the more standard liberal causes she has embraced, including opposition to Big Oil profiteering from Native lands, the fight against GOP-supported safety-net cuts that disproportionately affect minorities, and even banking reform (“[I]t’s about 12 miles on average from the center of tribal reservations to the nearest bank branch.”)

It’s reasonable to assume that Warren will hearken back to this speech whenever Trump or anyone else calls her “Pocahontas” in the future, ensuring that the nastier aspects of the slur will not go unnoticed.That’s morally necessary and politically smart.

At PowerPost, James Hohman’s “Unexpected defeat in rural Wisconsin special election sets off alarm bells for Republicans” at The Daily 202 shares some good news for Democrats:

THE BIG IDEA: Ten months is an eternity in politics, but a stunning Democratic victory Tuesday in a special election deep in the heart of Trump country suggests a blue tsunami could be forming.

President Trump became the first Republican to carry Wisconsin in a presidential election since Ronald Reagan by running up his score in places like the rural 10th state Senate district, which includes a swath of five counties between Eau Claire and Superior along the Minnesota border.

Trump won there by 17 points in 2016. A special election was triggered when Gov. Scott Walker tapped a popular state senator, who had held the seat since 2000, to become his agriculture secretary. Last night, Democratic candidate Patty Schachtner won by nine points.

Writing in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, Patrtick Marley wrote,

Patty Schachtner, the chief medical examiner for St. Croix County, will take the seat that had been held for 17 years by former Sen. Sheila Harsdorf (R-River Falls). Harsdorf stepped down in November to take a job as GOP Gov. Scott Walker’s agriculture secretary.

In an interview, Schachtner said she thought she beat state Rep. Adam Jarchow (R-Balsam Lake) because the race had turned nasty in mailings from groups outside the district.

“It wasn’t nice. It was mean,” she said of the campaign literature. “People just said, ‘You know what? We’re nicer than that.’”

Hohman noted that popular conservative talk radio host called the Democratic upset “a stunning sertback for GOP” in WI. Hohman adds that the GOP candidate Schachtner beat was a “solid assemblyman,” who ran a “spirited” and well-funded campaign. As for Schachtner’s credibility in the race, Hohman explains:

There is an important lesson here for national Democrats: Schachtner is the sort of candidate who can actually defeat GOP incumbents in red congressional districts this fall. She has deep roots in the community, and she is not a fire-breathing liberal.

Her campaign focused not on attacking Trump but fighting the opioid crisis, improving access to health care and bringing good-paying jobs to the region. She didn’t need to talk about the president to benefit from an outpouring of progressive energy and conservative apathy.

This last point is instructive. Trump’s negatives now get plenty of media mentions, even in conservative districts, and will continue to do so in the months ahead. Perhaps Democratic candidates in moderate and conservative legislative districts should not waste valuable messaging exposure on belaboring the obvious and contributing to ‘Trump fatigue,’ when they could be scoring positive points that distinguish their credibility.

Every Democratic candidate ought to prepare a soundbite pivot for questions about Trump, along the lines of  “Mr. Trump’s problems are obvious enough. I’m more concerned with how we can make life better for constituents in this district. That’s what I want to talk about.” And then, be prepared to back it up with a couple of succinct, well-stated examples.