Reply #16: Also by the way, I'll probably get flamed for this, but [View All]

[Lydia Leftcoast]

the nomination process in both parties seems like a stage-managed charade and has seemed so for a long time. Having watched the 1984 and 1988 elections with horror, as if witnessing a car crash about to happen, I couldn't help feeling that Mondale and Dukakis were supposed to lose.

Otherwise, why would such lousy campaigners and uncharismatic speakers been chosen? Why would their campaigns have been run so badly, with so many no-brainer missteps?

Answer: so that the conservative moles within the Democratic Party could say, "See? The public rejects liberals. Look at Humphrey, Mondale, McGovern, and Dukakis."

But the public didn't reject "liberals" per se. They rejected unappealing candidates or those who were otherwise made to appear flawed.

People forget that Hubert Humphrey was actually the most conservative of the Dems running in 1968. His opponents were Eugene McCarthy and :cry: Robert Kennedy, and after he got the nomination, amidst mayhem in the streets, a lot of anti-war activists refused to vote for him, because he had made excuses for the Vietnam War. In one sense, he wasn't liberal enough.

The media consistently implied that George McGovern was the "hippie candidate," because they hardly ever showed him without a shot of enthusiastic "flower child" fans. That was a killer in a time when Middle America was in the midst of a cultural backlash against "hippies."

In 1988, I was teaching at a college where the faculty was overwhelmingly liberal, but many of them didn't vote that year. (Dukakis carried Oregon anyway.) A faculty member who was chair of the county Democrats was going around the campus coffee shop at lunchtime trying to inspire his colleagues to take part in GOTV activities. The overwhelming response he got was, "Give me someone worth voting for, and then I'll think about it."

Another thing that people may not remember about the 1988 convention is that there was a lot of buzz about the hot young governor of Arkansas who had a bright future in the party. For whatever reason, his speech went very badly (I was completely underwhelmed), but look who popped up four years later as the nominee, with Al Gore as his running mate (Al Gore, who spent the Reagan years mostly agreeing with Reagan).

When it came to be Al's turn to run, he, too, was given extremly bad advice. Again, it was painful to watch him agree with Bush on everything in the "debates." Something like 1/3 of the voters were "undecided" just a few days before the election, which would never have happened if Gore had clearly distinguished himself from Bush. That inept, timid, lily-livered campaign made the election close enough to steal.

My feelings about 2004 are well-known here. Suffice it to say that faced with the worst sitting president in the history of the U.S., Kerry should have been able to defeat him without breaking into a sweat. It should have been Johnson versus Goldwater, too lopsided to steal.