There's widespread agreement that the landscape of the 2008 election could lead to a political realignment of historic proportions. But how and why would that occur? How do historical parallels from earlier landmark elections help us to understand what is happening this year? Those are questions we're addressing in this Daily Kos Sunday symposium.
DHinMI has explained why the political, social, and economic background to the 1932 election provides an extremely useful model for interpreting how 2008 could play out. In 1932 Democrats built upon public disgust with failed Republican governance to send the GOP into exile for 20 years. Devilstower has discussed the 1976 election in which another Democrat running as an outsider swept aside a discredited and incompetent Republican Party to try to institute a much needed agenda of reform. And DemFromCT has examined Carter's strategy in 1980 by which he tried and failed to paint the Republican outsider as incompetent and scary.
Historical models assist us in seeing trends, in highlighting how various factors can influence elections. Historical models are a means to think in a more focused way about the historical forces at work. They're not predictive. The circumstances of each era are particular to itself. With that in mind, I'll explore one further model that bears striking parallels to the current election - the 1968 battle that helped to restore Republican dominance of the presidency for a generation.
Unlike most presidential elections, in 1968 victory hinged on foreign policy perhaps more than on the pressing domestic issues.
That's not to minimize the significance of the appeal to racial bigotry by Nixon and Wallace in the wake of the Civil Rights Act, nor the mileage Nixon got out of his promise to restore law and order. Much of the country was fearful after a year of assassinations and riots and protests; Nixon hoped to win by stoking that fear. His personality and record were rather distasteful, so his best chance of winning was to redirect attention away from himself.
Humphrey, for all the anger he engendered in capturing the Democratic nomination, could at least draw upon a reservoir of public good will toward him personally. Nixon's most tantalizing opening was to run against the Democratic policies on Vietnam. His problem, initially, was that Nixon's hawkishness was barely distinguishable from LBJ's or Humphrey's. So for most of 1968 Nixon tamely declared that he had plan, always secret, to win in Vietnam. He wanted a race on domestic issues more than Vietnam. Never the less the centrality of the war debate eventually imposed itself on the election.
The Democratic administration helped to bring the war to the forefront. Not surprisingly in the end it worked against HHH. The Vietnam war was deeply unpopular; people had stopped believing the adminstration's reassurances that victory was near. Even a momentous turn of events might not have won back popular support for an administration and a party that had waded into the quagmire. Yet HHH tied himself for most of 1968 to LBJ's war because he saw no practical way to distance himself from policies he'd always publicly embraced. Vietnam was Humphrey's greatest weakness, waiting to be exploited.
The second largest factor in the 1968 election was the hugely unpopular lame-duck president. Whoever his party had nominated was going to bear the brunt of public anger. But by accepting HHH, the Democrats elevated a candidate who had virtually no room to maneuver within a badly fractured Democratic base. HHH was not just the steady hand at the tiller. He was bound to be seen as more of the same. That made it easier for Nixon to look a little like an outsider, to run as a champion of people ignored by DC.
In any case, this is critical: LBJ was determined to salvage his historical legacy by resolving the Vietnam War before he left office. The issues in Vietnam were intractable...in the manner of most quagmires. Thus LBJ was hell bent on achieving what was nearly impossible. He conceived the notion that if he could bring peace before November, then he could hand an electoral victory to his political heir.
Hence the party's candidate, HHH, had tied his wagon to an evolving and very tenuous foreign policy agenda over which he had virtually no control. LBJ had the reins and he was taking his own path. HHH had 'me too'.
Worse still, LBJ had grown used to treating the Saigon government pretty much as a puppet, however much both sides denied the charge. It was imperious condescension. As 1968 dragged on he was never able to find a solution to the simple fact that the Vietnamese realized his weakness as a lame duck and were happy to take the opportunity to manipulate the US government in return.
Thus the title of this post. The Paris peace talks of the summer of 1968, pushed through by Johnson, quickly devolved into a joke. All parties in Vietnam dug in their heels knowing well how eager LBJ was for a deal. The prolonged dispute about the shape of the negotiating table(s) in Paris became an object of ridicule in the US. The talks bogged down for good reasons. Nearly all parties saw plenty of grounds to string Johnson along, and few reasons to bargain seriously with a lame duck.
True, LBJ was able to inject renewed life into the peace talks just before the election by promising a cessation of bombing. However through secret negotiations with Richard Nixon (which were frankly treasonous - LBJ knew about them but decided against making them public, as Clark Clifford later revealed), South Vietnamese President Nguyen Van Thieu decided to scuttle the Paris peace talks. Thieu was convinced that he could get a better deal if Nixon were elected. Johnson was stunned when Thieu refused to attend the renewed peace talks in Paris. He shouldn't have been, it was in the cards all along. Thieu knew that an election year with a lame-duck president was the best possible time to make his play. The collapse of the Paris peace talks at the last moment undermined Humphrey just as he seemed on the point of overtaking Nixon in November 1968.
It happens that what the South Vietnamese leadership was hoping to get from Nixon that they couldn't get from LBJ was a long term commitment for US military backing for Thieu's fragile regime. That is the very opposite of what is at stake for the Iraqi leadership today, which wants to use this election to leverage the removal of US forces. An important distinction, sure, but the fact remains that negotiations over the future of US-Iraqi relations, so central to McCain's campaign, will be driven as much by a newly empowered Iraqi leadership as by Bush's eagerness to cut a deal to save face over the Iraq War. Bush is hell-bent on pushing through sweeping agreements with Iraq this year, including a Status of Forces Agreement. McCain's wishes probably will play little part in how things turn out.
Since May of this year at the latest it became clear, as the Bush administration tried to twist arms, that Prime Minister Maliki had put his finger to the wind. The political winds were not blowing in Bush's direction any longer. In public Maliki began siding more and more openly with the majority of Iraqis who are critical of SOFA and what it represents, the long-term occupation of their country.
Maliki hasn't hung Bush out to dry completely. That would be counterproductive undiplomatic. Negotiations continue; the Bush administration makes more and more concessions trying to keep Maliki satisfied. Bush is left in the position of having to put on a brave face as he's left guessing.
"If I were a betting man, we'll reach an agreement with the Iraqis," Bush told a news conference in Paris.
And so it will go, a slow walk until the election veering into who knows what territory. McCain certainly doesn't know where it's headed. The roadmap that Bush and McCain were counting on this past winter is becoming increasingly irrelevant. What matters now is Bush's desperation to create a legacy, and Maliki's determination to take advantage of that desperation. If that were not clear from the collapse of the administration's entrenched positions during May and June, then it ought to be from Maliki's remarkably casual endorsement of Barack Obama's plan for troop withdrawals from Iraq in mid July.
Maliki is gradually humiliating the lame-duck George Bush. The more Bush concedes this year in his desperation to cut a deal, the weaker his position will become. The puppet has nearly become the puppetmaster.
The humiliation of John McCain goes forward at least as quickly because his Iraq policy - the centerpiece of his presidential campaign - is identical to Bush's former positions and yet he has no control over these negotiations in Iraq. It has been entirely predictable that McCain would prove to be as much as hostage to Bush's war policy as Hubert Humphrey was to Lyndon Johnson's. Bush, like Johnson, is more interested in securing his place in history than in helping his heir apparent win the election. McCain has locked himself into a war policy that's quickly becoming untenable as Bush himself abandons it. Similar patterns are emerging with regard to other foreign flash-points, Iran and North Korea, as Bush is drawn toward Barack Obama's positions.
It's finally dawning on some of McCain's advisers that they are in deep trouble on Iraq.
Update [2008-8-4 1:40:11 by smintheus]: For a similar interpretation of events in Iraq, see also this column by Peter Keating.
