Tag: 1968 Presidential Election

Saturday Soother – May 30, 2020

The Daily Escape:

Cactus flowers, Devils Bridge, Sedona, AZ – May 2020 photo by sooperb4d

It’s hot and muggy at the Mansion of Wrong. Today we received our usual daily visit from a momma turkey and her eight chicks. Some are already able to fly for short distances, while the smaller ones just jog along.

This morning, Wrongo was thinking that he’d never expected to have to live through something as tumultuous and dangerous as 1968, but here we are. We’ve got:

  • A Plague killing people in every state
  • Economic collapse (potentially on the scale of the Great Depression)
  • An incompetent incumbent president who will say anything in order to win re-election
  • Heavily armed yahoos complaining about having to wear masks, or that they can’t get haircuts

But rather than talk about those four things, America’s talking about a racially based killing in Minneapolis that has morphed into an urban dystopia. Hennepin County finally brought charges against a cop who murdered a man in public with dozens of witnesses. That has incited urban violence. Second, Trump called for the looters in Minneapolis to be shot, tweeting:

“Any difficulty and we will assume control but, when the looting starts, the shooting starts,”

We will assume control? Does Trump think he has the right to invade Minnesota? And that wasn’t the worst of his tweet.

You may know by now that the other phrase was notorious in the civil rights movement. It was used in 1967 by Miami’s police chief at the time, Walter Headley, after he sent police dogs and officers armed with shotguns into Miami’s black neighborhoods in what he called:

 “…a crackdown on…slum hoodlums….We don’t mind being accused of police brutality.”

Headley claimed that Miami had not experienced “racial disturbances and looting” because he had put the word out that “when the looting starts, the shooting starts.” Headley thus elevated stealing to a capital crime punishable by death without due process. And now Trump is advocating the same thing.

Some are saying that Jack Dorsey, CEO of Twitter has taken a courageous stand against Trump, that Dorsey is standing up for all of us. CNN reports:

“…Trump has angrily complained this week about social media companies, repeatedly accusing them of censoring conservative voices and going as far as to sign an executive order Thursday seeking to limit their power. But data from Facebook, the world’s largest social media company, pours cold water on the assertion that conservative voices are being silenced.”

Here’s the data:

The red bars represent conservative sites. CrowdTangle, the company that made the chart, says that in the last month on Facebook, Trump has captured 91% of the total interactions on content posted by the US presidential candidates. Biden has captured only 9%.

Trump and the Republicans repeatedly accuse Facebook, Twitter and other social media platforms of bias, saying that they are the villains in the culture war the GOP uses to excite the conservative base.

The dispute is about whether Twitter has the right to disagree with and respond to the president. As a private company, it obviously does have that right. The chilling part is that the president and his advisers think otherwise.

Wrongo started by talking about 1968, the year that Nixon won the White House, running on a law and order message. He split the vote with George Wallace and Hubert Humphrey. That was 52 years ago, and a few things have changed. From Paul Campos:

“For one thing, the current president is somebody who makes George Wallace look like a statesman. For another, the country is much less white. (As a percentage of the total population, white non-Hispanics have declined from about 85% of the population to 60%).”

Nixon in 1968, like Trump in 2020, clearly exploited racial tensions, but a crucial distinction: Nixon wasn’t in power at the time of the 1968 elections. We’ll have to see whether Minneapolis helps or hurts Trump in November.

Time to take a break from our worst year in 52 years, and calm ourselves with a Saturday Soother. There is more yard work to do on the fields of Wrong, but we’re starting with a cold brew coffee from Greater Goods roasters in Austin TX. Food & Wine named them the best coffee in Texas in 2019. Their cold brew is called “Connections” ($15/12 oz.) and features the sweet, chocolatey goodness of beans sourced from Colombia and Brazil.

Now settle back and listen to the Tedeschi Trucks Band play a stunning live version of “Midnight in Harlem“, written by Minnesota band member Mike Mattison. Stay for the fantastic slide guitar solo by Derek Trucks:

Those who read the Wrongologist in email can view the video here.

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Remembering RFK

The Daily Escape:

Whidbey Island, WA at sunset – 2019 photo by 11mdg11

(This is the last column until Monday, June 10th. Wrongo and Ms. Right are enjoying a few beach days.)

This week shouldn’t be allowed to pass into the books without remembering Robert F. Kennedy. On June 5th, few of us were conscious of that same day 51 years ago, when he was assassinated in Los Angeles, moments after declaring victory in the California Democratic Presidential primary.

On June 5, 1968, Wrongo was running a US Army nuclear missile unit in Germany. We were in the midst of the Vietnam War, and LBJ had announced in March that he wasn’t running for reelection. Sen. Eugene McCarthy, an anti-Vietnam War candidate, had shown surprising strength in the New Hampshire primary, finishing second. Although he was initially given little chance of winning, January’s Tet Offensive had galvanized opposition to the war.

Bobby Kennedy entered the race in March, and it seemed that Democrats were poised to take the Party in a new direction. Kennedy was drawing huge crowds everywhere he went; he was on the cover of Time Magazine’s May 24th issue.

Most saw RFK as a continuation of optimism that JFK had demonstrated in his shortened presidency. From over in Europe in the days before the internet, Wrongo thought that Bobby Kennedy could win the nomination, and beat Richard Nixon in November.

That wasn’t to be. Armed Forces Radio carried the news that Robert Kennedy had been shot, and that doctors would be holding a press conference on his condition. We had all heard that earlier with the death of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in April.

That summer, American cities burned, the police rioted at the Democratic convention in Chicago, and the Russians invaded Czechoslovakia. In fact, Wrongo’s summer days were spent checking radar images of planes landing and taking off from Prague.

Hubert Humphrey began his campaign to keep the White House in the hands of the Democrats, while trying to distance himself from both LBJ and the War. The Republicans nominated Richard Nixon. George Wallace, the segregationist governor of Alabama launched a third-party run designed to draw conservative blue-collar Democrats. Wallace carried five southern states with ten million votes.

Nixon received 31,784,000 votes to Humphrey’s 31,272,000 million votes. It took until the next day to know the outcome. But as now, the Electoral College totals weren’t close at all: Nixon won 301 to 191 for Humphrey, with 46 votes going to Wallace.

It’s interesting to note that in 2016, Trump got 306 electoral votes in a two-way race.

In 1968, Wrongo believed we needed to end the Vietnam War, and that required Bobby Kennedy to be president. He has certainly felt since then that he needed to vote for Democrats. But only Bill Clinton’s first run, and both by Barak Obama, seemed to inspire the feeling of intensity and commitment that RFK sparked in a young Lieutenant in Germany.

There have been 13 presidential elections since the assassination of RFK. The Democrats have won five of those contests. Most of the Party’s losing candidates were by any political standard, uninspiring: Hubert Humphrey; Walter Mondale; Michael Dukakis; Al Gore; John Kerry and Hillary Clinton. All were mediocre campaigners.

Wrongo fears that our choices for 2020 are also uninspiring, and reflect a similar degree of mediocrity.

Not every candidate can be JFK or RFK. We all understand that.

But we must hope for better, for someone who can express what we are feeling. A person who sees the world as we do, who can make us want to get out of our chairs, and work to make that someone president.

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