Saturday, March 12, 2016

THE 2016 RACE SEEMS LIKE THE 1968 RACE WITHOUT NIXON

I'm watching all the craziness out there -- the Chicago rally canceled by the Donald Trump, allegedly in response to police concerns about protests, although the police insist that the Trump campaign never consulted them and that unrest there was under control, and now the cancellation of a Cincinnati rally followed by disruption that reached the stage at a rally in Dayton:



It feels like 1968 -- but not completely. Yes, Trump is running as an opponent of protesters who are a mix of young whites and non-whites -- but the 1968 candidate Trump resembles is George Wallace, not Richard Nixon. Trump isn't appealing to a plurality of white America with this. Hell, he's generating despair within his own party. And I do mean despair; really, watch this brief video of Marco and see how drained and miserable he seems:



There are establishment Republicans as well as Democrats and lefties expressing horror at what's going on in Trump World. Trump isn't assembling a coalition of right-centrists and angry populists, the way Nixon did in '68; he's spurring both his supporters and his opponents on to violence, like Wallace.

This seems like a rerun of '68 if it had been just Wallace versus Hubert Humphrey. Hillary Clinton has a lot in common with Humphrey: Democrats have been in the White House for eight years, as in '68, and, Hillary, like Humphrey, is the heir apparent who's been a party stalwart for years but is not widely loved. Like Humphrey, she seems out of step with left-leaning voters on key issues. What was up with her praise for Nancy Reagan on AIDS, followed by a reference to last year's Charleston shootings that also missed the mark?





Nixon was what we'd later call a triangulator, the candidate who talked about law and order, but not in as inflammatory a way as Wallace, the candidate who alternated coded appeals to white racists with appeals to old-guard establishmentarians, the candidate who rejected the peace movement but claimed to have a secret plan to end the war. A lot of this was fake, but it was skillful needle-threading, and it got him elected.

We don't have a candidate like that now. I could imagine Mike Bloomberg watching all this and rethinking his decision not to run, even though he's not what voters want, and I wonder whether John Kasich, running with the backing of the GOP establishment on a third-party line, would have a shot, given how many voters, including some Democrats, now believe he's a nice, harmless moderate.

Nixon was a terrible person who won at a bad moment. I don't really know who'd be the appropriate candidate at this moment. But I don't think a candidate analogous to Nixon will run. I think Humphrey vs. Wallace is what we're stuck with.