If you weren’t coming home in a pine box or wheelchair from Vietnam, the year 1968 was tremendously exciting, and among the waves of change roiling American society none was quite as dramatic as Eugene McCarthy’s campaign to wrest the heart and soul of the Democratic Party from the hawks and take the White House in what would be a bloodless and historic coup d’état.
I was a junior in college, editor of the campus newspaper and, while avowedly objective in all things political as a young journalist, I secretly and fervently supported McCarthy. My roommates took leave of classes, if not their senses, to slog through deep snow in New Hampshire to volunteer for the maverick U.S. senator from Minnesota in the first-in-the-nation primary. They even cut their long hair and shaved off their beards to “get clean for Gene.”
McCarthy stunned President Johnson and won 20 of New Hampshire’s 24 convention delegates, while Richard Nixon won the Republican primary. Robert Kennedy quickly reversed field and joined the race, hastening LBJ’s dramatic announcement that he would not seek reelection. And suddenly anything seemed possible to my friends and I, as well as millions of young people and others opposed to a war that already had taken more than 20,000 American lives and deeply disillusioned with the Democratic establishment, a ruthless president and his lapdog Congress.
The sensational early successes of McCarthy invite comparisons with Bernie Sanders, who like McCarthy nearly five decades earlier, has tapped into a reservoir of disenchantment with the Democratic establishment in the person of Hillary Clinton.
There are indeed similarities, but they will not hearten the supporters of Sanders, a Democrat-turned-Independent and self-described socialist from Vermont: While McCarthy and Sanders were and are men of principle and there is a not dissimilar reservoir of disenchantment, it also does not run deep. And like McCarthy, Sanders will get very little rank-and-file support, while his quixotic quest will end as McCarthy’s did, a mere footnote in the annals of presidential campaign history.
The lack of rank-and-file support is the key.
Sanders’ liberal support, like McCarthy’s, is a given. No surprises there as liberals embody what opposition there is to Clinton, although she is considered “liberal” by contemporary standards. But despite some seemingly promising poll numbers for Sanders, Clinton holds a huge and insurmountable lead among moderate and conservative Democrats, both white and nonwhite.
Sanders’ lack of black and Latino support is especially striking. Unlike most of the riders in the Republican clown car, that has nothing to do with how he views minorities and everything to do with how working-class, less liberal Democrats view him. Which is to say, traditionally Democratic voters.
So while Sanders may pick up a few delegates in the early primaries, he has no chance of succeeding if he can’t attract voters outside of his fairly small constituency. And he won’t.