Barack, Bobby, Hillary, and Gene

While looking toward the election season in 1968 might sometimes be shocking (particularly if the focus falls on Bobby Kennedy's truncated campaign as a justification for continuing the race), Harold Meyerson's Washington Post column takes a very different approach in comparing the Obama - Clinton effort to the Kennedy - McCarthy struggle in 1968.  

On matters of policy, there were really no significant differences between Kennedy and McCarthy. Both sought to withdraw U.S. forces from Vietnam; both were solid liberals on domestic and economic issues. But each campaign had about it the shock of the new. Each activated constituencies that had never before been so important within Democratic ranks: upscale professionals and students for McCarthy, blacks and Latinos for Kennedy. Both candidates inspired intense commitment from their supporters, and in each campaign there was a palpable feeling of making history, of upending the party's traditional order in a year when traditional orders were crumbling everywhere you looked.

Sound familiar?  But when the 1968 race ended in tragedy, it denied the party an opportunity that we have in 2008, the chance to work things out and come together.

I tell this tale, of course, not merely to remind us that the better world of which Robert Kennedy so movingly spoke died aborning 40 years ago in Los Angeles. I also tell it because I see a dynamic similar to that between the Kennedy and McCarthy campaigns in the relationship between Barack Obama's and Hillary Clinton's equally historic campaigns, and because today's Democrats have been given a chance -- as they were not in 1968 -- to come together and make the kinds of changes they have only dreamed of over the past four decades. You would think -- well, hope -- that after 40 years, this time they'd get it right.

Both Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton made history in this campaign.  The supporters of both have a chance not just to continue their effort, but to redeem the values that rallied both sides four decades ago.