anyone here old enough to remember eugene mccarthy?

[Hekate]

12. My first presidential campaign was for McCarthy; I was still 20 when my friends and I ran the HQ ...

....in the town, not on campus, and when the votes were all counted that June 6, we carried our end of San Bernardino County for Gene McCarthy... Which was some small comfort in the utter shock of the next day, when I woke up to find out that Bobby Kennedy had been assassinated and all our hopes were dead along with him. I turned 21 at the end of September.

Yeah, I remember.

Aside from me being a lot older, the political circumstances this year vis a vis Bernie Sanders are different than they were in 1968. If that's where you were going with this -- one "silver haired Solon" to another.

Jeb Bush is no Richard Nixon, though the people who have gravitated toward him may be akin to Tricky Dick. Barack Obama is not Lyndon Johnson. The mess in the Middle East is not the Vietnam War, and we sure as hell don't have a draft. In some respects it might be better if we did have a draft -- as Ben Franklin said, "The prospect of being hanged in the morning wonderfully concentrates the mind," and it sure made my generation sit up and take notice.

We obviously have problems of our own right now, and maybe Bernie is the answer. Or maybe Hillary. But surely if we remember anything at all from 1968, it's that Democrats and the Democratic Party can do a really really good job of defeating ourselves. Because we did that then. Hubert Humphrey, a good populist from Minnesota, was defeated by Richard Nixon with the help of police riots at the Chicago Democratic Convention and a whole lot of angryDems who wanted RFK (who was dead) or Gene McCarthy (who lost), and who decided that HHH was irretrievably tainted by having been LBJ's veep.

Amazing what I remember.