A great day for McCain and NADER?

[Kitty Herder]

March 5, 2008
Pyrrhus' Playbook
A Great Day for John McCain (and Maybe Nader)

By ALEXANDER COCKBURN
and JEFFREY ST. CLAIR

The race for the Democratic nomination now lurches on to what is already being billed as the next major battleground in Pennsylvania on April 22, and any Democrat with any memory of kindred blood lettings in the past should shiver as history begins to repeat itself. After eight disastrous years of Bush, with a candidate like John McCain, who says he knows nothing the economy and thinks the US will be in Iraq for the next 100 years, almost the only way any Democratic nominee can lose the presidential face off in the fall with be a protracted internecine battle, ultimately decided by the Democratic convention in the last week of August.


/snip/

In 1968 the antiwar forces came to the convention in Chicago fired with the sense that their candidates, Eugene McCarthy and Bobby Kennedy, had crushed Hubert in the primaries. But just as Richard Daley's police battered the protesters, so too did the party machine crush the antiwar forces and force Hubert Humphrey down their throats inside the convention hall. Humphrey was never able to reunite the fractured party and lost to Richard Nixon.

In 1972 the party bosses never accepted George McGovern, who finally accepted the nomination at three am in Miami and was sabotage by the Democrats and the AFL-CIO and crushed by Nixon in the fall.

Not learning from this, the Democrats saw Teddy Kennedy launch an insurgency against Jimmy Carter in 1980 which spluttered all the way to the convention, where Kennedy refused to concede and drew blood from Carter until the bitter end. A weakened Carter went down before Reagan in a terrible rout for the Democrats.

The Clintons have never been confused their own political fortunes with those of the Democratic Party. In 1996 and 1998 Bill Clinton refused to release campaign surpluses from his own war chest to help elect Democrats to the House and the Senate. Obama's campaign has most certainly rallied blacks and the young to the Democratic Party. These new recruits will surely melt away as they see the party machine grind the politics of hope in the dirt.

McCain couldn't have hoped for a better day.

http://www.counterpunch.org/cockburn03052008.html

[Sarah Ibarruri]

1. I take seriously nothing said by Alexander Cockburn....

He's a first class @$$hole, helped sabotage the elections by supporting Nader, pats Scientology (that den of thieves that call themselves a church) in the back, and is an all-around idiot.

However, I do think that Hillary needs to step down and stop making a complete ass of herself and the Democratic Party. This is the first time I'm saying this about Hillary. I reached my limit when she complimented McCain over a Democrat, Obama.

[madrchsod]

2. those tv images are still seared in my mind

the first time in my life that i was throughly outraged. how could our own party do this to us!

will clinton do the same to this generation of young people as daley and the party did to mine? i feel hillary will because she never felt or understood the outrage that night in chicago. there was nothing for her to lose that night but for the rest of us there was-our lives.
yes they will walk away because they will see that they do not matter, what matters is that she wins no matter the cost to our party and to the people of america.

that night in chicago the masters of war could`t have hoped for a better night