Playing with Fire by Lawrence O'Donnell

Author:Lawrence O'Donnell
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Press
Published: 2017-11-07T05:00:00+00:00

TWENTY-THREE

“EVERYTHING’S GOING TO BE OKAY”

California was the primary that most resembled the general election. First, it is huge. The candidates could easily drive from one end of New Hampshire to the other in a day with campaign stops along the way. Every other state they campaigned in had only one big city, one leading newspaper, and one television and radio market. California had three major media markets, each selling very expensive TV advertising slots, in San Francisco, Los Angeles, and San Diego. Second, California’s population was as diverse as the country’s. The white homogenous population of New Hampshire could all be approached the same way. But the voter appeal that worked in the black neighborhoods of Los Angeles would not work in Beverly Hills, or in conservative Orange County, or with Central Valley farmers or dock workers or Latino grape pickers or surfers. To run statewide in California meant you had to know something about every racial and ethnic group in the great melting pot of American culture. Minnesota was a good training ground for New Hampshire, Wisconsin, and Oregon. But California was something else, and Gene McCarthy was going to have to learn how to deal with that overnight.

McCarthy found himself forced to focus on issues other than the war. He moved to Bobby’s left on domestic issues. Where RFK proposed rebuilding the crumbling neighborhoods where many African Americans lived, McCarthy began calling for bolder steps toward real integration. McCarthy wanted to help people move out of ghettos. That sounded threatening to white voters who feared black people moving into their neighborhoods and their suburbs. Bobby was not willing to go that far. He didn’t think he could afford to lose any more of the white Kennedy voters of 1960 who didn’t like how far the Democrats had moved on civil rights in the last eight years.

By the time the campaign reached California, even Democratic Party bosses were shaken and confused. The Democratic establishment was supposed to be managing the easy reelection of an incumbent president who won four years ago in a landslide. Now they were spending every day trying to do something they had never considered before: contain chaos and see their way through it to a win in November. Parties were invented to eliminate chaos. America’s two major parties had long ago extinguished chaos and replaced it with predictability. It doesn’t take long for predictability to be boring. Boring was the first word most Americans would probably associate with politics. Until 1968.

When looked at as a business, a political party craves predictability as much as General Motors does—no surprises on the assembly line. In the twentieth century, no party suffered worse surprises than the Democrats did in the 1960s. They lost two incumbent presidents—one to assassination, the other to a strangely intractable war and an insurgent challenge within the party. Watching Gene McCarthy go to New Hampshire to campaign for the nomination against the incumbent president of his own party was disorienting enough for the establishment. No one had ever seen that.

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