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“There is a backlash against big government in this country. This is a movement of the people, and it doesn't make any difference whether the leading politicians endorse it or not. (It is made of the) average man in the streets ...this man in the textile mill, this man in the steel mill, the barber, the beautician, the policeman on the street, the little businessman. They are the ones. Those are the mass of people that are going to support a change in the domestic scene in this country. If the politicians get in the way of this movement, a lot of them are going to get run over.”
That quote could be confused as something said two nights ago in America, after some of the Tea Bag candidates were victorious in their republican primaries. In fact, it would not surprise me if Sarah Palin's speech-writers had included it in one of her recent public utterances. However, older members of this forum will recognize it as coming from former Alabama governor George Wallace. It's from his April 23, 1967 appearance on NBC's “Face the Nation,” when he announced his intentions to run in the upcoming presidential race.
Younger folks may not be familiar with Wallace, beyond his infamous positions on desegregation and his being shot in 1972. There is a tendency for him to be considered a footnote in history, a loser of little consequence. Yet, in the 1960s and early '70s, Wallace was viewed as the most influential loser in politics.
Wallace had announced plans to challenge President Kennedy in the 1964 democratic primary. At the time, most people believed that Wallace's goal was to weaken Kennedy in the south, making it more likely the President would lose in his re-election bid. This was, of course, the roots of what Nixon would use as his “southern strategy” in 1968.
After Dallas, Wallace remained intent upon damaging the Democratic Party's liberal wing. He ran in primaries in Indiana, Maryland, and Wisconsin, and took a third of the vote in each. However, due to lack of funding, he was unable to carry on his struggle.
Wallace was every bit the cheap opportunist that Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin are today. He knew that he couldn't compete well in the democratic primaries (which were far less in number than they are today), and so he created the American Independent Party. The AIP was, without question, that generation's version of the Tea Party. It appealed to racism, anger, fear, and the “us versus them” mentality that the radical right-wing of the Republican Party is spouting today.
In 1968, the democrats in Washington, DC, believed that Wallace would appeal to a group that was largely limited to the right-wing of the Republican Party. As Hampton Sides points out in his recent book on the stalking of Martin Luther King, Jr., the democratic “leaders” joked that Wallace was so filled with bile, that if he punched himself, he would get blood poisoning. Although that was both funny and accurate, they were underestimating the power of fear and hatred in America.
Not long ago on this forum, I read a discussion about Wallace's impact on the 1968 election. Some folks were surprised to hear that, after Robert Kennedy's death, a number of democrats who supported the New York Senator refused to vote for VP Humphrey. In fact, a small but important number of them ended up voting for Wallace.
On the surface, that may sound absolutely foolish today. We tend to remember RFK's primary run as perhaps the most serious progressive politician's attempt to secure the party's nomination for President. However, Kennedy appealed to a group much wider than the democratic left. Even in the primaries, he had the support of quite a few moderate and conservative democrats, and it is safe to say that if he ran against Nixon, RFK would have won votes from both independent and liberal republicans.
But when the race was between Humphrey and Nixon, a surprising percentage of moderate and conservative democrats viewed the contest as between a political weakling and a shady crook. (Wallace famously said, “There's not a dime's worth of difference” between the two parties as the election approached.) In truth, they were correct. Where a rational person might disagree with them, however, was in their decision to cast a protest vote for Wallace.
Liberal and progressive democrats, however, did not consider a vote for Wallace as an option. Not only was he representative of what they believed was horribly wrong with American politics, but his running mate was General Curtis LeMay, one of the most amoral, delusional and violent beings in our nation's history.
With LeMay on board, the notorious Hunt family began financing the Wallace campaign. Their ticket got 10 million votes (13.5% of the total), won five southern states, and ended up with 46 electoral votes. This was significant enough that in 1972, the Nixon Committee to Re-Elect the President (CREEP) viewed Wallace, along with Teddy Kennedy, as the two main threats to their candidate.
Wallace's influence was not limited to the voting booth, however. Also important was that his appeals to his often unstable supporters often encouraged cowardly acts of violence. We heard that same thing from the crowds surrounding Palin in 2008, and we hear it today from the followers of Glenn Beck.
Now: I've said all that, to say this – fully aware that even my wife and children view me as an old man who is prone to prattle about the ancient history of his youth – that there are lessons from history here that we should be applying to the current situation. And it's not just that I want to talk to the younger members of the democratic left. Rather, this is intended for those friends here who tend to be more moderate. I think they are convinced that they are more realistic and more practical in their advocating full support for the entire democratic ticket, and I am willing to grant that in some senses, they are correct.
But I want them to at very least consider what I've wrote here, and what our friends on the democratic left have been saying all along. We all are facing some degree of threat from the unsettling social influence of the right-wing republican extremists. It's all of us. It's women, both in their own home and in public. It's men who are looking for a job. It's the abortion doctor. It's those citizens concerned about what poisons are getting into their drinking water (I note that many of the “pro- frack drilling” folks around here are members of the Tea Party). It's all of us who were/are opposed to the Bush/Cheney foreign policy.
Wallace used to say that he wasn't a racist; he was just against those black people who refused to work. He said he didn't hate young people; just those who protested the war in Vietnam, or who refused to cut their hair or “use soap.” He thought that he was subtle when he was on a big stage, but he didn't bother when he spoke to small groups of his own kind. Sound familiar? Palin and Beck are the same.
No one in the Democratic Party is saying that we need to appeal to the types of people from Wallace's American Independent Party, or the current version, the Tea Bag Party. But the actions of far too many of the “leaders” in Washington, DC, seem to clearly be attempts to keep the support of those moderate to conservative democrats who, in 1968, ended up voting for Wallace. And without question, this is done without regard to those in the democratic left.
Our party should be able to use that Tea Party business to divide and then trash the Republican Party. To do so, we need to have our politicians show our stances as strong and for the best interests of the American people – especially the middle class right now.
There was a time when Hubert Humphrey was a good liberal. He was big on Civil Rights. That Humphrey would point out that while Beck et al say they aren't racists, that one of their biggest focuses is on doing away with the part of the US Constitution that let's brown-skinned children born in the United States to attend public schools (among other rights of citizenship). That Humphrey would point out that they are no different than George Wallace when he attempted to keep black children out of white schools. They need some type of moral soap to wash that racist filth off, and it is high time that the Democratic Party starts producing and applying that lather.
When Humphrey turned his back on liberalism (and his most loyal long-time supporters), and willingly cloaked himself in LBJ's war policies, he lost. It's a lesson that moderate and conservative democrats need to understand.
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