The Washington Independent - U.S. news and politics - washingtonindependent.com: Stories by Bruce J. Schulman

A Different Kind of Insurgent

Bruce J. Schulman — Mon, 28 Jan 2008 05:08:49 GMT

Photo Credit: Lauren Burke, WDCPix and Library of Congress

On the heels of a decisive victory in South Carolina, Sen. Barack Obama heads into Super-duper Tuesday as a surprisingly strong challenger to the presumptive favorite for the Democratic presidential nomination, New York Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton. With much of the party leadership against him, Obama seeks to accomplish what few Democrats have managed in the last half-century: transform an insurgent’s campaign, with strong appeal to young voters and to the affluent, educated elite of the Democratic Party into a successful bid for the White House.

In a much-cited column in The Los Angeles Times earlier this year, Ron Brownstein linked Obama to other “wine-track” contenders --“brainy liberals with cool, detached personas and messages of political reform” like Eugene McCarthy in 1968, Jerry Brown in 1976, Gary Hart in 1984, Bill Bradley in 2000, and Howard Dean in 2004. Those insurgent campaigns lost the nomination to old-style machine candidates who had strong connections to union labor and party leadership. The rare exceptions who got the party’s nod--Adlai Stevenson in the 1950s, George McGovern in 1972-- fared badly in the November elections.

But Obama’s candidacy could well veer off the wine track. He draws on different historical models and confronts a very different kind of nomination fight than his insurgent Democrat predecessors. As his South Carolina victory revealed, Obama has strong support from African-American voters normally cool to Democratic insurgents. The singular character of his candidacy, and the shifting U.S. political landscape, just might let Obama succeed where previous reform Democrats have foundered.

The wine track/beer track divide has animated Democratic Party politics for two generations. This enduring rift emerged in the mid-1950s, when leading Democrats tried to reposition the party and its liberal agenda amid the post-World War II economic boom. In a time of growing affluence, with millions of Americans departing city row houses for suburban ranch homes (by 1960, more Americans lived in suburbs than any other community), the class-based politics of the New Deal era no longer had resonance.

Working on the campaign of Illinois Gov. Adlai Stevenson, prominent liberals like the historian-activist Arthur M. Schlesinger urged Democrats to develop a new agenda, one less focused on “quantity”-- lunchbox issues affecting the standard of living for working Americans -- and more on “quality”-- lifestyle issues like support for the arts, environmental protection and respect for the cultures of minority groups. They also envisioned a different style of politics -- one that muted the class rhetoric and the fierce partisanship of party stalwarts like Harry S. Truman in favor of disinterested, non-partisan championing of the general welfare.

The coming of age of the baby boom, and the turbulent politics of the 60s, made such values liberalism a potent political force. New Democrats often stressed governmental reform -- efforts to eliminate corruption, partisanship and horse-trading from national politics. Whether voiced by McGovern, Dean or Obama, these promises energized idealistic young people bent on transforming the political process. The disinterested commitment to general welfare, technocratic appreciation for the complexities of modern life, and distrust of populist rhetoric also appealed to educated, white collar workers in the growing high-tech, medical and financial sectors.

But those campaigns generated little excitement among blue collar Democrats or minority voters. Backed by union labor and party leaders, Humphrey defeated McCarthy in 1968 (and would likely have staved off Robert F. Kennedy, if an assassin had not ended his campaign). Echoing a Wendy’s ad, the establishment candidate, former Vice President Walter F. Mondale derailed Gary Hart when he asked “Where’s the beef?” Bradley and Dean’s campaigns similarly failed to translate widespread admiration into concrete support at the polls.

But despite his cerebral style and his concern for process, Obama is no McGovern or Bradley. Unlike those earlier insurgents, Obama has had no trouble raising money and has won endorsements from influential Democrats, like Sen. John Kerry, Arizona Gov. Janet Napolitano, South Carolina Sen. Tim Johnson and California Rep. George Miller
Indeed, rather than resembling earlier wine track insurgents, Obama’s campaign more closely hearkens back more to that ultimate Democratic Party brand: the Kennedys.

Equally at home with Harvard professors like John Kenneth Galbraith and street-smart Irish Pols like Tip O’Neill, John F. Kennedy forged a new type of Democratic politics. Because of his ethnic and religious background and his military service, Kennedy could bring cultural icons like Pablo Casals and Andre Malraux to the White House (and fill his administration with Harvard swells) without being tagged with the egghead label that had sunk Stevenson in the 1950s.

Kennedy's daughter, Caroline Kennedy, wrote a piece in yesterday's New York Times saying Obama was the candidate most able to inspire voters, especially young people, as her father had.

But perhaps even more than JFK, it may be his younger brother, Robert F. Kennedy, who provides the model for Obama’s current campaign. Bobby Kennedy ran an insurgent’s race, challenging the administration of Lyndon B. Johnson and his designated successor, Vice President Hubert H. Humphrey. Running against the party pros that still largely controlled the nominating process, RFK attracted wine track voters, already nostalgic for Camelot; in the aftermath of the Martin Luther King Jr.’s death, Kennedy quoted from his “favorite poet,” Aeschylus, and spoke the language of reform and political renewal that animates Obama’s campaign. Kennedy also appealed strongly to minority voters.

Of course, Obama lacks the residual appeal with blue-collar white urban ethnics that Bobby Kennedy, being a Kennedy and an Irish Catholic, could draw on. But like RFK, Obama has assembled an insurgent’s campaign, strong among educated, affluent Democrats, energizing young voters, and simultaneously, exerting powerful appeal among African-American Democrats. That’s a formidable coalition, and one that no previous insurgent Democrat could manage. From McCarthy to Dean, minority voters have found earlier reformers cold.

Obama has something else going for him: the shifting terrain of the electoral landscape. In 1968, Democrats held just 15 primaries that selected a minority of the delegates. Bobby Kennedy may have out-dueled McCarthy 46 to 42 percent in the climactic California primary, but Humphrey, the leader in the delegate count, did not even have to contest the race. In the industrial North and Midwest, party professionals with strong ties to union labor controlled the nominating process. In the South and West, favorite son candidates dominated their states’ delegates, trading them for political favors and influence in the next administration. The excitement that insurgents stoked among rank-and-file Democrats did not matter.

In 2008, more than 40 states will hold primaries, awarding the overwhelming majority of the delegates. At the same time, blue-collar whites no longer form the dominant faction they long represented in Democratic Party politics. The beer track has been slowly drying up.

Obama still faces a tough battle for the nomination. But with his unique appeal and the changing layout of the primary battlefield, he may succeed where previous insurgent Democrats have faltered.

Bruce J. Schulman is professor of history at Boston University and the author of "The Seventies."

How The West Could Be Won

Bruce J. Schulman — Mon, 04 Feb 2008 13:38:43 GMT

Illustration by: Matt Mahurin

"I guess this was how the West was won," Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (d-N.Y.) told cheering supporters in Las Vegas after the Nevada caucuses last month.

Clinton’s proclamation was premature -- she has not yet won the West -- but savvy, for the West is likely to determine the victor in this year’s presidential campaign. With more than 2,000 convention delegates at stake for the Democrats and more than a 1,000 for the Republicans, the looming Feb. 5 contests in California, Arizona, Utah, New Mexico and Idaho will almost certainly identify the front-runners in each party’s nomination battle. And, looking toward the November election, the prominence of the West and the growing influence of the Latino vote signal a regional shift in the locus of power in presidential politics.

The inland West is the one region of Red America that might turn blue in November and since it is gaining population, congressional seats and electoral votes, it could construct the foundation for long-term Democratic majorities. Demographically, states like Nevada and Colorado are coming to resemble staunchly Democratic California, with large numbers of Latinos and the influx of educated, affluent workers in media, information technology, and financial services -- many of them migrants from the Golden State. Democrats already hold governorships in Arizona, New Mexico and Colorado, and Senate seats in Nevada, New Mexico, and Colorado. In 2004, any two of those four states--Nevada, Colorado, New Mexico, Arizona--would have put Sen. John Kerry in the White House, even without Ohio’s closely contested electoral votes.

For decades, Republicans used their strength in the South to construct winning coalitions in national elections. Now the West might offer the Democrats the path to another realignment, the path to an Electoral college majority that does not rely on winning bitterly contested “swing states” like Ohio and Florida. It’s no accident that the Democrats chose Denver as the site for their 2008 Convention.

Safely Republican for most of the 20th century, the fiercely individualistic West has long cherished a romantic version of its pioneer heritage and frequently asserted its independence from Washington. At the same time, no section of the country has had to negotiate more complex patterns of racial conflict than the West, and no region has depended more on the largesse of the federal government over issues like water and land rights -- a fact that has accounted for the region’s defection in hard times to Democrats like William Jennings Bryan and Franklin D. Roosevelt. The people of the mountains and desert have also expressed more skepticism about overseas interventions than their coastal fellow citizens. It is a land of great emptiness, as the critic Alfred Kazin famously mused, punctuated by giant irrigation projects and air force bases.

And it will soon displace the South as the strategic battleground of national politics. In 1964, on the morning after signing the landmark Civil Rights Act, a strangely melancholy President Lyndon B. Johnson told his young aid Bill Moyers, "I think we just delivered the South to the Republican Party for my lifetime and yours.” LBJ proved a shrewd prophet.

For 40 years, ever since Richard M. Nixon targeted white Southerners in 1968, the South has formed the linchpin of the Republican ascendancy in national campaigns. As the once Democratic Solid South -- the century-long hangover of the Civil War and Reconstruction -- became more and more Republican in the wake of the Sunbelt boom and the Civil Rights revolution, Republicans used their Dixie stronghold as a firm base for presidential politics.

Since 1968, only two Democrats have captured the White House twice -- and Southern governors headed both of those tickets. Jimmy Carter narrowly defeated President Gerald R. Ford in 1976 and Bill Clinton won with 43 percent of the popular vote in a three-way race against President George H.W. Bush and Texas billionaire H. Ross Perot. Carter and Clinton carried Southern states that most other Democratic standard-bearers -- from George S. McGovern, in 1972, to Walter F. Mondale, in 1984, to John Kerry, in 2004 -- pretty much conceded to the GOP.

Clinton and Carter’s victories suggested that Democrats could only win the presidency if they appealed to Southern voters. Recent campaigns have only confirmed this conventional wisdom. Even without Florida’s contested electoral votes, Al Gore would have captured the White House in 2000 if he had carried his home state of Tennessee or Clinton’s Arkansas. And Kerry failed to win a single state below the Mason-Dixon line in 2004. Indeed, John Edwards’ unsuccessful campaign rested its entire strategy on this truism that only a Southerner can lead the Democrats to victory in November.

But the 2008 electoral map suggests another approach. While Democrats remain unlikely to win many electoral votes in the South, the inland West might provide the decisive margin for the Democratic ticket.

Moreover, the strife over immigration within the GOP, especially the leading role that militant opponents of immigration have played in the early primaries, offers the Democrats a strong advantage in the region. Over the past three decades, successful Republicans, like Nixon, Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush, have broken the Democratic stranglehold on Latino voters. Carefully carving out moderate positions on issues like immigration and bilingual education, they each won more than 35 percent of the Latino vote.

Meanwhile, Republicans have fared poorly in national elections when they have been unable to amass substantial support among Latinos. Ford in 1976 (18 percent of the Latino vote), George H.W. Bush in 1992 (24 percent) and Bob Dole in 1996 (21 percent) all met defeat in November. Except for Sen. John McCain (R-Az.), the lone Westerner among the leading candidates, all the current GOP contenders have taken hard-line positions against immigration.

Still, the Democrats will face a difficult task -- especially if McCain captures the Republican nomination. When Bill Clinton suggested eliminating grazing subsidies and allowing the market establish prices for grazing on public lands, Western ranchers denounced this return to laissez-faire as an outrage of Big Government interference with the region’s treasured freedoms.

The trick for Democrats in 2008 will be to attract Latino voters, new arrivals and critics of the Iraq war without arousing traditional Western fears about interference with the region’s long-established advantages and prerogatives.

Celebrating the Democratic Party’s decision to hold its national nominating convention in his city, Denver Mayor John Hickenlooper suggested that the Mile High City embodied “the 21st century ideals” that would “help lead America in the year 2008 and beyond." With the West so critical to this year’s presidential campaign, the mayor’s cheer-leading for his hometown might turn out to be right on target.

Bruce J. Schulman is professor of history at Boston University. He is the author of "The Seventies: The Great Shift in American Culture, Society and Politics" and "From Cotton Belt to Sunbelt : Federal Policy, Economic Development and the Transformation of the South 1938-1980."

Clinton Running Like Old Guard Humphrey

Bruce J. Schulman — Mon, 25 Feb 2008 17:18:06 GMT

As Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.) girds for the March 4 Ohio and Texas primaries -- races that could mark her last stand in the battle for the Democratic presidential nomination -- her candidacy represents a surprising turnaround. As an operative in George S. McGovern’s 1972 insurgent campaign, Clinton embodied the reform agenda that McGovern championed: an effort to strip union and elected officials of their influence in the Democratic Party; to open the presidential selection process to previously underrepresented groups, and to replace the nuts-and-bolts deal-making and backroom horse-trading of party bosses with a “New Politics” based on visionary commitments to transform the fundamental rules of public life.

A generation later, McGovern still admires -- and recently endorsed -- the activist who staffed his campaign. But oddly, Clinton seems to have morphed into 21st-century version of the Old Guard that opposed McGovern. The ABM -- “Anyone But McGovern” -- campaign failed in 1972. It could not resist a generational shift in the Democratic Party and a sea-change in the way that national politics was conducted, even though McGovern’s opponents nearly succeeded with a last-ditch effort to change the delegate selection rules after the fact.

Clinton now seems to resemble no one so much as Minnesota Sen. Hubert H. Humphrey, the ex-vice president and honored Democratic warhorse who opposed McGovern. She has become the candidate of the unions and major party officials. A long-time champion of liberal causes, Humphrey had once been the Democrat’s young Turk whose passionate speech in favor of civil rights threw the 1948 convention into an uproar. He would eventually steer the Civil Rights Act of 1964 through the Senate. But by 1972, the “happy warrior” represented the party establishment that youthful activists like HillaryRodham Clinton were determined to push aside.

Will Clinton also pursue a desperate strategy to stop her opponent? Will she become victim of the same generational politics she once championed?

In Texas and especially Ohio, Clinton has embraced Humphrey’s 1972 strategy. Like her predecessor, Clinton derides her opponent’s fancy rhetoric and dismisses his plans to broaden the electorate, while emphasizing her long experience in government, her mastery of policy details and the concrete aid her programs would offer working Americans. Just as party officials like Chicago Mayor Richard Daley and union leaders likeAFL-CIO President George Meany rallied to Humphrey’s standard in a last-ditch effort to derail McGovern, so the party’s current old guard is campaigning for Clinton. Former House Majority Leader Richard A.Gephardt (D-Mo.) and International Assn. of Machinists President Tom Buffenbarger are stumping for Clinton in Ohio, mocking Sen. Barack Obama’s pledges to change the tone of national politics. “Voters are not into highfalutin rhetoric,” Gephardt warned. “They’re into real solutions to real problems.”

If the contest remains close, the Clinton campaign has signaled a willingness to fight for the seating of delegates from Michigan and Florida -- two states that the Democratic National Committee had stripped of their votes at the party’s nominating convention for violating rules about when to schedule their primary elections.Obama did not contest those states.

With such a move, Clinton would steal a page from Humphrey’s 1972 playbook. Even though McGovern's victory in the winner-take-all California primary guaranteed his nomination, Humphrey tried to block it by getting the party to change the rules after the fact and allocate California’s delegates proportionally according to the percentage of the vote each candidate had tallied.

Will Clinton also pursue a desperate strategy to stop her opponent? That gambit failed, as did the effort of Humphrey and his party and labor allies to forestall the changing of the guard in Democratic Party counsels. Though McGovern lost badly in the general election, and the party took steps -- like the creation ofsuperdelegates -- to rein in future insurgent campaigns, the cat was already out of the bag. A host of young McGovernites--Bill and Hillary Clinton, Gary Hart, John Podesta, Gene Sperling, Bob Shrum --would become the party’s new face. They represented a Democratic base increasingly populated by relatively affluent, issue-oriented activists rather than union labor and machine politicians; a party far more skeptical of U.S. military power than Cold War Democrats like John F. Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson, and Humphrey had been.

The McGovern team -- Hillary Clinton among them -- also mastered a new style of politics. It took advantage of a nominating process that placed new importance on winning favorable press coverage and mobilizing voters in a vastly expanded set of primaries, instead of relying on endorsements from elected officials and get-out-the-vote efforts by union leaders. Theirs was a largely symbolic campaign. LikeObama’s , it was grounded in McGovern’s opposition to a continuing foreign war, to the enthusiasm of young Americans voting for the first time and especially, to a commitment to restore honor and decency to American politics.

“Today,” McGovern declared in 1972, “our citizens no longer feel that they can shape their own lives in concert with their fellow citizens. Beyond that is the loss of confidence in the truthfulness and common sense of our leaders.” His campaign offered change -- and hope.

During the Clinton presidency of the 1990s, the Democrats who cut their political teeth on McGovern’s 1972 campaign understood the potency of such an approach. They never forgot the concrete policies, particularly in times of economic distress, but they understood the powerful forces that had made old-style bread-and-butter politics obsolete; that a new generation of voters sought a different kind of nourishment from public life. They drove out politicians like Humphrey--in a final indignity, at the 1980 Democratic convention, President Jimmy Carter had mistakenly referred to the recently deceased former party champion as “Hubert Horatio Hornblower.” In doing so, they ushered in the era of theClintons.

Now, Hillary Clinton appears to be playing the Humphrey role in this year's presidential campaign. Much is still to be decided, but she may well be headed for a similar fate.
Bruce J. Schulman is professor of history at Boston University and the author of "The Seventies: The Great Shift in American Culture, Society and Politics" and "Lyndon B. Johnson and American Liberalism."

When Elite Get Tough

Bruce J. Schulman — Mon, 21 Apr 2008 06:19:01 GMT

Sen. Barack Obama's opponents are still working to exploit the flap over his remarks in San Francisco, gleefully labeling him an "elitist."

“I don't think it helps to divide our country into one America that is enlightened and one that is not,” Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.) charged. “If you want to be the president of all Americans, you need to respect all Americans.” Steve Schmidt, an aid for Sen. John McCain, piled on. "It shows an elitism and condescension towards hardworking Americans that is nothing short of breathtaking,” he claimed.

Portraying Obama as a pompous, Harvard-educated elitist, critics have mocked his diction, his manner, even his accent. While it may seem surprising to find a black man from a broken family fighting charges of snobbery, anti-elitism has been a familiar feature of American politics since the Republic’s early days. Since Richard M. Nixon perfected the tactic in the 1960s, it has become a particularly effective tool for derailing liberal Democrats from Northern industrial states. Indeed, since the 1960s, white Southern Baptists who could roll a convincing “y’all” off their tongues have been the only Democrats to capture the White House.

To end the long drought, Obama might have to tap into the fighting spirit of his fellow Harvard alumni -- Franklin D. Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy. Those men overcame their privileged backgrounds, cultivating reputations for toughness that appealed to ordinary citizens.

Resentment against the swells became a staple of presidential politics in the 1820s, when Andrew Jackson, a former general and substantial slaveholder, become king of the common man. As the franchise expanded to the unpropertied, Jackson defeated the Boston Brahmin John Quincy Adams in 1828, laying to rest the once-dominant principle that the masses should submit to the rule of their natural betters. Eight years later, the opposition Whigs cemented this new style of presidential politics, when they linked their candidate, William Henry Harrison, a Virginia aristocrat and military hero, to humble life in a log cabin.

But if the Jacksonian era made anti-elitism a touchstone of American politics, it certainly did not mark the exit of patrician princes from presidential campaigns. Men to the manner born -- with prominent family ties, inherited wealth or elite educations -- have frequently occupied the White House -- to the present day, in fact.

Four of the last six presidents (George H.W. Bush, George W. Bush, Bill Clinton and Gerald R. Ford) have held degrees from Yale or Harvard. The current incumbent embodies this seeming paradox. How did the son of a president and grandson of a senator, scion of inherited wealth, graduate of Andover, Yale and Harvard, pass himself off as the ultimate good ol’ boy -- the regular guy everybody wants to share a beer with, even if Bush doesn’t drink beer?

More important, how did anti-elitism -- a charge which never stuck to liberal Democrats like Roosevelt and Kennedy whatever their background and style -- become a potent weapon against liberalism? More important, how did anti-elitism -- a charge which never stuck to liberal Democrats like Roosevelt and Kennedy whatever their background and style -- become a potent weapon against liberalism?

Certainly, no president should have been more vulnerable to charges of snobbery than Franklin Delano Roosevelt. The descendant of Dutch patroons -- the aristocrats who settled the Hudson River valley in the 17th century -- FDR lived out the life of the American ruling class. He had private tutors, attended Groton, considered the most elite of the English-style boarding schools, and had admission to Harvard guaranteed by family connections. The cigarette holder and pince nez placed him among the snootiest of Americans.

But Roosevelt’s dedicated efforts to shield ordinary Americans from what he called the “hazards and vicissitudes of life,” his congenial temperament and his zest for the rough-and-tumble of partisan politics more than compensated for his aristocratic background. FDR also reveled in the opposition his presidency provoked among his fellow sons of privilege. Never before had the forces of selfishness, FDR told a massive rally at Madison Square Garden in 1936, “been so united against one candidate as they stand today. They are unanimous in their hate for me. They hate Roosevelt -- and I welcome their hatred.”

Kennedy was also the pampered child of an extremely privileged background. With his erudition, his unmistakable accent and his consummate style, Kennedy should have been easy target for populist scorn. But unlike many liberals of his age -- twice-defeated presidential standard-bearer Adlai E. Stevenson prominent among them -- Kennedy felt no squeamishness about power. He enjoyed exercising it in the service of domestic reform, foreign policy and in political struggle with his rivals.

But in 1968, Nixon changed the debate. A man who seethed with resentment against the elites he felt lorded over him with their superior connections and Ivy League educations, the never-popular Nixon suffered crushing loses in the 1960 presidential campaign and his 1962 race for the California governorship. By the end of the 1960s, however, Nixon would embody the concerns of millions of white, middle-class Americans unmoored by the turmoil of that tumultuous decade.

Appealing to the “forgotten American” and the “silent majority,” Nixon stoked anger against an out-of-touch liberal establishment that turned up its nose at the values of ordinary Americans. Nixon and Vice President Spiro T. Agnew sneered at bureaucrats, the media (“nattering nabobs of negativism”) and the intelligentsia (the “effete corps of impudent snobs”). They attracted working class Democrats to the conservative fold by attacking the cultural hauteur and smug superiority of the privileged. In the process, they helped the Republican Party shed its long association with the country club set.

Nixon wrote the playbook that almost every future Republican would follow -- link Democrats to a condescending elite of opera tickets and Grey Poupon. By making himself into a pork rind-loving, cowboy-boot-wearing Texan, George H. W. Bush (of Andover and Yale) played this hand to discredit the son of immigrants, Michael S. Dukakis in 1988.

In recent years, as the Democratic Party became an uneasy coalition of young activists, affluent social liberals, union labor and minority voters, this strategy has also become a key component of Democratic primary campaigns. In 1984, Walter F. Mondale used it to undermine Gary Hart’s “yuppie” campaign. When Hart left the race, one pundit wagged, there will be no trans-Atlantic Perrier pipeline, no national quiche stamps program.

And, this year, witnesses the astonishing transformation of Hillary Clinton -- once reviled by the right as the ultimate latte liberal -- into the candidate of “pinochle and the American dream.” The charge of elitism has stung liberal Democrats -- especially those insurgents who tried to move the party beyond its union labor base, so that it would appeal to growing population of educated professionals and wired workers, the type of Americans who actually drink lattes.

To defuse these attacks, Obama needs to counter-punch vigorously against his two multimillionaire opponents. And he seems to be doing just that. He also needs to remind voters of where he came from.

Obama's education and accomplishments should not distance him from ordinary Americans, but instead showcase an authentic striver, a member of the meritocracy attuned to the perils and the promise of American life. Like FDR’s fight with polio and Kennedy’s Catholic heritage, Obama's life includes struggle and his politics need to embrace the beneficent use of power.

If Obama can do this, he might finally lay to rest the phony populism of Nixon that has dominated U.S. elections for the last four decades.

Bruce J. Schulman is the William Huntington Professor of History at Boston University and the author of "The Seventies: The Great Shift in American Culture, Society and Politics" and "Lyndon B. Johnson and American Liberalism." .

A Personal Primary

Bruce J. Schulman — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 21:42:18 GMT

In her concession speech Saturday, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton appealed for party unity. But did Clinton's endorsement of Sen. Barack Obama come too late? Has the bruising primary battle so divided the party and so weakened its presumptive nominee that Obama is vulnerable to defeat despite an unpopular war and a troubled economy?

On the surface, Obama's prospects for healing the wounds in his party look grim. In many past campaigns, bitter nomination fights like his tangle with Clinton have so undermined the eventual victors -- Democrats like Hubert H. Humphrey (1968), George S. McGovern (1972) and Jimmy Carter (1980) and Republicans like Barry M. Goldwater (1964), Gerald R. Ford (1976) and George H.W. Bush (1992) -- that they lost the general election.

In many cases, these breaches not only sabotaged bids for the White House, but cost the party congressional seats. Sometimes, prominent opponents of the eventual nominee even supported the other ticket -- or bolted the party entirely and launched third-party candidacies.

But Obama need not worry too much about the rifts in his own party. In every one of those cases, bruising primary battles reflected a deeper ideological split -- a fundamental debate about the party's direction and principles. Other races have witnessed contentious nomination fights -- the Republicans in 1952, the Democrats in 1960. Those races, however, focused on personality rather than policy; with little ideological difference between the contenders, those battle-tested nominees triumphed in November.

The ugliest nomination fights, then, have reflected fundamental divisions, struggles for the political soul of a national party. In 1964, Sen. Barry M. Goldwater, leader of a potent grass-roots conservative movement, won the Republican nomination in a long, bitter campaign against New York Gov. Nelson A. Rockefeller, the embodiment of the party's moderate Eastern Establishment.

Raucous Goldwater delegates practically booed Rockefeller off the stage when he tried to address the convention. "This is still a free country, ladies and gentleman," Rockefeller shouted over the jeering crowd. While Goldwater appealed to some shared Republican principles, his acceptance speech made it clear that he valued ideological purity over party unity. "Let our Republicanism, so focused and dedicated, not be made fuzzy," he warned the party. "I would remind you that extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice -- and let me remind you also, moderation in pursuit of justice is no virtue."

Twelve years later, Ronald Reagan -- the man who would popularize the party's "11th commandment" against speaking ill of a fellow Republican in the 1980s -- nearly deposed Ford in a primary battle that lasted until the party's August convention. Leading the party's emerging conservative faction, Reagan denounced Ford's foreign policy as submission to Soviet domination and called on the party to abandon its generation-long accommodation to big government.

Thanks to an incumbent's control of the party machinery, Ford barely held Reagan off and dumped Rockefeller, his moderate vice president for a conservative running mate, Sen. Robert Dole, in a futile attempt to paper over his party's ideological divide. Ford lost the November elections, in part because Democrat Jimmy Carter ran strongly among white Southerners and conservative evangelical Protestants that Ford could not enlist in his coalition.

But Carter himself fell victim to intramural party strife in 1980, as the incumbent president faced a tough challenge from Massachusetts Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, the champion of the party's liberal wing. Kennedy challenged Carter's more business-oriented approach to domestic affairs and his efforts to discipline labor unions and other liberal interest groups. Only after winning a procedural vote at the convention did the president finally clinch the nomination. Kennedy offered Carter a lukewarm endorsement -- he never posed arm-in-arm in the traditional unity photograph. Many administration insiders insist that Carter never recovered.

In 1984, the Democrats divided again. Former Vice President Walter F. Mondale won the support of labor and party professionals, while Colorado Sen. Gary Hart ran a "new politics" campaign with strong appeal to affluent and young voters more interested in political reform, the environment and lifestyle issues than in the bread-and-butter concerns that drew blue-collar voters to the party. One columnist joked that Hart's "yuppie" supporters favored the construction of a "trans-Atlantic Perrier pipeline" and the establishment of a "National Tennis Elbow Institute," but Hart's insurgent campaign took the struggle down to the San Francisco convention and signaled an enduring rift in the party's ranks.

Indeed, the Hart-Mondale contest eerily echoed the Democratic primary battles of 1968 and 1972, when "new politics" candidates Eugene McCarthy and McGovern energized young Americans, brought minority voters into the process and attacked the party leadership for its corruption and, especially, its support of the Vietnam War. Hart, like Bill and Hillary Clinton, cut his political teeth as a McGovern campaign operative in 1972.

To be sure, Obama's primary battle with Clinton has been as nasty and as difficult as any of those struggles -- every one of which led to defeat in November. But bitter as it was, the 2008 race did not reflect a major political split within the Democratic Party. All the leading Democrats opposed the war in Iraq (they argued merely about who was first to that position), advocated expanded health care and called for aggressive steps against global warming. Clinton and Obama sparred over experience and judgment, electability and "elitism." Their positions varied little; they certainly did reprise the ideological clashes of 1968 or 1980.

In fact, 2008 most closely resembled the 1960 democratic contest, when a young, charismatic senator--John F. Kennedy -- wrested the nomination from a group of more seasoned politicians: Humphrey, Missouri Senator Stuart Symington, and the favorite, Senate Majority Leader Lyndon B. Johnson of Texas. Kennedy overcame criticisms of his inexperience and led a united party, anxious to reclaim the White House after eight years, to victory in November.

Kennedy, of course, won narrowly -- he did not even capture a majority of the popular vote. Obama faces a similarly formidable test, perhaps more difficult since he cannot as easily associate his opponent with the sitting administration, as Kennedy could with Vice President Richard M. Nixon.

But should the Democratic nominee falter, he should not blame the long primary struggle for his misfortune. His party shares his essential program, and the electorate hungers for change it can believe in.

Bruce J. Schulman is the Huntington Professor of History at Boston University. His latest book, co-edited with Julian Zelizer, is "Rightward Bound: Making America Conservative in the 1970s." He is the author of "The Seventies: The Great Shift in American Culture, Society and Politics" and "Lyndon B. Johnson and American Liberalism."