Stephen Zunes:
...The desperate tactics employed by Senator Hillary Clinton to capture the Democratic presidential nomination from Senator Barack Obama contain some remarkable parallels with the efforts of another favored candidate of the party establishment to block the nomination of another insurgent Democrat 36 years ago. In both cases, the establishment candidate — with little chance late in the primary campaign of obtaining enough delegates to secure the nomination — committed to a strategy of not only trying to twist the rules so to pull off a coup at the convention, but engaging in systematic attacks against the front-runner in ways that appeared to be designed to weaken him in the very areas that would most benefit the Republicans in the general election campaign.
In 1972, the leader late in the Democratic primary race was South Dakota Senator George McGovern who — like Obama — had galvanized youthful voters, anti-war activists, small donors and other party progressives in a grass roots campaign that had brought new life and energy into a party which had narrowly lost the election four years earlier with a weak pro-war candidate at the helm. At the start of the campaign, the Republicans had looked vulnerable in November, with an unpopular war dragging on and an incumbent administration beset by scandals. However, as the liberal Midwestern senator defied expectations by running up a string of primary victories, former Vice-President Hubert Humphrey — who, like Clinton, seemed to feel that he was owed the nomination and the chance to be president — sought to both discredit McGovern in the eyes of voters and re-write the rules for seating state delegations at the party’s convention that summer...
Go read it all, and wait for the moral equivalent of Tet when we bomb Iran.
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