The actor George Clooney, who had been among President Joe Biden’s biggest supporters and donors in Hollywood, called on Biden to bow out of the presidential race on Wednesday, just weeks after he hosted a major fundraiser for his reelection campaign.
Missing from the Clooney op-ed: The last two times Democrats changed their ticket at the last moment (1968 and 1972) they lost in landslides.
Did you expect people to not fact check this? 1968 was lost by less than a percentage point and was after the LBJ presidency, which was wildly unpopular for escalating the Vietnam War. You also fail to mention that both elections were against Nixon, who until the Watergate scandal was widely regarded positively. Edit: these two elections were also right in the middle of the implementation of the southern strategy, when racist Democrats were starting to defect to the Republican Party after the passage of the Civil Rights Act.
Both Democratic candidates were also chosen at the national convention, so I’m not sure what you mean by last moment candidate changes. Presumably one must have an official candidate before a last moment change can be made.
Also, 1972 was a trainwreck because the moderate assholes of the Democratic party threw a big temper tantrum over a progressive like McGovern getting the nomination and pushed him to pick a no-name moderate as his running mate, a moderate who just so happened to have major health problems McGovern and the general public didn’t know about. When those health problems got leaked by someone (seems nobody knows who for sure), the campaign tried to stand firm and McGovern said he was behind his VP Eagleton 1000%, leading to his polling numbers falling off a cliff and never recovering (even though they ended up dropping Eagleton and getting a different running mate like a week later).
Saying we should be worried about switching our nominee because of what happened in 1972 is like saying you shouldn’t get chemotherapy because most people who die of cancer were getting chemo, or you shouldn’t let firetrucks park on your street because most burned down homes had a firetruck parked near them recently, it’s just completely backwards.
But think of all the racists that defected to the Republican Party that might have otherwise voted Dem!!
Actually that does make the Dem establishment’s deranged obsession with getting “undecided” voters instead of exciting their base make a lot more… I don’t want to say “sense” because it’s a strategy that goes over like a lead balloon, but the old fucks at the wheel still being traumatized by 1972 adds context.
LBJ refused to run after leading in the primaries. This left three major democratic candidates, Robert Kennedy, who entered the race late, Eugene McCarthy and Hubert Huphrey, LBJ’s vice President. The major issue was Vietnam. Kennedy and McCarthy were against the war, Humphrey was stay the course. Kennedy, who just got the lead in primary votes was assassinated the night of the last primary. An open convention was held in Chicago with rioting in the streets. Humphrey was chosen as nominee in a back room deal. He lost to Nixon who said he had a secret plan to end the war. But, of course he lied.
Fact check me all you want
Okay. Are you going to edit out the misinformation in your comment that says losing by less than a percentage point is a landslide, or clarify that none of the candidates were changed after the convention?
Nixon got 301 electoral votes, Humphrey got 191.
Oh, we’re playing “land votes” now? Don’t you think ignoring the popular vote is giving away the game?
If you mean electoral votes, that is what made Donald Trump president. In fact, that makes every president.
Quick question: Did Donald Trump win in a landslide in 2016?
That is more than a little bit misleading
https://web.archive.org/web/20240710212846/https://www.history.com/news/lbj-exit-1968-presidential-race
Better source with lots more details (which makes it harder to excerpt) - https://web.archive.org/web/20240710213056/https://www.npr.org/2018/03/25/596805375/president-johnson-made-a-bombshell-announcement-50-years-ago
A note about those riots -
https://web.archive.org/web/20240710214549/https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1968_Democratic_National_Convention_protests
This is completely correct, but just saying he lied is kinda understating the magnitude of the horrifying things he and Kissinger did in that region of the world. A small sample - https://web.archive.org/web/20240710215210/https://theconversation.com/henry-kissingers-bombing-campaign-likely-killed-hundreds-of-thousands-of-cambodians-and-set-path-for-the-ravages-of-the-khmer-rouge-209353
Incidentally, as long as I’m thinking about the terrible things the 1968 election led to, its worth pointing out that Nixon’s use of law and order rhetoric brought the Dixiecrat segregationists who were big mad about the civil rights acts fully into the Republican party, who was then able to spend the 1970s dismantling lots of integrative programs and throwing black people into prison for bullshit reasons (like, this is the moment mass incarceration takes off). It’s also worth pointing out how a lot of people just remember Humphrey as a spineless Johnson lackey who kept supporting his boss’s war even though he really didn’t agree with it, but we should remember him as the badass who walked into the 1948 Democratic national convention and said it was time to drop segregationist bullshit and start promoting civil rights.
I imagine we disagree on why it turned out how it did, but I imagine we agree that the world would have been a lot better place if Nixon lost the 1968 election.
I don’t know what’s misleading. Facts is facts.
I tried to be succinct and write as little as necessary. This medium demands it.
I was actually pretty close to all these events, and some of the players.
I suppose we would actually agree on why things turned out the way it did, but nonetheless history tells us that dropping in a new nominee is a good way to lose.
The world would have been a better place had Robert Kennedy not been killed.
Fair enough about the need to be succinct (that has obviously never been a strong suit of mine), and yes, your first comment was technically factually correct, but the context of Johnson being a weakened candidate who thought he probably was going to lose if he stayed in is important. My argument would be that in situations where we dropped in a new nominee we were already pretty screwed for other reasons, and the need to switch nominees was just a symptom of that.
Y’know, I’ve actually kind of gotten that impression. I kinda hate to get into personal/individual account stuff, but I’ve read a lot of your comments at this point and speaking as someone whose own direct campaign experience has been limited to volunreering and chatting with the paid campaign staff, you remind me of some of them in a lot of hard to articulate ways. For lack of a less judgemental way to put it, some of your comments make me think “yeah, this guy gets how it works” and the rest make me think “this guy is everything wrong with the Democratic party!” I only ever seem to end up responding to the ones I disagree with, but either way it’s a perspective I appreciate.
110% agreed, even more than Humphrey he was the one who should have won that election. I wasn’t alive for The 1968 election, but just reading about the history of it is heartbreaking.
Unfortunately, the public nature of these comments from sitting Congressmembers mean that we’re left with little choice now.