The Myth of Scoop Jackson
By Hubert Humphrey, one of contemporary hawks’ darlings, only secured 43 percent of the popular vote. George Wallace, formerly a Democrat, got 14 percent of the vote, overwhelmingly from people who had historically been voting Democratic, on a white supremacist ticket. Before 1964 the Democrats had, of course, been among other things the party of white supremacy. By 1972 they had ceased to be the party of white supremacy and there was no white supremacist ticket to vote for, so southern whites — long conservative in the views on a wide variety of subjects — voted for the Republican Party, that one being the more conservative of the two.
It seems to me there’s nothing that really could have been done about this. Throughout the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s most observers regarded the prevailing Democratic coalition as unsustainable. People like Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson who actually led that coalition and presumably knew what they were talking about agreed with this. During the 1968-72 period the natural thing happened and it ceased to be sustained. The idea that “Scoop” Jackson could have made it work seems absurd.
Nor have I ever been clear on what the Scoopies exact view of what McGovern did wrong was supposed to be. Say a Democratic hawk had won in 1972 and prosecuted the Vietnam War for four more years — then what? What would have been achieved by that? Should both parties have just taken the view that being against a war is always electoral suicide and continued the fighting for another twenty years? Thirty?
This is partly a problem of people vastly overstating the effect of personalities and campaign tactics (as opposed to structural factors) in determining election outcomes. And the outcome in 1972 was about as close to inevitable as any presidential election could be, a Republican perfect storm. LBJ’s prediction about the Civil Rights Act costing the Democrats the South was of course correct, and the region that had been the backbone of the Democratic Party since its inception was now solidly Republican. And in addition to that, Nixon was a moderate who wouldn’t alienate the traditionally Republican northeast. The Democrats could have put Curtis LeMay himself at the top of the ticket and they would have gotten slaughtered (although Marty Peretz would still be claiming the Dems lost because they were insufficiently hawkish.)
Invocations of Saint Scoop to portray Lieberman as a canary in coalmine are silly for another reason. After all, the inexorable collapse of the traditional Democratic coalition occurred with Jackson safely ensconced in the Senate (indeed, Jackson won a tightly contested primary in 1970–maybe the Dems would have lost 60 states if he hadn’t won.) If Lieberman is standing between the Democrats and permanent electoral oblivion, the Democrats are already doomed–the effect of any one Senator on party branding are trivial. Moreover, I’d love to see evidence that Lieberman is popular with the American public (as opposed to a narrow band of pundits who are indifferent about or actively hostile to the electoral prospects of the Democratic Party.)