Cleveland , Chicago, Conventions and the Media
BY RYAN THIER
“AND WITH GEORGE MCGOVERN AS PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES, WE WOULDN’T HAVE TO HAVE GESTAPO TACTICS IN THE STREETS OF CHICAGO.” – SENATOR ABE RIBICOFF
1968 was a turbulent year in the United States, with cultural and political unrest explosively culminating in Chicago’s conflagration of a Democratic National Convention. The chaos, however, began long before the August convention. The escalating and widely unpopular conflict in Vietnam pushed President Johnson’s approval ratings so low that he announced in late March that he would not run for reelection.
The country was further shaken when civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated in April. One city, though, presented a message of hope rather than despair. On the night of MLK’s assassination, Robert F. Kennedy landed in Indianapolis for a rally in his campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination. Despite fear of riots and for the candidate’s safety, he informed the crowd of Dr. King’s death and said, “what we need in the United States is not violence or lawlessness, but love and wisdom, and compassion toward one another.” That night riots broke out in over one hundred cities across America; there were none in Indianapolis. Two months later, Kennedy won the California primary and was shot dead during the night’s victory celebration.
Held at the end of a bloody, tumultuous year, the 1968 Democratic convention, instead of a unifying end to the party’s division, turned out to be the crescendo for the Democrats’–as well as the nation’s –long-stirring discontent. Entering the convention, Vice President Humphrey had enough delegates to ensure his nomination, but there were questions concerning whether or not the convention could proceed peacefully. Due to Vice President Humphrey’s close association with President Johnson—specifically his agreement with Johnson’s hugely unpopular Vietnam policy–-the plans for anti-war protests were not cancelled even after Johnson dropped out of the race.
The ensuing five days saw a badly divided Democratic party fight it out on the convention floor (although, in terms of delegates, Humphrey easily secured the nomination) and a pugnacious confrontation between anti-war protesters and police officers, troops, national guardsmen, and secret service agents. The “Gestapo tactics in the streets of Chicago” were captured by the TV cameras and broadcast to the whole nation, so even those who didn’t hear Senator Ribicoff knew exactly what was going on in Chicago.
The convention was a disaster for the Democrats and Humphrey, who would lose to Richard Nixon in the general election. In the convention’s aftermath, the Democrats launched the McGovern-Fraser Commission on Party Structure and Delegate Selection. The commission crucially transferred the primary power of selecting the nominee from the party bosses and state organizations to the voters in primaries. The days of the nominee being selected by party bigwigs in the fabled— but not necessarily apocryphal—smoke-filled rooms were over. Where primaries were once a supplemental part of the nominating process, the McGovern-Fraser Commission decreed no more than 10% of a state’s delegates could be selected by a state committee or organization, making primaries the key to accruing delegates and thus the heart of the nomination process.
This change not only dramatically reshaped conventions and their role in elections, but also dramatically reformed the role of the media. While an oligarchic selection process is an inherently undemocratic way to choose a candidate, party bosses and state organizations are more politically informed than the average voter. Shifting the responsibility of selection from the knowledgeable to the novices created a need for someone to inform voters about the candidates and assist them in making their decision. That ‘someone’ became the media. The problem with this arrangement is summed up nicely in a chapter title of Harvard Kennedy professor Thomas E. Patterson’s book Out of Order: “The Miscast Institution.” The media spends much more time on the human element and drama of campaigns than it does explaining candidates’ policies. The media is not to blame for this conflict, as their role was thrust upon them. As Patterson writes, expecting the media to properly educate voters is tantamount to expecting public schools to make up for collapsing family values at home.
The 1968 Democratic Convention left a lasting impression on the country, but perhaps its most lasting legacy is its exposure of flaws in the nominating system, and the changes this precipitated. For better or worse, the voters choose their candidates now, strategy has been sacrificed for democracy, and the electorate has the 1968 convention to thank or blame. One of the biggest sources of political drama at conventions today is simply their location, as both parties attempt to strategically locate their conventions to either curry favor in a swing state or shore up support in a base state. The GOP’s announcement that their 2016 convention will be held in the crucial swing state of Ohio is the most recent example of this phenomenon, even though Nate Silver, a leader in political statistical analysis, largely debunked the myth that putting a convention in a state helps you win it. It is unlikely that we will see “Gestapo” tactics in the streets during a convention again, but as the Republican party’s recent crackdown on voter ID laws shows, electoral warfare hasn’t ended—it has simply moved to ballot box.