Terrorism and Politics

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"Lawmakers burst into debate over gun control, philosophers analyzed the nature of violence, and the nation was described as grieving.

"Yet 'grief' suddenly seemed like a faintly obsolete word. Nor would 'shock,' 'rage,' 'dismay' do, either. Such anthropomorphic words have been, for generations, the most convenient shorthand of political observation, inviting writers to describe millions of people as if their emotions were fused by a single spasm of 'agony,' 'despair,' 'vengeance' or 'sorrow' — as if, indeed, they were one community. But it is impossible ever to describe a great nation as if it were a community — and, in 1968, the essence of the matter was that the old faith of Americans in themselves, as a community of communities, seemed to be dissolving."

Theodore H. White, 'The Making of the President 1968'

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Donald Trump's meteoric rise in the polls — in defiance of all conventional wisdom — is clearly baffling to many people (although the latest poll from Iowa hints that Trump may finally have peaked). They don't know what it means. Is it racism? Is it fascism? Should we pass more laws that would have been totally ineffective in preventing the latest massacre?

I think it is fairly easy to see what is happening in this country today — in large part because I can remember what happened in this country many yesterdays ago — and I have formed a theory about it and the 2016 presidential campaign.

I am speaking of a time when the United States really appeared to be coming apart at the seams — 1968 — when political assassinations and violence in city streets were commonplace.

I was only a child at the time, and I didn't fully understand everything that I saw and heard, but I could comprehend a lot of it. I saw TV reports of riots in the streets of big cities. I saw protesters being beaten by police, and I saw protesters throwing rocks and bottles at the police in response. I saw reports of prominent Americans being assassinated.

I knew fear and chaos when I saw it, and I see the same thing happening now.

Don't get me wrong. There was unrest all over the world. There always is — somewhere. But not usually everywhere — and that is what seemed to be happening in 1968. I'm not saying that actually is what was happening. But it sure seemed like it.

And it was frightening.

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You had a pretty good idea in those days which places were best to avoid. In the summer of '68, for example, you didn't want to be near the Democrats' convention hall in Chicago.

You could avoid the obvious places for protests — but those places aren't so obvious anymore. We've seen riots recently that occurred in unpredictable places. That kind of thing tends to make people feel unsafe, you know?

So do seemingly random attacks like the one in San Bernardino, Calif., less than two weeks ago.

Now, we all know that bad things can happen to any one of us at any time. That's life. And, eventually, life is going to end for us all. We may get sick or injured and never recover, or we may be in a fatal accident of some kind. Or any of 10,000 or so other potential causes of death. (The list is virtually endless.) I think most of us have accepted that. So we continue to drive our cars to restaurants and concerts and work, always with that reality tucked away in the backs of our minds.

We know that we will never get out of this world alive. We don't like to be reminded of it on a daily basis. And we don't expect death to come when we're shopping or eating — or participating in an office holiday party.

I think it was Woody Allen who said, "I'm not afraid to die. I just don't want to be there when it happens." If we're honest with ourselves, no matter what we think happens or doesn't happen when we stop breathing, that's how we feel, too.

Of course, the kind of spiritual leaders that we have historically had here in the West — ministers, priests, rabbis — remind us that we will die, but they do so as part of a long–term campaign for souls, not to encourage listeners to hasten the day when others' souls will be won or lost — for good. That image, fairly or not, is what many Americans see in their mind's eye when they think of mosques and Muslims.

I think Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton are probably correct when they say that most Muslims are peaceful, but you can't ignore the fact that most of the recents terrorist acts, both here and overseas, have been committed by Muslims — and that causes fear. And when refugees are streaming across the border, it isn't possible to tell which ones can be trusted and which ones cannot.

I see 1968 and 2016 as being comparable. Then, as now, people felt unsafe, and they looked for a leader who would take a firm stand against what scared them. President Johnson left a vacuum in this regard, much as Barack Obama has left a vacuum; Hubert Humphrey was left holding the bag for the administration in '68, and he lost a close race to Richard Nixon — the only man in modern American history to win the presidency after having lost a previous presidential election — because the administration had repeatedly demonstrated that it didn't have a clue what to do.

And Nixon won with a third–party firebrand named George Wallace running. Wallace received more than 13% of the vote, with most of those votes coming from the South, and he carried five Southern states that almost certainly would have voted for Nixon if Wallace had not been in the race.

History tells us that the Republicans won five of the next six presidential elections — in large part because they won the battle for the hearts and minds of the voters on the issue of law and order.

I hear many Republicans fretting about Trump running as an independent if denied the GOP nomination. If that happens, the logic says, Hillary Clinton will be the beneficiary just as they allege that her husband was elected because Ross Perot got one–fifth of the popular vote in 1992. I don't think that is true. History shows that third–party candidacies, when they are most appealing to voters, tend to be a problem for whichever party is in power.

Exit–poll surveys in 1992 indicated that, if Perot had not run, Clinton and George H.W. Bush each would have picked up about 40% of his supporters, and the remaining 20% would not have voted at all. The numbers would fluctuate by state, of course, and it is fair to suggest that states where the race between Clinton and Bush was close could have swung the other way if Perot had not been on the ballot. But in the states where Clinton or Bush had decisive leads, it is unlikely that Perot's absence from the race would have meant much.

If the '92 exit polls are correct — and I have neither heard nor seen any evidence that would lead me to believe they are not — I suppose many Republicans believe Bush could have won that 20%, but I'm inclined to think those voters wouldn't have chosen from the major parties' nominees. They were drawn in to the process by Perot and most likely would have receded into the shadows from which they came if he had not been on the ballot. They weren't responsive to Bush or Clinton.

A dozen years before that, in 1980, there was talk right up until Election Day that Rep. John Anderson would siphon off enough votes from both President Jimmy Carter and former Gov. Ronald Reagan to force their race into the House of Representatives. Anderson had run against Reagan in the Republican primaries before deciding to mount a third–party campaign, and he was widely praised as an alternative to the major nominees. But the experts overestimated his influence on the campaign. Anderson won no states and received only 6.6% of the vote.

Perhaps Carter would have won most of Anderson's votes if Anderson had not run as a third–party candidate, but, outside the South, where Carter lost nearly every state but held Reagan under 50% in most, it hardly seems it would have mattered. Reagan won in a landslide.

The issue right now is not whether Trump would fracture the party and allow Hillary Clinton to win next year. The issue for voters is who makes them feel safe. Trump has been successful at that. If his Republican challengers want to be relevant in the 2016 campaign, they will need to address it, too.

Because 2016, like 1968, is going to be about an increasingly insecure nation and how it deals with its greatest fear.

Nixon's Appeal to the Great Silent Majority

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"So tonight, to you, the great silent majority of my fellow Americans, I ask for your support. I pledged in my campaign for the presidency to end the war in a way that we could win the peace. I have initiated a plan of action which will enable me to keep that pledge. The more support I can have from the American people, the sooner that pledge can be redeemed. For the more divided we are at home, the less likely the enemy is to negotiate at Paris."

Richard Nixon
Nov. 3, 1969

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If it hadn't been for the speeches and statements he made during the Watergate scandal, the speech that Richard Nixon gave 45 years ago tonight might have been remembered as his most significant presidential address.

The American people were divided over the war in Vietnam, a division that came to be perceived along all sorts of other (mostly irrelevant) lines — by race, by age, by gender, by region, by economic status — that weren't entirely irrelevant.

On this night in 1969, Richard Nixon introduced the concept of the mythical "great silent majority" into the American dialogue — suggesting that, in spite of themselves, most middle class Americans agreed with each other but were too polite to say so, and implying that he was one of them — a true–blue patriotic American who had remained silent too long. He contrasted his strategy of political realism with the vocal minority and its unrealistic idealism.

He tried to strike a somewhat defiant note. "If I conclude that increased enemy action jeopardizes our remaining forces in Vietnam," Nixon declared, "I shall not hesitate to take strong and effective measures to deal with that situation." He assured his listeners that was not a threat but a promise.

Nixon appealed for their support — and urged them (again by implication) not to participate in demonstrations against the war or to side with the counterculture — on this night 45 years ago. He had been elected president a year earlier by an extremely narrow margin, and he wanted to build a consensus.

He did better than that, at least initially. Before the speech, Gallup reported that his approval rating was 56%; after the speech, his approval was up 11 points to 67%, nearly the highest of his presidency.

And, in reality, it may well have laid the foundation for his 49–state landslide re–election in 1972.

In many ways, though, I have believed that the speech was a logical extension of the "Southern strategy" Nixon used to win the 1968 presidential campaign. At that time, Democrats still dominated Southern politics, but by using subtle and not–so–subtle appeals to racism, Republicans began chipping away at the Democrats' grip on politics in the South.

The most immediate effect was to siphon off votes upon which the Democrats' presidential nominee could always depend in the past — with the most direct recipient being independent candidate George Wallace. The Republicans hoped to pick off a few Southern states with Wallace and Hubert Humphrey dividing a vote that almost certainly would have defeated Nixon if it had remained united. At least, that is how Nixon saw it.

Nixon learned that divide and conquer works. Wallace still won nearly half a dozen Southern states, but Nixon managed to carry Florida, Virginia, Tennessee and the Carolinas — and, in so doing, won the election. But the Southern strategy was regionally confining. "Silent majority" transcended regional boundaries.

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After his speech 45 years ago tonight, Nixon used appeals to patriotism to define Republicans — and to divide groups of Americans — having already begun a process that would fulfill Lyndon Johnson's prophecy that his advocacy of civil rights legislation had handed the South to the Republicans for a generation.

In hindsight, I would say the ongoing shift from Democrat to Republican in the South truly began in that 1968 election. What other conclusion can one draw? The Democrats swept the nation and many Southern states in 1964, when Johnson faced Barry Goldwater. But, in the 1964 election results, there were clues to be found, hints about the direction the South was traveling.

It happened quietly and gradually. It certainly was not achieved overnight. But little by little, one by one, Southern states voted for Republicans on the federal level, then they began to do it on the state and local levels as well. And, one by one, Republicans picked off each state.

Tomorrow, it is quite likely that my home state of Arkansas will be the last Southern domino to completely fall when Sen. Mark Pryor appears poised to lose his bid for a third term — perhaps the last time that Nixon's political legacy will be felt in America.

The Southern strategy has seen some backsliding in recent elections, though, with Virginia and North Carolina voting for a Democrat for president for the first time in decades and Florida voting Democratic as well — and Democrats representing states like Louisiana and North Carolina in the Senate — but much of that can be attributed to the arrivals of Democrats whose jobs have brought them there from Northern and coastal cities. So the Southern strategy may be around for a few more elections. There may still be some work to be done in some place.

But, by and large, that transition is nearly complete now.

That shift in party preference may have been the most remarkable domestic political development I have witnessed in my lifetime — the transformation of an entire region, the South, from reliably Democrat to reliably Republican. I grew up in the South; it simply went without saying that just about everyone there was a Democrat, and political squabbles came down to the liberal, conservative and moderate wings of the party. Winning the primary in the spring or early summer was tantamount to election; beating the Republican in November was a formality.

Some people would say that Republicans have always been right–wingers, but the truth is that there really was no rightward shift in Republican ideology, in the South or elsewhere, until 1980, when the Reagan campaign and the emergence of the Moral Majority combined to coax conservative Christians into politics. There were pockets of Republican support throughout the South before then. Up until that time, I saw no real political involvement on the part of the churches — but I sure saw it after that.

Nearly all of the Republicans who were nominated in the decades before Reagan — including both Nixon himself and the man Nixon served as vice president, Dwight Eisenhower — are increasingly viewed as too moderate for the modern Republican Party.

It was only after Reagan won the nomination that the momentum for Republicans in the South really became noticeable.

All that was still many years away when Nixon spoke to the "great silent majority" 45 years ago tonight. Nixon drew the lines in the dirt that night.

"Let historians not record that, when America was the most powerful nation in the world, we passed on the other side of the road and allowed the last hopes for peace and freedom of millions of people to be suffocated by the forces of totalitarianism," Nixon said.

Something to think about when you watch the election returns tomorrow night.

The Day Nixon Won the Presidency

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There haven't been many cliffhangers in presidential politics, and one of the most interesting, from the perspective of an historian, has to be the one that occurred 45 years ago today.

It was the last truly paper–thin popular vote margin in a presidential election in the 20th century, and it was the last time for nearly 40 years that voter turnout in a national election exceeded 60% — in spite of the fact that the voting age was lowered to 18 before the next presidential election.

And, if the outcome had been different, the nation might have been spared the Watergate scandal that consumed the Richard Nixon presidency.

But the Democrats' nominee, Vice President Hubert Humphrey, had to win the grudging acceptance of those who had supported antiwar candidate Gene McCarthy in the primaries. The war influenced most voters that year, either directly or indirectly, and McCarthy's supporters didn't completely trust Humphrey because of his role in the Johnson administration.

Gradually, Humphrey had been winning them over that fall; Democrats who had supported McCarthy and Bobby Kennedy earlier in the year apparently began to realize that, like it or not, the choice was between Humphrey and Nixon, the man they had been demonizing for a couple of decades. About two weeks before the election, when Humphrey announced in Salt Lake City that he would pull the plug on the bombing in southeast Asia as "an acceptable risk for peace," the momentum was on his side.

"Up until Salt Lake City," wrote historian Theodore White, "the position of the Democrats had been that any bombing halt in Vietnam must be coupled with reciprocity on the part of the enemy. Now, in a three–point program, Humphrey declared that he would risk a complete bombing halt in the interests of peace, and then see what response might develop, reserving the right to resume bombing if no such response was clear."

The impact on the polls was immediate. Gallup reported that Humphrey had cut Nixon's lead in half.

Then, less than a week before the election, McCarthy ("who had been pouting on the Riviera" since losing the nomination to Humphrey, wrote historian William Manchester) announced his support for Humphrey — and, at that point, wrote Manchester, "Humphrey was at the top of his form; Nixon had begun to sound uncannily like Thomas E. Dewey."

The late Humphrey surge would have changed the outcome, many people argued, if the campaign had gone on for a day or two more — and, in fact, the Democrats had no one but themselves to blame for that. The Democratic National Committee decided to postpone the Chicago convention until the end of August to coincide with the birthday of President Lyndon Johnson.

At the time, it was the latest start for a national convention since the Civil War more than a century earlier — and the change cost Democrats valuable campaign time that could have altered the outcome of the general election.

(It is worth noting that LBJ was much more popular when that decision was made than he was when the convention was held.)

In hindsight, the whole election really hinged on the outcomes in three states — California, Illinois and Ohio. Nixon carried them all by relatively close margins. If Humphrey had carried all three, he would have been elected president.

And if Humphrey had carried any two of those three — or California alone — the independent candidacy of George Wallace would have accomplished its objective of forcing the election into the House of Representatives — where Wallace, who had been fading in the polls that autumn and must have been aware that he could not possibly win, could play the role of kingmaker.

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Nixon, a native Californian, never really seemed likely to lose his home state (although the Republican ticket did lose the home state of the vice presidential nominee, Spiro Agnew). Oh, sure, some major party presidential nominees had lost their home states over the years — Democrat Adlai Stevenson even managed to do it twice — and, if that had happened in 1968, Nixon would not have won in the Electoral College (and, given his final popular vote margins in both California and the nation as a whole, he might not have won the popular vote, either).

But, contrary to what modern political observers may think of California's electoral tendencies, the fact was that, in 1968, the state had voted Republican in three of the previous four presidential elections, and it had never rejected Nixon in a national campaign.

Realistically, California was off the table.

But if Humphrey could have won about 67,000 votes from Nixon in Illinois and about 45,000 votes from Nixon in Ohio, he could have prevented Nixon from receiving enough electoral votes to be elected. And if he had carried both of those states, along with California, he would have won the election outright.

That kind of scenario (or something like it) seemed like a real possibility on this day in 1968 — even moreso after midnight, when all three states (along with Missouri and, for a time, Texas) remained too close to call.

Humphrey and Nixon were even with each other in the polls heading into Election Day, and many states remained too close to call well into that evening — and the early morning hours of the next day. In fact, it was not until the next morning that the TV networks called the election for Nixon — and, even after they did that, some states stayed too close to call for awhile.

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My memory of those days is vague, owing primarily to my youth. But one memory stands out.

As I have written here before, I grew up within 350 miles of my grandparents. It wasn't all interstate in 1968, but my family still managed to visit my grandparents frequently. My father taught at a local college, which did not have summer sessions in those days, and my mother stayed at home until she re–entered the workforce in the mid–'70s so my family typically made two, even three trips to visit the grandparents in the summers — in addition to trips we usually made at Christmas and sometimes at Thanksgiving or during spring break.

I loved my grandparents and wanted to please them, and I'm sure I must have heard them talking about the election that summer. My mother's parents, with whom we always stayed when we visited Dallas, were Nixon supporters. My father's mother was a Democrat, and I am sure she supported Humphrey, but my maternal grandparents spent more time with me and had more influence on me.

Anyway, I must have heard them speaking of Nixon that summer. My grandfather could be — shall we say? — loquacious on certain topics, one of which was politics. My best guess is that I must have boldly asserted, at some point, that Nixon would win — and, then, as children will, I forgot about the conversation.

Until a day or two after the election.

It was then that I received the first telegram I had received in my then–brief life. It was from my grandparents and a couple of their friends (who must have been there when I made my prediction) congratulating me.

I wish I could say I still have that telegram, but I don't. As nearly as I can remember, it said something like this: "Congratulations on your prediction! We're all proud of you!"

At that point in my life, I knew nothing about politics, but I guess my grandparents' praise made me feel like I was some sort of prodigy, that I was destined to be some kind of political historian.

Maybe I was. After all, I still enjoy analyzing election returns, and I still like to make predictions.

I must confess, however, that those predictions involve considerably more thought and research than the one I made in 1968.

George Wallace: No Middle Ground

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"There's some people who've gone over the state and said, 'Well, George Wallace has talked too strong about segregation.' Now let me ask you this: how in the name of common sense can you be too strong about it? You're either for it, or you're against it. There's not any middle ground as I know of."

George Wallace
1962

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There are many people who, regardless of almost anything else they ever did or will do, will forever be linked to the American civil rights movement.

Some made only brief contributions to the movement's history; others were a part of the conversation for years.

George Wallace, who died 15 years ago today, was one of the latter.

Earlier this year, MSNBC's Chris Hayes asserted that Wallace had been a Republican. Hayes and I don't always see eye to eye on issues, but ordinarily we do agree on historical facts. This time? Well, I'm sorry, but he had his facts wrong.

His was an understandable assumption, I suppose. Most Southern states have been solidly Republican for many years, and Wallace probably would be a Republican if he was living and running for office.

(Wallace's son and namesake was elected state treasurer in Alabama as a Democrat, but he switched to the Republican Party a decade later and was elected to the Alabama Public Service Commission.)

But George Wallace's time was the middle of the 20th century. Most successful Southern politicians were still Democrats, as they had been for more than a century.

If that sounds strange to 21st–century ears, remember that it was a time that was significantly different from today. In those days, both parties had liberals, conservatives and moderates. The parties are far more polarized today.

(I noticed in yesterday's Dallas Morning News that editor Sharon Grigsby wrote about "sorority racism" at the University of Alabama.

(With a black man in the White House for nearly five years now, it's been fashionable to toss around the accusation of racism at anyone who so much as disagrees with the president. I grew weary of that long ago. But that doesn't mean that I deny the existence of racism. I just think there are more important battles to fight than the ones that have been waged.

(This sorority thing falls in that category. I appreciate, as does Grigsby, the work that went into the Alabama student newspaper's article that exposed sorority racism on campus, but if the exclusive nature of the Greek system is the most egregious offense that one can find on the 'Bama campus, things are a lot better than they used to be.)

Wallace was probably best known for seeking the presidency as the nominee of his own political party, the American Independent Party, in 1968. Well, Wallace wasn't actually the founder of the party. That was Bill Shearer, a right–wing political activist who, along with his wife, founded the party to give Wallace, by that time the former governor of Alabama (existing state law prevented him from seeking re–election in 1966), a platform from which to campaign for the presidency.

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But his political story actually began some 30 years earlier when, as a 19–year–old, he contributed to his grandfather's campaign for probate judge. Seven years later, he was appointed one of Alabama's assistant attorneys general. About a year after that, he was elected to the Alabama House of Representatives.

Ironically, considering the tone of his later political career, he was considered a moderate on racial issues in those days. But he shifted his politics after losing the Democratic nomination for governor to an avowed segregationist in 1958.

"I was outniggered," Wallace reportedly told Seymore Trammell, his 1958 campaign director, "and ... I will never be outniggered again."

(Such a pivotal moment in a politician's life story always sounded like satire to me — sort of like Scarlett O'Hara in "Gone With the Wind.")

He gained national notoriety in 1963, when he pledged, in his inaugural address, to "toss the gauntlet before the feet of tyranny" as a tireless advocate of segregation. About six months later, he made what was largely a symbolic gesture when he made his "stand in the schoolhouse door" in an unsuccessful attempt to prevent black students from enrolling at the University of Alabama.

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As I say, the value of the stand in the schoolhouse door was largely symbolic. There was Wallace, small of stature, trying to stand up to the big guys who were assaulting the beliefs and values of his state. He lost, but he was able to take credit for the attempt to defend the little guy.

"There was always a grand sense of persecution among the Wallace workers," wrote political historian Theodore H. White of the 1968 campaign, "a nearly religious faith that everyone was against them but the people, and that the saving of white America from the pointy–heads was a cause greater than politics."

And in the cauldron that was 1968, there was a time when Wallace was a serious contender for the presidency. Like Ross Perot in 1992, though, Wallace did best in the national polls when he said the least. But it simply wasn't in Wallace's nature to remain silent.

Thus, it was probably inevitable that he tumbled in the polls the more he opened his mouth.

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"Why does the Air Force need expensive new bombers? Have the people we've been bombing over the years been complaining?"

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His rhetoric was incendiary, and, ultimately, it appealed to only a small minority of American voters — too small even to force the race into the House of Representatives, where Wallace hoped to play kingmaker.

Nevertheless, his campaign was the most successful third–party effort in nearly 60 years; forty–five years later, he is still the last third–party candidate to win at least one state (he won five — Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Louisiana and Mississippi — worth 45 electoral votes).

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His national ambitions were dealt a permanent blow in 1972 when he was shot while campaigning for the Democratic presidential nomination, and he was confined to a wheelchair for the rest of his life.

Wallace tried to win the nomination again in 1976, but by that time, another Southern politician, Jimmy Carter, had overtaken him in his regional base. Wallace's day had ended.

My memory is that, at the conclusion of the 1976 primary season, Wallace gracefully accepted the voters' verdict and told the nominee–to–be that he would support him in the general election campaign.

"It must have been one of the most difficult conversations Wallace had ever had to conduct, this telephone call to the man who had dashed his own presidential hopes and replaced him as the South's political hero," wrote Jules Witcover and Jack Germond in their book about the 1976 presidential campaign, "Marathon."

Wallace returned to Alabama. In 1982, after apologizing to the black voters of Alabama for his racist past, Wallace won his final term as governor. When that term ended in January 1987, he retired from public life.

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"I tried to talk about good roads and good schools and all these things that have been part of my career, and nobody listened. And then I began talking about niggers, and they stomped the floor."

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I guess that was the great irony of George Wallace.

Nationally, I guess he was the poster child for bigotry and intolerance, but, in his judicial career before he ran for governor, Wallace was known as a liberal judge who treated everyone the same, regardless of race.

Wallace was an enigma in life, and he remains one 15 years after his death.

Ronald Reagan vs. Robert Kennedy

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In the 1980s, I had a Commodore 64 computer in my home, which I used primarily for two purposes — writing (using word processing software that probably can't be found anymore, even though, as I understand it, Commodore 64s and their accessories are still sold online) and playing the computer games of that time.

One of the games that I enjoyed playing was a presidential election game. You could use preprogrammed historical figures from 1960 to 1984, which meant you could re–create actual election contests or match other candidates in a kind of what–if scenario. You could also answer a series of questions on various issues and program yourself to be a candidate.

For that matter, you could alter the actual economic and foreign conditions. You could have a third–party candidate. It was really the ideal game for a political junkie like myself.

The computer could even manage any or all of the candidates.

Then, during the course of the game, you could budget your advertising and campaign appearances for each of nine rounds (weeks), followed by a realistic depiction of a minute–by–minute Election Night.

One scenario that I liked to play was a what–if scenario featuring New York Sen. Robert F. Kennedy and California Gov. Ronald Reagan as opponents in the 1968 election. Kennedy, of course, was assassinated while he campaigned for the Democratic nomination, and Reagan's 1968 campaign never really got off the ground.

But there was a time when a confrontation between the two was not only regarded as possible, it was even seen by some as probable.

I was an admirer of Kennedy, even though I really wasn't old enough in 1968 to understand much about him, other than, I suppose, the fact that I knew his name.

I didn't really know Reagan's name at the time, but a decade later, I sure did. And I had heard plenty of speculation over the years about how an election campaign between Kennedy and Reagan would have turned out.

So I often played the 1968 scenario managing Kennedy against Reagan. Sometimes I included George Wallace as a third–party candidate — as he was in real life.

Kennedy and Reagan tended to split the three–way scenarios. When it was just the two of them running against each other, Reagan won just about every time.

Like all the other what–ifs of history, the outcome of such an electoral confrontation will forever be a mystery. No one knows, for example, if Wallace would have mounted a third–party candidacy if Reagan had been the Republican nominee.

If he had, would he and Reagan have split the right–wing vote, permitting Kennedy to take a razor–thin victory?

And if Wallace had chosen not to run, would Reagan have won?

Forty–five years ago today, voters got a taste of what it might have been like.

On Monday night, May 15, 1967, Reagan and Kennedy met in a one–hour debate about the Vietnam War. Approximately 15 million Americans watched it on CBS.

Footage from that occasion is fascinating to watch today — in no small part because, even though there have been many books written about both men, I have seen very few references to that debate.

In fact, the only article I have seen about that debate — which was really more of a global town hall meeting — was Paul Kengor's piece in the National Review five years ago.

Kengor observed that the consensus that Reagan "won" the debate was virtually unanimous, and I have found no reason to dispute that.

If they had been their respective parties' nominees and had met in a series of debates in the fall of 1968, it seems logical to me that Reagan might have prevailed. He had a very folksy way of speaking when he was president that endeared him to people, even those who disagreed with him. Kennedy, on the other hand, had a reputation for being "ruthless" that turned off even those who supported him.

(In the debate 45 years ago tonight, however, the two seemed to switch roles. Reagan came across as the more ruthless while Kennedy seemed more amiable. At least, that is my impression from the clips I have seen.)

Also, the Democrats had held the White House for eight years, and the incumbent was very unpopular. On this occasion, though, as Kengor points out, Kennedy and Reagan "ended up debating the group of students" who questioned them, "not one another." A panel of "extremely rude" international students served as the questioners, and they "seemed to bask in their big chance to unleash their torrent of anger on the two available representatives of the country they despised."

Even if Kennedy and Reagan had run against each other, the debate in which they participated 45 years ago today might have been vastly different from the ones they would have had in their campaign.

If debates in 1968 resembled the ones that have been held since, the panel of questioners wouldn't have been students intent on challenging authority but professional journalists with expertise in the subjects about which the candidates were asked.

But it's difficult to say that because, in 1968, presidential debates were not the campaign fixtures they have become. The only models at the time were the debates between Richard Nixon and John F. Kennedy in 1960.

Who knows what the organizers might have done to the format in 1968?

And who knows what America would be like in 2012 if either Bobby Kennedy or Ronald Reagan had been elected president in 1968?

That would have meant that Richard Nixon probably never would have been elected president — hence, there would have been no Watergate. Would either Kennedy or Reagan have been finished in national politics if one had lost to the other in 1968 — however narrowly?

Would the winner have ended the Vietnam War years before it actually ended?

To be sure, it would be an alternate reality.

The Day George Wallace Was Shot

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There were quite a few assassinations — and assassination attempts — when I was growing up.

But I believe the one that occurred 40 years ago today — in which Alabama Gov. George Wallace was shot while campaigning in Laurel, Md., for the Democratic presidential nomination — was the first to show both the assassin and his would–be victim together in the same photos and film sequences.

It was a Monday, and school was going to close for the summer in another week or so. Everyone was eager for summer vacation — the students, the teachers, everyone, I guess, except the mothers who would soon have their children under foot 24 hours a day.

Otherwise, it was just an ordinary Monday — and, sometime that afternoon, I learned that Wallace had been shot. I don't remember now if word spread while I was still in school that day or if I learned what had happened when I got home, but, when I did get home, it was all over the television stations, wiping out the cartoons I usually watched after school.

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So I got on my bike and rode over to the home of two guys who were in my grade in school, Danny and David Johnson — and, as I often did in those days, I stayed for supper.

I've written here before about that occasion. Danny and David's father was a well–known Arkansas segregationist who managed Wallace's independent presidential campaign in Arkansas in 1968, and the attempt on Wallace's life earlier that day inspired political reporters in Little Rock to seek his reaction.

They got a quick response from him — he called it a "dastardly act" — and my memory of that day is that nothing else was said about the shooting around that table that night — other than Mr. Johnson's wry comment to his sons and me that his remark "sounded like a bad word."

He grinned his trademark grin when he said it, and, even though I was a small boy and didn't understand all the things that were happening in the world, I felt confident that Gov. Wallace would not be like the Kennedys and Martin Luther King, that he would survive the shooting.

Which he did. But he never walked again.

It was the end of an era, and, historian Theodore White asserted in "The Making of the President 1972," his book on the 1972 election, Richard Nixon's re–election was assured thanks to the Wallace shooting.

In his paranoid way, Nixon feared Wallace, who nearly succeeded in his quest to deny both Nixon and Democrat Hubert Humphrey a majority in the Electoral College in 1968. If Wallace won the 1972 Democratic nomination, Nixon reasoned, he might win outright.

"For two years, George Wallace had haunted the planning of the White House," White wrote. But, after Wallace was shot, "it was all over. Only the question of margin remained; whether the president could get that mandate for which his lonesome soul so longed, that landslide authority which might let him act with the largeness of the great presidents of the past."

Nixon did, indeed, win a landslide victory over George McGovern in 1972. A few years later, when White wrote his thoughtful examination of Nixon and the Watergate scandal, "Breach of Faith," he credited Wallace's influence for many of the decisions and actions of the Nixon White House.

"[T]o eliminate the threat of Wallace in the future," White wrote, "[Nixon] was to use, in 1970, trickeries against the Alabama governor only slightly less dirty than those he used against Democratic candidates in 1972."

And, as we all know, Nixon ultimately was forced to resign because of the dirty tricks his 1972 campaign used against the opposition.

But that was still in the future on this day in 1972. Forty years ago today, the shooting of George Wallace was a cause for somber reflection on both political extremes.

Although not as polarized then as they are today, the right and the left were forced by the shooting to examine their own philosophies and their attitudes about George Wallace and his role in the political debate.

For voters on the right, Wallace was the spokesman who articulated their hopes and dreams — and fears. For those on the left, he was symbolic of everything they believed was wrong with the nation.

He was both — at the same time — I suppose. And he was neither.

I'm inclined to think Wallace was a politician — and, like most successful politicians then and now, a panderer.

Early in his political career, when he was a circuit judge, Wallace had a reputation for being fair and impartial. Race did not matter in his courtroom. But then he lost a governor's race in which he had been endorsed by the NAACP and the winner had enjoyed the support of the Ku Klux Klan.

Wallace claimed he had been "outniggered" and that it wouldn't happen again. He kept his word. When he ran for governor four years later, he took a solidly segregationist stand and won by a landslide.

"I tried to talk about good roads and good schools and all these things that have been part of my career, and nobody listened," Wallace said. "And then I began talking about niggers, and they stomped the floor."

Perhaps the most troubling aspect of the Wallace shooting for many was the fact that, like the shooting of Gabrielle Giffords last year, the assailant had no real political motive.

Had there been one, it might have been easier to accept. But when the diary of Arthur Bremer, Wallace's would–be assassin, was published, it indicated that his only real objective was notoriety — not unlike the would–be assassin of Ronald Reagan, who wanted only to impress an actress.

There was nothing that could elevate the intended sacrifice, not even a biblical sense of justice.

The Politics of Rage

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"Wallace was getting 50 percent in the first scattered returns; the lead shrank in the first half–hour to 47 percent, then to the low 40s, and then stabilized at 42 percent. But the 42 percent had a profile — it was not simply the north and the piney woods rednecks that were voting for George Wallace."

Theodore H. White
"The Making of the President 1972"

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The history books tell us that George McGovern was nominated by the Democrats to run against Richard Nixon in 1972.

And, in fact, that is what happened.

Things tend to look a lot more cut and dried in history books than they did at the time, though. We have the advantage of hindsight. We know what the outcomes were — in the primaries that were held that spring, in the conventions that were held that summer and in the general election that November.

But 1972 was a funny kind of year. It was a year when a win wasn't really a win — and a loss wasn't really a loss.

Sometimes they were, though — and, in the traditional ways, a win was still a win and a loss was still a loss. But, in the Democrats' primaries (and there were far fewer of them in 1972 than there are in 2012), there didn't seem to be anything resembling momentum.

McGovern was, as I say, the eventual nominee, but he didn't win any of the first four caucus/primary contests. He performed better than expected in New Hampshire when front–runner Ed Muskie appeared to implode, but he hardly made a ripple in Florida a week later.

Nothing was clear as Florida prepared to hold its primary. People often forget that the charismatic George Wallace was a formidable foe in the primaries in the spring of 1972, and he looked quite imposing in Florida, receiving more than twice as many votes as anyone else.

I wasn't yet a teenager when Wallace sought the 1972 presidential nomination — but, while I suppose I was seen as a bit precocious at the time with my knowledge of history and the presidency, one thing about the Alabama governor was clear to me in spite of my youth.

In fact, I remember thinking that, if it was clear to me, it had to be obvious to everyone else — but I am far from certain that it was.

It probably goes without saying that Wallace had a reputation for being a racist and perhaps he was — but there is a difference of opinion as to whether he really was a racist or a racial opportunist (after all, Wallace apologized to the black citizens of Alabama in his later years and wouldn't have won his final term in office if it hadn't been for the support of black voters).

Not that there is — necessarily — much of a difference between the two. But Wallace's 1972 campaign showed that he was really more about the politics of rage than he was about the politics of race.

At times, yes, it was a racist rage. But most of the time it was a populist rage.

And that is the thing that was clear to me at the time. I think it must have played a significant role in the thought processes of those who worked for Richard Nixon.

The Nixon White House feared George Wallace. He had carried five Southern states as an independent in Nixon's narrow win in a three–way race four years earlier, and Republicans were concerned that he could do considerable damage to Nixon's campaign for re–election if he won the Democrats' nomination.

At the very least, they were worried about a possible rerun of 1968, with Wallace being the spoiler again. The last time, it had been to the benefit of the out–of–power Republicans.

But, in 1972, the Republicans had held the White House for four years. They had inherited Vietnam, but it had ceased to be Lyndon Johnson's war and was now Richard Nixon's war.

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In the rear–view mirror of history, it's hard to imagine anyone defeating Nixon in 1972. His approval ratings were consistently in the 50s and were on an upward trajectory after his trip to China in February; in November, he received more than 60% of the popular vote and carried 49 states.

Just a year earlier, though, he had been struggling in the polls, and the possibility that he might be denied a second term seemed very real. A Harris Poll in August 1971 suggested that Muskie would beat Nixon if the election had been held at that time.

I remember that a political board game was developed in 1971 called "Who Can Beat Nixon?" It was designed much like "Monopoly," and several people could play — but no one could be Nixon.

It was mostly meant as a novelty, I think, but the parents of one of my friends had it, and I do remember my friend and I tried to play it a few times. My memory is that the cards were stacked heavily against Nixon — and it probably should have been called "Can Nixon Win?"

Anyway, that was the political atmosphere in 1971 and, to an extent, early 1972 when George Wallace was campaigning for president — and he found a receptive audience in Florida. His victory there didn't really surprise people, but the margin did.

And it scared some people, too. Wallace got 42% of the Florida vote, more than twice what the runnerup, Hubert Humphrey, received. Humphrey, it should be noted, specifically targeted the labor vote, the black vote and the Jewish vote. Wallace focused on the broader theme of alienation.

For some voters, that was expressed in anger over busing. That may well have been based in racism, but the arguments against it sounded reasonable. Many parents protested that they weren't against integration, but they were against busing their children long distances from their homes to achieve it.

Wallace told the voters that he was on the side of the little guy. It was the "feel your pain" message of its day, I suppose.

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"The average man was being gutted by government. Taxes were important in George Wallace's message. ...

"But, above all, busing. Busing was what really got to the average man. ... This was 'social scheming' imposed by 'anthropologists, zoologists and sociologists' (Wallace loved to draw out the word 'sociologist') ...

"It was clear for the last three weeks before primary day that George Wallace would lead in the spread–eagle Florida primary. ... But it might be close."

Theodore H. White
"The Making of the President 1972"

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In the end, though, it was far from close.

And, for awhile, there was some real anxiety in Democratic circles about the possibility that Wallace would develop some momentum that could carry him to the nomination.

But that didn't happen — at least, not outside the South.

Wallace chose not to compete against Muskie and Henry Jackson in the Illinois primary the following week, and he edged out Humphrey for second place against McGovern in Wisconsin three weeks after the Florida primary.

The air was escaping from the balloon he grabbed in Florida.

Wallace finished a distant fourth in Massachusetts in late April, and he ran second to Humphrey in Pennsylvania but still lost by a mile (if you consider 14 percentage points a mile in politics).

In the two–month interval between Wallace's victory in Florida and the attempt on his life, Wallace won only two primaries — Tennessee and North Carolina.

No one realized it in March 1972, but Wallace's apparent ascendance in national politics would end well before the convention.

Outwardly, it ended on that day in May when Arthur Bremer tried to kill Wallace in a shopping center parking lot in Maryland.

Realistically, it reached its peak 40 years ago today.

Hoosier Buddy?

In the ongoing countdown to next year's election, there are 344 days to go until the votes are counted on Nov. 6, 2012.

That's 49 weeks from tomorrow.

Just think of all the things that will be determined — one way or another — between now and that night 49 weeks from tomorrow night.

In spite of that, though, there are a few things that can be taken for granted.

It is generally assumed, for example, that Barack Obama will receive his party's nomination. No challenger has emerged; in fact, no Democrat, prominent or otherwise, is even said to be considering a challenge.

Diehard Democrats have been saying for months that the absence of competition for the nomination is a good sign. Jimmy Carter was challenged for his party's nomination in 1980, they have pointed out, and went on to lose the general election. Bill Clinton, on the other hand, was not seriously challenged for his party's nomination in 1996 — and easily won a second term.

No challenger means Obama doesn't have to spend campaign resources on his pursuit of the nomination. He can hold the funds for the fall campaign, when he can concentrate on winning the battleground states and the states that he carried last time that Democrats rarely win — and he can start slinging mud, as an incumbent with an unemployment rate as high as the one in America today must (and, inevitably, will) do, at whoever is leading in the polls this week.

That wasn't Lyndon Johnson's problem. LBJ's nomination was never in doubt, but he did have some modest opposition. Primaries didn't play the pivotal role in the nominating process in 1964 that they do today, but there were a few, and Alabama Gov. George Wallace challenged Johnson — and did astonishingly well — in some primaries in Northern states.

In those primaries, historian Theodore H. White wrote in "The Making of the President 1964," Wallace sought "to test whether racism could magnetize votes in the North as well as the South."

In Indiana, Wisconsin and Maryland, Wallace got his answer.

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"Wallace astounded political observers not so much by the percentage of votes he could draw for simple bigotry (34 percent of the Democratic vote in Wisconsin, 30 percent in Indiana, 43 percent in Maryland) as by the groups from whom he drew his votes. For he demonstrated pragmatically and for the first time the fear that white working–class Americans have of Negroes. ... in the mill town of Gary, Indiana, he actually carried every white precinct in the city among Democratic voters ..."

Theodore H. White
The Making of the President 1964

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Barring the most wildly improbable of developments, Obama will be the Democrats' standard bearer in 2012. No suspense there.

But the identity of Obama's opponent remains a mystery, and no one knows what the economy will be like when people go to the polls next fall.

So there is some suspense as America prepares for the start of the primary/caucus season.

The conventional wisdom is that people make up their minds about a presidency, not necessarily a president, about six months before an election. And, while today's Democrats would like to think that people will make their voting decision based on whether they like Obama on a personal level, the fact is that liking an incumbent and approving of the job he has done are two entirely different things.

It does help if voters like the president, and survey after survey shows that Americans tend to like Obama personally. But those same surveys show that most Americans think the country is going in the wrong direction.

That can be decisive in places where the outcome is in doubt — in the modern–day battleground states, where many voters may feel torn between the fact that they like Obama but don't like where they think the country is headed.

For many reasons, I feel safe in predicting that the Republican nominee — whoever that turns out to be — will win Indiana next year.

Indiana was an unexpected bonus for Democrats on Election Day 2008. The state votes for a Democrat about once in a generation — if that. Obama's victory there was the first for a Democratic presidential nominee in 44 years.

If Johnson hadn't carried Indiana in 1964, Obama would have been the first Democrat in his lifetime to carry the state.

LBJ was the only Democrat to carry Indiana in the lifetime of Obama's mother. She was born in 1942, and the last Democrat to carry Indiana before Johnson was Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1936.

Indiana voted for FDR in 1932, too. It took something as big as the Great Depression to get Indiana to vote Democratic in consecutive elections. Before the 1930s, the last time Indiana voted Democratic in consecutive elections was in the years just before the outbreak of the Civil War — in the middle of the 19th century.

Indiana did vote Democratic four times in the 20th century. In addition to LBJ's 1964 landslide and FDR's landslides of 1932 and 1936, Woodrow Wilson won the state in 1912 — when Republicans were divided between President William Howard Taft and former President Theodore Roosevelt.

If the Republicans had been united that year and either Taft or Roosevelt had been their nominee, their share of the vote combined would have exceeded Wilson's by nearly 35,000 out of more than 650,000 cast — a narrow margin, sure, but more substantial than the margin in Indiana for the Republican running against Wilson when he sought re–election four years later.

When he wrote about Johnson's landslide nearly 50 years ago, White also wrote about patterns he detected in the election returns, including the "ripples and bubbles of protest" spawned by the civil rights movement and the general racial unrest across the nation.

Such "ripples and bubbles," White wrote, were so hard to spot that one was forced to "pore over charts to find them." But he did observe evidence that the Democrats, as LBJ himself would say the following year, were handing the South to the Republicans for half a century.

The South, White wrote, showed "significant" declines in Democratic support, and those declines clearly continued in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s, through good years and bad years for both parties.

I guess it wasn't hard to identify that trend in the South in 1964. Five states in the Deep South voted Republican — some heavily — and the ones that remained in the Democratic column, as they had for generations, did so by much narrower margins than ever before, even when popular Republicans like Teddy Roosevelt and Dwight Eisenhower were on the ballot.

Almost no other states, even traditionally Republican ones, voted against Johnson in 1964. Nevertheless, White identified some ethnic "ripples and bubbles" in some northern states like Indiana — "Polish working–class wards" where the Republicans "managed to shave the Democratic percentages" in spite of the fact that it was an overwhelmingly Democratic year.

White acknowledged that he could not determine "whether this was an echo of backlash" or "ethnic identification" with the Republican running mate's Polish–American wife.

But the next 10 presidential elections suggested that Indiana's support for the Democrat in 1964 was an aberration, not the start of political realignment there.

And there is no reason to believe that Obama's victory there in 2008 was a realignment, either. His coattails weren't just short in Indiana, they were nonexistent. While Obama was winning a squeaker (50% to 49%) against John McCain with the help of young and minority voters in the cities, the Republican governor was being re–elected with 58% of the vote.

In 2010, Republican Dan Coats, who spent a decade in the U.S. Senate previously, was elected the state's junior senator with 55% of the vote. Six of the state's nine House districts elected Republicans, most of them with more than 60% of the vote.

Indiana&apo;s roots are planted deep in Republican soil, and its support for the Democrat in 2008 was an aberration. Any state–by–state prediction for 2012 that suggests that Obama will retain Indiana can be dismissed as unreliable.

On the evening of Nov. 6, 2012, Indiana is likely to be one of the first states projected for the Republican nominee.

You can take it to the bank.

Sweet Home Alabama

They held their primaries in Alabama this week, and I'm a little bewildered.

A black man named Artur Davis, who has represented west Alabama's Seventh District in the U.S. House since 2003, ran for governor and was handily beaten by the state's agriculture commissioner, a white man named Ron Sparks.

Unofficially, Sparks received 62% of the vote in what the Birmingham News called "one of the more remarkable upsets in Alabama primary history."

Huh?

I grew up in the South, but I have never lived in Alabama. In fact, I have seldom even been in Alabama. And — no offense intended to the congressman — I had never heard of Artur Davis until a few days before Christmas, when his colleague, Parker Griffith, switched from the Democratic Party to the Republican Party.

Obviously, my credentials as an Alabama insider are seriously lacking. Actually, I would characterize them as nonexistent.

In the course of researching my blog article on that decision, I learned about Davis' campaign and discovered that he had been saying that Griffith's decision "repudiates the hard work of many Democrats who sustained him."

I saw nothing at the time that indicated whether Davis or Sparks was in front in the governor's race. I knew nothing of their political philosophies (I have since learned that Davis is, based mostly on his congressional voting record, a centrist, but I still know very little about Sparks' views). And I will readily admit that my gut reaction was based on what I have seen and heard about Alabama and the Deep South all my life.

My gut reaction last December was that Davis would lose — eventually. I didn't know if he would lose the Democratic primary, because most blacks in America are Democrats and Alabama (like most Southern states) has a fairly large black population.

It was possible, I reasoned, that the Democratic Party in Alabama — the same Democratic Party that nominated George Wallace for governor four times — might nominate Davis.

That's the same George Wallace who was remembered in a PBS documentary by a black lawyer for being "the most liberal judge that I had ever practiced law in front of," but, after losing the 1958 gubernatorial nomination to a Ku Klux Klan–backed opponent, ambition may have gotten the better of him, and he vowed never to be "outseged" again.

After being sworn in as governor the first time in January 1963, he famously proclaimed, "Segregation now! Segregation tomorrow! Segregation forever!" Accurate or not, that came to summarize Wallace in the minds of most Americans — a defiant, stand–in–the–schoolhouse–door racist.

And, more than 10 years later, Wallace lamented, after endorsing Jimmy Carter (the symbol of the "new" South) for president, that "I had to do things — say things — to get elected in Alabama that made it impossible for me to ever be president."

Well, Wallace (along with just about all of the American politicians who built state and national careers on the tragedy of racial conflicts) has been dead for many years now. But the attitudes that he and others exploited for their own political gain were generations in the making and cannot be completely erased in a single election.

Still, there is no doubt the parties have moved farther to each extreme. Wallace's son and namesake is a Republican now, and I wouldn't be surprised if most of the descendants of the Alabamians who elected the elder Wallace governor so many times now regard themselves as Republicans, too. Thus, it wouldn't shock me at all if Alabama's Democrats are more liberal than their ancestors.

So I couldn't conclude that Alabama's Democrats would not nominate a black man for governor — but, ultimately, I believed his candidacy was doomed. I found no reason to believe, as some people apparently did after Davis was elected in 2002 to represent a newly created district that is more than 60% black, that he was a rising star in Alabama politics. And, yes, I suppose that was not politically correct in the modern sense because I presumed his lack of statewide star quality was a racial thing.

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Oh, yes, a lot of things have changed in the South, and, for all I know, Davis was doing much better in the polls at some point than he did when the voters cast their ballots this week. But maybe this was one of those Bradley effect deals, where poll respondents said they would vote for the black guy but, at the moment of truth, just couldn't do it.

OK, Davis lost the party primary. But if he had not lost the party nomination, I'm inclined to think he would have lost the general election — when the more conservative Alabamians will participate along with the left–leaners.

But, as I study accounts of the final weeks of the campaign, I wonder if maybe Alabama's Democrats actually gave the nation some reassurance that the state has progressed farther than most had dared to dream.

Maybe it was mostly about race. Maybe it was a case of the so–called Bradley effect.

But, maybe, it was something as simple and as basic as the adage so memorably expressed by Tip O'Neill: "All politics is local."

A couple of weeks ago, the Tuscaloosa News quoted a political science professor as saying that there was a significant difference in the candidates' approaches. Davis, he said, appeared to be structuring his campaign with the general election voters in mind while Sparks was focused on the party's voters, the ones he had to persuade to win the nomination.

Now, to put it bluntly, it is never a good idea to run as if you have already won the preliminary and you're mostly positioning yourself for the general election campaign. It seems like a recipe for disaster for any politician — never mind the politician's race, gender, age, religion, etc.

Maybe, to paraphrase Michael Jackson, it don't matter if you're black or white — as long as you tell 'em what they want to hear. Perhaps Democratic voters didn't want to hear Davis defend his vote against health care reform, which might have played well in November. Perhaps they were more impressed by the facts that the state's black leaders and the teachers and other groups that appeal to today's Democrats endorsed Sparks.

Anyway, I believe race did play a part in what happened. Maybe its influence was very subtle. In spite of all the talk of a post–racial America, it seems to me that such change is coming more slowly in the South than it is in other regions. At some point, I hope the South can overcome its racist legacy, but it will require a certain amount of tolerance and understanding on the part of the rest of America.

There seems to be a one–size–fits–all mentality outside the South about black politicians. Since Obama's election in 2008, the conventional wisdom appears to be that it is all a matter of strategy — especially if you read Jeff Zeleny's article on the Alabama primaries in the New York Times: "[T]he decisive defeat of Artur Davis ... illustrates the limits of trying to replicate the strategy that helped carry President Obama to office," he writes.

That strikes me as being willfully ignorant of certain facts — one of which is that there is nothing of the sort to replicate in Alabama. Two years ago, more than three–fifths of Alabama voters voted for John McCain.

I don't know if Davis openly sought to emulate Obama's national triumph in a Deep South state or if that objective was a presumption by some in the outside media, but, if that was the strategy, it leads me to ask a simple question: Why?

Blacks have seldom won statewide races in America — and almost never in the South. And it is worth remembering that most Southern states did not vote for Obama, either. It may be hard for people in other regions to understand, but even with the sizable black populations in this region, Obama has never been especially popular here.

And maybe that is, to a certain extent, the product of racial conflict.

Because, you see, another fact that has been conveniently ignored is that, in 2008, the results in Alabama clearly were polarized by race. Whites, who account for nearly 69% of the state's population, voted heavily for McCain; blacks voted heavily for Obama.

The same thing happened in other Southern states, too. It just wasn't as pronounced as it was in Alabama.

And, yet, as I say, Davis' voting record was a centrist one. Alabama Democrats who wanted to win a governor's race for the first time in the 21st century should have been tempted to nominate Davis — and, yet, most of them picked his white opponent.

You can reach a racist conclusion based on that information if you wish. And, human nature being what it is, there may always be those voters who make choices based on irrelevant factors like race or gender or age or religion. Politicians don't get to choose what the voters get to use to make electoral decisions.

But maybe the message from most of Alabama's Democrats wasn't that a black man had been rejected by the voters (although there is no getting around the fact that a black man did lose the primary).

Maybe the message was that voters have evolved so much in this country that a black Democrat can be defeated in his party's primary because his views did not reflect the voters' — not because he was black.

Isn't that what Martin Luther King was talking about when he spoke of being judged not by the color of one's skin but the content of one's character?

Cornelia Wallace Dies

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George Wallace was shot by Arthur Bremer on May 15, 1972.

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Cornelia Wallace is dead, a casualty of cancer at the age of 69.

If you're under 40, you may not know who Cornelia Wallace was.

But if you're over 40, the image of her flinging her body on the supine form of her husband, Gov. George Wallace of Alabama, to protect him after he had been the victim of an assassination attempt in May 1972 is comparable to the memory of Jackie Kennedy attempting to shield President Kennedy from additional gunshots in Dallas in 1963.

In fact, Cornelia Wallace was often compared to Jackie Kennedy in the South because of her raven-haired good looks and prominence as the wife of a famous politician. "C'nelia," as she was known, was nicknamed "the Jackie Kennedy of the Rednecks."

And now, like Jackie Kennedy, Cornelia Wallace is dead of cancer in her 60s, less than three weeks before her 70th birthday.

Cornelia Wallace always seemed to be mindful of appearances and was credited with improving her husband's public image.

"Under the influence of his attractive new wife, Cornelia, he had shed the old undertaker's uniform — dark suit, narrow black necktie — of Southern courthouse politicians," wrote Theodore H. White in The Making of the President 1972, "and was garbed now in bright shirts, fashionable double-knit suits, broad colorful ties."

I don't know what influence she may have had on his campaign slogan, but Wallace's 1972 slogan ("Send Them a Message") certainly had more subtlety than the one he used in his independent presidential campaign of 1968 ("Not a Dime's Worth of Difference") or the famous line from his 1963 gubernatorial inaugural ("Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever").

Like most assassinations — or assassination attempts — the attack on Wallace was totally unexpected.

Riding high in public opinion polls in mid-May 1972, Wallace was making a presidential campaign stop in a Laurel, Md., shopping center and was working the crowd after his speech. Arthur Bremer, a loner who desperately wanted to be famous, fired several shots at him from close range before being subdued.

Bremer didn't kill Wallace, but the damage had been done. One of the bullets fired by Bremer that day lodged in Wallace's spinal column, and he was paralyzed and confined to a wheelchair until the day he died in 1998.

The day after the shooting, Wallace won primaries in Maryland, Tennessee and North Carolina, in part, some said, because of sympathy.

But the shooting may well have cost him whatever chance he had of winning the nomination. Wallace remained hospitalized for an extensive period, and South Dakota Sen. George McGovern secured the nomination.

Cornelia Wallace, the niece of a former Alabama governor who, ironically, lost to Wallace in 1962, remained by his side while he recovered in a hospital in Silver Spring, Md. She was with him in his successful bid for re-election in 1974, and she was with him during his unsuccessful campaign for the Democratic nomination in 1976, which turned out to be Wallace's final bid for the White House.

The Wallaces, who married in 1971, divorced in 1978, and Cornelia Wallace later moved to Florida to be closer to her two sons from a previous marriage.

She died in Florida on Thursday. Her funeral will be held Monday in Winter Haven, Fla.

Last Sunday was the 38th anniversary of the Wallaces' marriage.

Change Is Best Served By Ballot, Not Bullet

We live in turbulent times, but -- so far, at least -- we're changing our leadership in the civilized way that a democracy makes such changes.

With ballots, not bullets.

Anyone who is under 35 doesn't really appreciate how different things are today.

But, for people of my generation -- in fact, for people of my parents' generation -- it was almost unheard of for a president to be assassinated.

For awhile.

But it didn't stay that way.

Over about a 40-year period, three presidents were assassinated -- Abraham Lincoln in 1865, James Garfield in 1881 and William McKinley in 1901.

Then we went through about six decades without a presidential assassination. A couple of presidents died, but their deaths were due to natural causes, not assassin's bullets.

But then, things changed. And when I was growing up, assassinations seemed to be a fact of life.

I was about to turn 4 years old when President Kennedy was assassinated. I didn't know or understand what was happening in the world. "The world," as far as I was concerned, was my home and my yard.

At the time, my family didn't own a TV set, but our neighbors did.

So we spent most of the next four days at the neighbors' house -- which was fine with me because our neighbors had a son who was only a few months older than I was. He was my playmate -- and, as far as I was concerned, he had the coolest toys to play with.

I didn't know why we were spending so much time at the neighbors' house. But if it meant I could ride my friend's new tricycle or play with some of his other toys, I wasn't going to rock the boat.

The mental images I have of Kennedy's funeral are from films I've seen. My actual memories of that period are the spotty impressions of a 3-year-old.

It was different four years later, when assassins were killing Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy. And I was more aware of what was happening in the world around me.

I remember news reports of the riots that swept across the nation when King was killed. I remember the national convulsion of mourning when Bobby Kennedy was killed. I remember the general feeling of helplessness that came with both murders.

When I was growing up in the 1960s, two words seemed to imply that death was inevitable -- "cancer" and "assassination." When someone mentioned either of those words, that feeling of helplessness returned.

("Assassination attempts" didn't always succeed, as I learned from a series of experiences in the 1970s. But, although some of its strength has diminished, "cancer," regrettably, has retained most of its power. When John Dean told the senators who were investigating the Watergate scandal that there was "a cancer growing on the presidency," the implication was that Nixon's presidency was doomed. As, indeed, it was.)

But as I grew older, things changed for the better.

As an adult, I've seen people I care about survive a diagnosis of cancer. I've seen some who haven't, but the survival rate has improved and, for that, I am grateful.

And I've seen famous people who were targeted for assassination but survived.

Certainly, there were some who didn't survive. John Lennon was killed by a fan in front of his New York building in 1980.

But Ronald Reagan lived through an assassination attempt in 1981. So did Pope John Paul II. And Gerald Ford survived two attempts on his life a few weeks apart in 1975.

And the closest thing I've seen to the public paroxysm of pain that followed the King and Kennedy assassinations in 1968 was the global response to the apparently accidental death of Princess Diana nearly 11 years ago.

The era of unsuccessful assassination attempts really began, I guess, on this date 36 years ago, when George Wallace was shot after speaking at a campaign rally in Laurel, Md.

Wallace was famous for his segregationist politics (those who are old enough will remember his stand in the schoolhouse door at the University of Alabama, pictured at left) -- but the man who shot him, Arthur Bremer, claimed that his only motivation in attempting to kill Wallace was to become famous.

Oddly enough, Bremer's story was the inspiration for the main character (played by Robert De Niro) in the 1976 movie "Taxi Driver," co-starring Jodie Foster.

Foster's performance in the film in turn motivated John Hinckley to attempt his assassination of Reagan in 1981. Hinckley claimed he wanted to impress Foster.

One of life's ironies.

Bremer was convicted of attempted murder and sentenced to 63 years in prison. His sentence was later reduced to 53 years on appeal.

Wallace died in 1998. Although paralyzed by the shooting, he lived another quarter of a century and was nearly 80 years old when he died. Bremer's act was something Wallace had to live with, but it doesn't appear to have shortened his life.

Last year, nearly a decade after Wallace's death, Bremer was released from prison at the age of 57. He will be on probation for the next 17 years.

Famous people continue to be stalked. Some have been attacked, and some have died. But we can all be grateful that political assassinations have been prevented in America for the last 40 years. Let's hope it stays that way.

We don't need people making decisions for the rest of us with guns.