Democratic ticket
Opinion: The Clintons' and Biden's support will be beyond valuable this autumn.
Sixty years ago at the Democratic National Convention, delegates from the southern states staged a walkout during the then-Mayor of Minneapolis and future Vice-President Hubert Humphrey's speech. What was the issue that irked them so? A line in his speech, where he claimed that America should: “Walk out of the dark shadow of States Rights and into the bright sunshine of Human Rights”. That comment, the boiling point of an argument over whether segregation of black and white communities, split the party in two that year. One side was a splinter faction called the Dixiecrats, led by the notorious white supremacist Senator Strom Thurmond, while Harry Truman led the rest of the more liberal wing to the Presidency, the core base of the Democratic Party we know today, while the rest of the more traditional southern Dems eventually defected to the Republicans over the course of the next twenty years.
Given that brief little history lesson, it's practically impossible to downplay the significance of Barack Obama's acceptance of his party's nomination, irrespective of your political position.
Not that there wasn't the chance of a derailment at the beginning. Though not nearly as grave or sinister as the Convention of '48, Hillary Clinton's presence, and more to the point her supporters, threatened to undermine the whole show with the suggestion that a significant percentage of those who put an x beside Hillary's name in the Primaries wouldn't follow party lines come November. However, while there still might be a few on the fringes, the keynote speeches from both Clintons, Hillary on Tuesday and Bill on Wednesday, put those fears to rest. There are some in the cable news business who are still casting aspersions over how much the Clintons really mean it, however, their support will be beyond valuable this autumn. As, indeed, will Joe Biden.
On the face of it picking a Senator from a tiny state, Delaware, with the population of a small Irish family gathering that always votes Democratic anyway seemed an odd choice. But, Biden has family ties in working class Pennsylvania, where his family worked in the coal mines, and apart from winning the votes of Zoolander fans it's also hoped he'll shore in blue collar voters and Catholics, exactly the same demographics that Clinton was winning in the primaries. He also, however, has a tendency for making the occasional gaffe (He once quoted a Neil Kinnock speech without crediting him, prompting his dropping out of the 1988 Presidential Race) and has a tendency towards a “Too far, Joe!” sense of humour. Mind you, that acerbic wit of his may prove to be just the antidote to his Republican counterpart, whom you sense is only ever one well-placed put down away from being ruined.
Of course though, in this particularly long running play Barack Obama is still very much the leading man, the question is, even with his near-messianic status and immense and broad popularity, is his winning the Presidency too good to be true? At the height of the peace love and understanding era that was the late sixties, you'd think that a square like Richard Nixon would be no match for the liberals and hippies and reformers who seemed to be everywhere, but he took the Presidency in 1968 a matter of months after the deaths of Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy, thanks to what were called “the silent majority” who didn't care much for the vocal minority. Obama's followers, like King's and Kennedy's before him, are loud and plentiful, but to win he'll need some quiet voters too.
By: Paddy Duffy
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Posted by : andrew - 29 days ago
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