I really thought this was going to be a tough one when I offered it last week.
George Wallace (the white politician, not the fine black comedian) was an anomoly, the last gasp of a two-generation old political myth, the Southern Populist.
In 1966, he was a man alienated from his own party. Humiliated at the school house door by President John F. Kennedy (a man from his own party) he watched in horror as another Democrat, Lyndon Johnson, pushed through the civil rights laws.
After winning re-election in 1966, Wallace would finally take the ultimate steps in 1968, running first in the Democratic primaries and then (finally) as an independent, winning five southern states (one short of Goldwater) but in the process taking 15% of the national vote out of Democrats’ hands. Nixon’s "Southern Strategy" then placed that vote in the GOP, giving this generation a nearly 3-2 GOP majority — all other things being equal.
Wallace was a man of the past. Those who remember him at all probably recall his being shot by Arthur Bremer when he ran again, in 1972, looking fit to break the Democrats apart again. What you probably don’t remember is that Wallace later made his peace, apologized for his past racism. Most blacks in Alabama accepted the apology.
So who’s Wallace now?
The politics of Wallace were vital to Democratic hopes a generation before he broke from his party. The same is true for Bloomberg now.
Michael Bloomberg is the last vestige of New York’s "Republican liberalism," a strain that gave us Thomas E. Dewey, Jacob Javits, Nelson Rockefeller and (perhaps most memorably) John V. Lindsay. Lindsay, in fact, was the new Mayor of New York in 1966 and beginning, through a campaign of fecklessness, shortsightedness, and wavy hair, the process by which New York City would be plunged into bankruptcy a decade later.
Just as Wallace was used as a tool to turn a big swath of the Democratic Party into "Reagan Democrats," so The Democratic Leadership Council now hopes to use Bloomberg against the GOP. They think there are millions of moderates who aren’t ready for the Dean party, enough to make Bloomberg — a billionaire who is moderate on social issues — viable.
Give them credit. They know their history.
So now we’ve identified some of the major players in our 1966 Game. There is one missing, of course, the person around whom all this revolves, the creator of the new Thesis, the Godfather of the new movement.
Who’s Barry Goldwater now?
