Eugene McCarthy, RIP.

In a string of elections ranging some twenty years, Eugene McCarthy played the political gadfly, bringing down a president, battling his own party and openly challenging another senator named McCarthy. He even shunned Jimmy Carter in favor of Ronald Reagan, which in retrospect was probably his most astute call. McCarthy died yesterday of complication from Parkinson's Disease.

McCarthy is best known, of course, for bringing about the sort-of abdication of LBJ by putting up a strong challenge in the New Hampshire primary in 1968 based on his vehement opposition to the Vietnam War. His strong showing exposed Johnson's vulnerability, which attracted Bobby Kennedy to the race. After Kennedy's assassination, McCarthy ultimately lost the Democratic nomination to Hubert Humphrey at the tumultuous Chicago convention.

The Democratic party has never recovered. Many still regard McCarthy as a hero, and many will likely invoke is memory as another way to draw analogy between Iraq and Vietnam. While he is generally regarded as witty, principled and iconoclastic, others will regard him as a fool who assumed the mantle of conscience of a nation while merely using his well-honed persona as curmudgeon-in-chief to self-promote at the expense of his party and ultimately his nation.

In truth, McCarthy's antics that began in 1968 harmed his party so greatly that Democratic presidents have only held office for 12 of the last 36 years. The whole of the party is now in thrall to McCarthyite tactics, now seen as standard vogue al a Howard Dean and Jack Murtha, and trickling down, or bubbling up, from the likes of Cindy Sheehan and MoveOn.org. Generally regarded as a Democratic hero, he was instead the architect of the decades-long collapse of a once great political party. No more do we have Democratic, liberal hawks like FDR, Harry Truman and JFK (other than Joe Lieberman). Instead we have a party full of McCarthys. No party can survive that.

If you weep for the loss of the Democratic party, blame Eugene McCarthy.

The Senator was 89.

Comments

[Dave Schuler]

I'm not sure I agree with your assessment of McCarthy. Disclosure: I was not one of his supporters although nearly all of my peers were.

I think that Gene McCarthy was as decent a guy as can be expected from a politician who has risen to high political office (that is to say, not overly so). I think that he did what he did both from conviction and through calculation. He achieved a higher level of prominence than he ever could from being a Democrat loyal to the leadership of the party

My own opinion is that the real force that split the Democratic Party was George Wallace. His 1968 run for the presidency as an independent candidate—a reaction to the Civil Rights Act of 1965—split the Rooseveltian coalition. The Wallace voters never returned to the Democratic fold and have mostly voted Republican ever since.

Without competition from white Southern social conservatives the remaining Southern component of the coalition was African Americans and that (along with the activities of McGeorge Bundy at the Ford Foundation) set the stage for the interest group politics that has dominated the Democratic Party for the last 35 years.

[Daniel]

Dave,

While I agree with your assessment about the Wallace split, I see his exit from the party as a largely positive step in it's own right. But I think that it was McCarthy that set the standard for party disunity. With him, the party became a collection of cliques that have set about engaging in a permanent war within the party itself.