The closer Barack Obama gets to the White House, the more some people worry that some crazy is going to take a shot at him. Two weeks ago, when Hillary Clinton invoked the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy as evidence that she was not indecently prolonging the Democratic primary season, the furor that erupted was wildly disproportionate, because whatever Clinton's many sins, she was not in any sense suggesting that she was waiting for Obama to get shot so she could win the nomination.
But part of what she tapped into to was the fear, dread really, that the turbulence of 1968 may find an echo the 2008 campaign with equally deadly results; the Obama candidacy seems an odd reflection of the turbulent events of that time. He is both the embodiment of Martin Luther King's Dream and a latter-day incarnation of Bobby Kennedy's inspirational call for hope and change.
But as Clinton found out, just the mention of assassination in the closes proximity on Obama's name set off alarms, in particular for black people and those of a certain age.
In a larger sense, though the shadows of 1968 have hovered over this presidential election year, with all the promise and foreboding the parallels would suggest. This election has also been framed by an unpopular president prosecuting an unpopular war. Iraq may not be Vietnam, but George W. Bush cannot escape the same deep sense of failure that marked LBJ's presidency, and which will stain his into perpetuity.
And while the social fissures may not run as deep as they did in 1968, (There are no draft cards to burn and there are no riots in the cities) it is clear that 2008, like 1968, will mark the end of one distinct political moment and the emergence of another. If the Sixties ended in 1968, the Reagan Eighties are finally at their end in these waning days of the Bush presidency.
Richard Nixon's victory in 1968 represented the first success of the political conservatism that would dominate much of the next generation, most forcefully in the form of the Reagan's two terms and the Republican revolution of 1994. But now there is no doubt that the debacle of George W. Bush's presidency will close out that period, even if by some miracle John McCain is elected in November. Bush has essentially discredited everything to the conservative revolution had come to stand for, and there seems no debate about whether to turn away from him and his ideology.
Indeed, at times, it seems like this election was about the Sixties. John McCain apologized for not supporting a national holiday honoring Martin Luther King holiday. There was the pantomime of a debate between Clinton and Obama over whether MLK or LBJ deserved more credit for the passage of the civil rights legislation in the Sixties.
And, of course, there was deep Democratic worry that sharp divisions over the war could drive the party to defeat in November, in much the same way such disagreements propelled Nixon to victory in 1968.
But I think in all the good and bad ways imaginable, it is really the ghost of Bobby Kennedy that had defined the 1968 nostalgia that has been injected into the 2008 campaign.
It is easy to draw parallels between Obama and Kennedy: young, idealistic, first-term senators whose calls for change and insistence on some kind of brighter future despite the odds took them to the brink of the presidency. Kennedy died 40 years ago yesterday; shot as he walked through the kitchen of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles after delivering his California primary victory speech.
Kennedy had been in the race for two and half months when he was killed. He had become, in many ways, the most prominent civil rights advocate in the country, talking about racial equality and poverty in what was obviously a very hostile environment. But in the short time he was in the race, he had come to be seen as unstoppable. The worry was that he was unstoppable, unless someone shot him. Someone did.
This, quite frankly, is the deep and terrifying worry some people have about Obama. And for some his triumph in the Democratic primary deepens that concern. Hillary Clinton does have some claim to the RFK legacy. She sits in the same Senate seat from which he launched his campaign. And as a close family member of a former president, she was walking a path that Bobby tried to take 40 years ago.
But it is Obama, with his unrelenting message of hope and change and his deep personal charisma, who has emerged as the RFK of 2008.
