The Liveliest Campaign Season Since 1968

[Geee]

American Thinker:

Those who slight the Republican primary candidates and sneer at their campaigns are either innocently misinforming their audience or strategically disinforming them. In fact, this is the all-around spunkiest campaign season I have witnessed since 1968 and the smartest since about 1864.

I have been tracking campaigns closely since 1960. Then, as a pre-teen paperboy and JFK fan, I scrutinized the results of the Democratic primaries as intensely as I did Dodger games. In 1964, I chanced upon Ronald Reagan's stirring televised defense of Barry Goldwater and began to rethink my adolescent allegiances.

In 1968, I tried desperately to reconcile my drift to the right with Robert Kennedy's cagy shift to the left. His assassination in June of that year spared me that burden and thrust me, though still too young to vote, into the ranks of the independent and undecided. That was the year, of course, that the Occupy Chicago folks turned the Democratic Convention into a third-world smackdown. As the son of a cop, they lost me forever.
For pure theater, however, even Chicago did not match a George Wallace rally I attended that year in downtown Newark, New Jersey. With an 8 mm camera in hand, I stood on the low wall surrounding Military Park and filmed the day's events.

First arriving, and quickly surrounding the speaker's platform, were Wallace's supporters. This being Tony Soprano's hometown as well as my own, most of them were Italian-Americans. Scores of angry student types, mostly white and hirsute, flooded the park behind them. Bearing the banners of the Progressive Worker Party, they started surging up against Wallace's paesanos.

Before the Italians could respond, a motorcycle gang roared up on their Harleys. The gang members inserted themselves between the Wallace supporters and opponents. Their backs to the stage, they stared down the wide-eyed students, who, upon seeing the gang patch, "United Klans of America," surely regretted cutting class that day.

This was enough for the Newark P.D. A flying squad of cops, none smaller than an NFL linebacker, blew right by me and waded into the melee. A month after Chicago, our young leftist friends developed a new and healthy respect for the police.

An equal opportunity voyeur, I brought my camera to an Eldridge Cleaver rally in Albany, New York a few weeks later. The Black Panther honcho was also running for president. Why not? When asked by a reporter what candidate Cleaver hoped to bring down, Cleaver replied without hint of a smile, "Yo Mama." Next question?