Will Obama Let the Sunshine In? [circa 1968]

RealClearPolitics -- Articles ^ | July 10, 2008 | Daniel Henninger

[Uncle Ralph]

How perfect it was that while running for president in 2008, the 40th anniversary of "1968," Barack Obama should denounce the 1960s. His candidacy and his times are bland compared to what was happening then, or so everyone thought.

The year 1968 had a torrent of cataclysmic political events, each of which might have destabilized any other year.

We just passed Robert Kennedy's assassination, and before that the Paris student riots in May 1968. Up next month, the Democratic convention in Chicago - with its pitched battles in Grant Park between the cops and antiwar demonstrators, the anti-Vietnam protests inside the hall, Mayor Richard Daley on home TVs screaming hysterically at Sen. Abraham Ribicoff.

Thus spake Sen. Barack Obama, b. 1961:

"There is no doubt that we represent the kind of change that Sen. Clinton cannot deliver on. And part of it is generational. Sen. Clinton and others, they have been fighting some of the same fights since the '60s. And it makes it very difficult for them to bring the country together to get things done."

Sen. Clinton "and others" would include House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, various Senate and House Committee chairmen, DNC Chairman Howard Dean, and much of the Congressional Black Caucus whose political formation started and stopped in the civil rights movement of the 1960s.

Insofar as many of the people running Sen. Obama's own party have spent the past four decades playing the Hatfields to the conservative McCoys, can one truly say he has freed himself from those times?

As someone might have said back then, sort of. . . .

[garyhope]

There’s no sunshine where Obammy has his head stuck.