1968 Redux: Will Phillips End Biden’s Campaign?

History doesn’t repeat, but it rhymes. Sometimes so much it seems to be making fun of us.

On Friday, Minnesota Rep. Dean Phillips shook up the Democratic presidential race by registering for the New Hampshire Democratic primary. Phillips said he is motivated by weak polling from Biden in the face of a seemingly inevitable Trump candidacy. “I will not sit still and not be quiet in the face of numbers that are so clearly saying that we’re going to be facing an emergency next November,” he explained.

Is it really a shake-up? Phillips has no name recognition, a puny war chest, and no defining issues other than that he is not Joe Biden. But he is clever — Phillips stole a march on the president, getting on the primary ballot under the wire and forcing Biden to mount a write-in campaign. Sloppy tradecraft from the Biden political operatives who let that happen.

And here is where the historical rhyming comes in. In 1968, Sen. Eugene McCarthy, also from Minnesota, mounted a primary challenge to incumbent President Lyndon Johnson. Johnson also was surprised and, like Biden, had to mount a write-in campaign. 

Even given that disadvantage, Johnson won 50 percent of the vote to McCarthy’s 42 percent in the New Hampshire primary. But superior organization on the ground netted McCarthy 20 of the 24 available delegates. So, though Johnson won the tally, he, in fact, lost — and not just the delegate count. McCarthy demonstrated that the god could bleed.

Johnson’s view of the New Hampshire Democrats who backed McCarthy was typically homespun. The night before the election, he told special adviser John P. Roche, “Johnny, every Democrat who’s mad at his wife or her husband or thinks taxes are too high or whatever is going to get it out of his or her system by kicking Lyndon Johnson in the ass.” The same type of “ass kicking” dynamic might be operative today.

McCarthy is remembered as a Vietnam War peace candidate, but he was more an opportunist than an idealist. Johnson was weak on the Vietnam issue after the 1968 Tet Offensive, so McCarthy used it against him. In fact, polling showed most McCarthy supporters were not doves but thought that Johnson was too soft on the war, and many deserted the party for former Alabama Gov. George Wallace, running third party, in the fall. (READ MORE: How the ’60s and Early ’70s Ignited the Culture Wars)

McCarthy’s motive was not peace but spite, payback for not being chosen as vice president for the 1964 campaign (which went to fellow Minnesotan Hubert Humphrey). Johnson had humiliated McCarthy by allowing him to think the job was his and encouraging him to go into seclusion before the announcement was made. Roche related a story that a few years later, McCarthy said that he ran in 1968 “because that son of a bitch kept me waiting in that motel for five days.” So, McCarthy’s campaign was based on petty revenge. “These things happen,” Roche explained. “There are very simple answers sometimes.”

And get this: McCarthy’s perceived victory paved the way for Sen. Robert F. Kennedy to announce his candidacy four days later. Today, we have his son Robert F. Kennedy Jr. already running. (RELATED: EXCLUSIVE: RFK Jr., Threatened Again, Sues the Biden Administration)

Phillips, like McCarthy, is opposing a president with sagging approval ratings, international crises, a weak economy, and no apparent vision for the future. Democrats may find voting for Phillips an attractive way to send the White House a message, the same way they did in 1968. And don’t count out the idea that some New Hampshirites may want payback for the Democrats’ trying to ease them out of the primary poll position. Granite Staters take their “first in the nation” status seriously. Politically, it’s the best thing they have going.

Phillips has no chance of winning the nomination, but, by making Biden scramble, he could do well enough to cause a ruckus. It could confirm suspicions some Democrats have that Biden is simply not up to the task of running. Maybe other candidates will jump in the way RFK Sr. did in 1968. And — who knows? — maybe Biden will take the easy way out and declare he will not seek another term, like Johnson did three weeks after New Hampshire.

But that might be a rhyme too far.

James S. Robbins is Dean of Academics at the Institute of World Politics and author of This Time We Win: Revisiting the Tet Offensive.

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