Will the Democrats in Chicago Repeat 1968?

I just downloaded Office 365 and don’t want to wait until tomorrow, so I’m going to write a brief story and upload it today, just to make sure that the 70 bucks I gave to Microsoft is buying anything other than a message that the software doesn’t work.

And what I am thinking about is a report I just saw on CNN about how the Democrats are expecting a massive demonstration about Gaza this week during their convention meet in Chicago.

Now it just so happens that I was in the demonstrations outside the Chicago Democrat(ic) convention in 1968 which was also a demonstration against a war, in that case the war in Vietnam. I was a graduate student in Chicago that year and several months prior to the convention we held a teach-in against the war on the campus, an event when none other than Ted Kennedy showed up to lecture us on why the United States needed to ‘stay the course’ in Vietnam because we had made a commitment to an ally and commitments needed to be maintained.

A month or so after Ted Kennedy appeared at our campus his older brother Bobby announced his intention to run against the incumbent President, Lyndon Johnson, who then announced that he wouldn’t run again but his Vice President, Hubert Humphrey, declared himself to be a candidate and made it clear that he would more or less follow the Administration’s line.

By the time the convention opened on August 26th, the ant-war movement had already lost its two most important political leaders, Martin Luther King…