This story tells us that Sen. Clinton is marching on in the Democratic presidential primary to West Virginia, where she tells us…“It was West Virginia that made it possible for John Kennedy to become president. Now John Kennedy didn’t have the number of delegates he needed when he went to the convention in 1960, he had something equally as important. He had West Virginia behind him.”That’s a somewhat artful history lesson there by the former first lady.
As you can see from this .pdf link (not sure if it can be accessed - "select" content) to an archived New York Times story, John F. Kennedy may not have had all of the delegates he needed prior to the West Virginia primary, but unlike Sen. Clinton, he was leading his main opponent, Sen. Hubert Humphrey of Minnesota (I would also be interested to know if HRC met with coal miners and their families as JFK did or intends to do so; I can’t really determine that from the ABC News story).
The .pdf copy of the 1960 Times story tells us that, if anything, the Democratic primary was more chaotic then than now, with Kennedy in the lead followed by Humphrey, with former president Harry Truman ready to endorse Stuart Symington and LBJ also poised for a run (with Sen. Robert Byrd encouraging the anti-Kennedy vote in favor of Johnson based on Kennedy’s Catholicism…there was even talk of two-time Dem presidential loser Adlai Stevenson re-entering the contest).
As far as the Republicans were concerned, Richard Nixon was pretty much a lock, though New York Senator Nelson Rockefeller was poised to play a bit of a “spoiler” role somewhat like Ron Paul and his people are trying to do now.
Hillary would do well to be careful making comparisons between this and past Democratic presidential contests. If she were to somehow emerge as the nominee at this point, it would top any imagined precedent anyway, but not in a good way I believe (definitely not something to be encouraged as far as I’m concerned).
No comments:
Post a Comment