Remembrance of embarrassments past
Hillary Clinton has to be embarrassed to have outpolled that uncommitted fellow in Michigan by only about 15 percentage points. She’s not the first candidate to have been embarrassed in a presidential primary, but off-hand I can’t think of precedent for being embarrassed by a non-entity.
Just for fun, let’s recall some other embarrassing primary moments. Two obvious ones involved sitting presidents. In 1992, President Bush suffered the indignity of defeating commentator Pat Buchanan in New Hampshire by only a 52-37 margin. The fact that the early returns tended to favor Buchanan made the contest particularly disquieting for the president. And in 1968, President Johnson defeated Sen. Eugene McCarthy in New Hampshire by a margin of only 50-42, an experience that may have caused Johnson not to seek re-election. It should remembered, however, that Johnson’s name didn’t appear on the ballot – voters had to write him in.
1964 is perhaps the most notable year for embarrassment. It started in New Hampshire. Barry Goldwater and Nelson Rockefeller were the overwhelming co-favorites for the Republican nomination. However, Henry Cabot Lodge defeated both of them. Lodge received 36 percent of the vote compared to 22 percent for Goldwater and 21 percent for Rockefeller. Lodge, stationed in Saigon as our ambassador to South Vietnam at the time, was neither on the ballot nor running for president.
This wasn’t Goldwater’s only less than stellar showing. In Indiana, his only opposition came from Minnesota's former boy governor, Harold Stassen, who ran for president every four years and had become a laughingstock. Goldwater easily defeated Stassen, but his margin of victory – approximately 72-28 – was not inspiring. The same was true in Illinois where Goldwater defeated Sen. Margaret Chase Smith to a similar tune. Keep in mind, however, that Goldwater was challenging the Republican establishment of the day (aka "the Eastern Establishment"), so it wasn’t hugely surprising that a substantial protest vote materialized.
If some of the Republican results in 1964 were an embarrassment to Goldwater – the eventual nominee – and his arch-rival Rockefeller, the results on the Democratic side were a disgrace to the party. George Wallace of Alabama, running as an out-and-out segregationist, decided to take his campaign to the North, specifically to Maryland and Indiana (arguably “border states”) and to Wisconsin. President Johnson declined to enter these primaries; instead the party put up “favorite sons” as Johnson’s surrogates.
Running against the sitting governors of Indiana and Wisconsin, Wallace captured approximately one-third of the vote in both states. Wisconsin’s governor had predicted that Wallace would get no more than 100,000 votes, and had labeled even that number "a catastrophe." Yet, Wallace collected more than 250,000 votes. And in Maryland, where the national and state party pulled out all of the stops to support the state’s Democratic Senator, Wallace gained approximately 43 percent of the vote including (I believe) a majority of the white vote.
Wallace’s real purpose in running in these states was probably to deter northern Senators from voting in favor of the pending Civil Rights Act of 1964. Fortunately, he did not succeed, thanks largely to Republican Senators, led by Everett Dirksen of Illinois, who were undaunted by the “white backlash” that Wallace helped generate.
Most of the instances recounted above involve the embarrassment of a U.S. president. So too, in a way, does last night's result in Michigan.
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