What A Non-Obama Ticket Might Mean For Future Majority (Part 1)

I don't mean this great website, I mean the millennial generation. There has been some consternation about what the newly interested masses of Obamaniacs will do if, God forbid, Obama isn't on the ticket next year.

There have been a few Presidential campaigns in the modern presidency that appealed on a movement scale to young people. Based on some of our history, the major options would seem to fall the following:

Youth for Goldwater, Clean for Gene (& R.F.K.), Dean for America.
I’ll look at each, in a three part series. First with an examination of the context of the race and then my thoughts on how it may apply or not to hypotheticals involving Barack Obama.

1. Youth for Goldwater - a large movement of largely hegemonic teens who felt, as the ads said, "In your heart, you know he's right." The children of important people, youngsters like Chris Matthews and Hillary Rodham (Clinton) joined the Radical Squares to become part of this movement back in the day.

More after the bump.

Goldwater was a bit of Ron Paul, a sprinkling of Mike Gravel dipped in John McCain. In a happy marriage, Goldwater tapped into Young Americans for Freedom (YAF) which grew popular with youth partly due to opposition to the draft on grounds of libertarian-tinged appeals to individual freedom. Similar appeals from Goldwater tapped into unhappiness with the government in general.

Also, when Goldwater said that President Lyndon Johnson's Vietnam policy was devoid of "goal, course, or purpose," leaving "only sudden death in the jungles and the slow strangulation of freedom," tens of thousands of teens, not willing or able to associate with the "transgressive" elements protesting the war in Vietnam from the left, found a large movement that looked like politics as their parents knew it. This marriage infused Goldwater's Youth Movement with a larger than normal wave of young people.

After LBJ mopped the floor with Goldwater in '64, the Republican Party was empowered to run adversarial contestants all over the country, including in '66 when a nutjob former actor became Governor of California! Just over a decade later, the key players of the Goldwater movement were back in power and at the highest levels of government.

But aside from the crème de la crème of the Goldwater '64 campaign staffers, who like many staffers work within the party for the sake of holding power, most of Goldwater’s movementarian voting block were adrift, without Presidential leadership they could believe in until Watergate. As YAF founder M. Stanton Evans said, "I didn't like Nixon until Watergate."

The exceptions were careerists like Cheney, Rumsfeld, Tom Charles Huston, and Douglas Caddy.

For some, the dalliance with Goldwater was but a youthful indiscretion. For other talented and dedicated young politicos of that generation, however, it was a lifetime commitment to a cause that endured and prospered when the aforementioned nutjob actor became President despite having Alzheimer’s.

What was the cause? What is Obama's cause? Will many of the hundreds of thousands of Obamites leave aside the Democratic Party for over a decade if he loses? Asking the question makes some people very angry, but at the least, it’s a debatable question.

For Goldwater’s army, he had a little red book, The Conscience of a Conservative in an easy-to-read large font, he made it clear that Republicans are different from Conservatives. The followers of this book helped usher in the age of the “Conservative movement.” An ex-post-party formulation where the word “conservative” is magic, applicable to those who are in other conservatives’ good graces. “Until they aren’t. At which point they are liberals.”

Obamarama has a similar post-partisan appeal for young voters who may hate Bush, but they don’t trust the Democratic Party very much, either. To them, Obama rises above the ideological fray, he transcends the adversarial nature of modern politics. He is a new kind of politician for a new time.

It doesn’t matter that much of Obama's brain trust is made up of Daschle people from the 1990s, nor that the Constitutional Convention of 1790 established three separate but equal branches of government with checks and balances precisely so that it would be… wait for it, adversarial.

Talking to Obama supporters I hear that it isn't so much about Obama's staffing decisions, nor his various policies, the appeal is about him. He seems to inspire hope that he is the man who can lead in a new, different, better way. If anything, it's his lack of ideology that people love.

Goldwater was all about the ideology. When Goldwater lost, it was a setback for the Conservative Movement. The Goldwater campaign wasn't about Goldwater. He didn't have the congenital need to be loved. It wasn't love he wanted, or adulation. Apparently, judging from Rick Perlstein's book, it wasn't even votes. What he wanted was converts to a philosophy and a new vision for America. He wanted to take the Republican party away from the Eisenhower-Rockefeller centrists.

After losing to one the Democratic Party squares, could an Obama endorsement transfer his wave of personal popularity and celebrity support to a different Democrat, you know, the old kind of Democrat, the exact kind of Democrat that has made Obama's campaign so different and exciting for these millions? Or would an Obama loss mean the loss of the Obamanaics until he runs again?

[Part II - How it's different from Dean (or, Don't Even Go There) is next.]