Sen. Joe Lieberman is doing his best Scoop Jackson imitation in 2003. Using his status as a semi-observant Jew to pose as the moral conscience of the Democratic Party, Lieberman has challenged Kerry for the Democratic moderates. Unfortunately for him, the Democratic activists see him as "Bush-lite" and don't want a moderate going up against George W.
Hubert Humphrey was the Democratic Party's tried-and-true battle-scarred warrior in 1972. Likeable but somewhat uncharismatic, the 1968 Democratic presidential nominee posed as the voice of moderation in the 1972 field of candidates.
Richard Gephardt plays the same part for today's Democrats. As a presidential candidate in 1988, Gephardt won three primaries, but he doesn't have enough name recognition or charisma to take on the other Democratic candidates.
The dark horse in the 1972 Democratic nomination race was George Wallace. The former Alabama governor, famous for blocking the University of Alabama, Montgomery schoolhouse door to prevent federal desegregation, set the Democrats on edge; Edmund Muskie called him a "demagogue of the worst kind." A Wallace nomination would have been the Democrats' worst nightmare.
The dark horse in 2003 is Rev. Al Sharpton. Sharpton, like Wallace in 1972, is a racial demagogue. Famous for his part in inciting riots over Tawana Brawley in 1987 and in Crown Heights in 1991, Sharpton can single-handedly splinter the Democratic black constituency. A couple of Sharpton primary victories could hurt the Democrats more than they would prefer to imagine.
Just as in 1972, today's Democratic Party is a party in flux. But unlike 1972, there's no Watergate on the horizon. George W. Bush could hardly be mistaken for Richard Nixon. Nixon, a moderate, regulated wages and prices, pursued a soft-line foreign policy of detente and pulled out of Vietnam. Most of all, Nixon was paranoid about his political opponents.
George W. Bush, on the other hand, is a committed conservative and is fearless in staring down his political opponents. If Bush had been president in 1972, Republicans would have enjoyed two decades of uninterrupted presidential power. With the Democrats partying like it's 1972, today's Republicans have an opportunity to begin a new era of conservative dominance.