Posted 5:41 PM by Alfred

Below is an excerpt from Hunter S. Thompson's Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail '72. it's been getting me thinking about some of the parallels between this race and the one going on as we speak. in 72 the US was still in vietnam, and although everyone agreed it was the wrong thing, we needed an exit strategy, albeit with tails between legs to some degree. now 32 years later we are still knee deep in a war with iraq which we "won" although we now have the problem of pulling out and not leaving a powderkeg set to explode.

mcgovern ended up winning the democratic nomination and getting thoroughly destroyed by nixon. we're talking as bad as reagon beat mondale in 84, maybe worse. simply because his views were too far left to beat nixon's machine, even come close, and yup, this was the election that nixon & crew got in trouble for bugging offices aka watergate. but in any event, mcgovern was the idealist that they decided to put up and his total annihilation paved the way for typical 2 party politics where you can't even tell the difference between who the fuck is talking about what the hell. but whutevs.

so i think kerry's gonna give bush a good fight nonetheless so they kinda went with the best odds guy, which was a big prognostication of the 72 election (Ed Muskie was the favorite, because it was viewed he had the best chance to beat Nixon, but nobody apparently, well, according to HST, liked him for anything besides that) but it blew up in their face with all the young people/hippies/next generation people that wanted to do everything the right way & the good way and honor the memory of our dead kennedys.

trippy stuff, amazing book, by the way, uh, so yup, have a happy day. i drummed up a WAY inordinate amount of links for reasons i'm still trying to figure out, but maybe you kids will get a kick out of it. either way i win because my goldfish is opening for barry manilow at the waikiki shell tonite. peace, and i will now pass the mike to our esteemed doctor hunter s. thompson:

Bobby Kennedy. Come back to haunt us in the midst of this low-level campaign that would never have been necessary except for Sirhan Sirhan’s twisted little hand… so now we have the taped voice of Robert Kennedy, long before he took a bullet in the brain, endorsing George McGovern on the radio in Milwaukee on Easter morning, four years later…)

There is not much talk about this around the McGovern campaign. It was Frank Mankiewicz’s idea to use the thing, and Mankiewicz was very close to Bobby. He was the one who had to pull himself together on that grim morning in Los Angeles and go out to make The Announcement to a hospital lobby full of stunned reporters: “Senator Kennedy died tonight…”

So the sound of his voice being used as a Paid Political Commercial is just a hair unsettling to some people – even to those who might agree with the McGovern/Mankiewicz presumption that Robert would have wanted it this way.

Maybe so. It’s a hard thing to argue, and the odds are far batter than even that Robert Kennedy would find McGovern preferable to any other candidate for the Democratic nomination at this time. He never had much of a stomach for Hubert, except as the lesser of evils, and it probably never occurred to him that dim hacks like Muskie and Jackson would ever be taken seriously.

So it is probably fair to assume that if Bobby Kennedy were alive today – and somehow retired from politics – he would agree with almost everything McGovern says and stands for. If only because almost everything McGovern says and stands for is a cautious extension of what Bobby Kennedy was trying to put together in the aborted campaign of 1968.

But in another sense the 1972 Democratic Campaign mocks the memory of everything Bobby Kennedy represented in ’68. It is hard to imagine that he would be pleased to see that – four years after his murder – the Democratic Party would be so crippled and bankrupt on all fronts that even the best of its candidates would be fighting for life by trying to put a good face on positions essentially dictated by Nixon & George Wallace.

In purely pragmatic terms, the Kennedy voice tapes will probably be effective in this dreary ’72 campaign; and in the end we might all agree that it was Right and Wise to use them… but in the meantime there will be a few bad losers here and there, like me, who feel a very powerful sense of loss and depression every time we hear that voice – that speedy, nasal Irish twang that mailed the ear like a shot of Let It Bleed suddenly cutting through the doldrums of a dull Sunday morning on a plastic FM station.

There is a strange psychic connection between Bobby Kennedy’s voice and the sound of the Rolling Stones. They were part of the same trip, that wild sense of breakthrough in the late Sixties when almost anything seemed possible.

The whole era peaked on March 31, 1968, when LBJ went on national TV to announce that he wouldn’t run for re-election – that everything he stood for was fucked, and by quitting he made himself the symbolic ex-champ of the Old Order.

It was like driving an evil King off the throne. Nobody knew exactly what would come next, but we all understood that whatever happened would somehow be a product of the “New Consciousness.” By May it was clear that the next President would be either Gene McCarthy or Bobby Kennedy, and the War would be over by Christmas….

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