Lyndon Baines Johnson was not "The One" Democratic Party presidential candidate in the 1960s. John F. Kennedy was ("Camelot" and all that...). Nowadays we have "The Lightworker" Obama-Wan Kenobi in office, and I can't image any credible intra-party challenge to his (re)nomination in 2012. And Afghanistan is no Vietnam, in terms of lives lost and treasure expended, so I don't know if the analogy's going to work all that well going forward in any case. Interesting too that arch-paleocon Pat Buchanan's the one posing the question, more so as there's a left-(quasi)right alliance for cut-and-run from the deployment. That said, Pennsylvania Governor Ed Rendell makes the possibility sound realistic, depending on how the ground situation looks in 2011. Fun the play armchair presidential strategist, in any case:
PAT BUCHANAN: [Anti-Vietnam sentiment] drew an anti-war candidate, Eugene McCarthy, first into the New Hampshire primary, and after he did fairly well with 42%, it drew Robert Kennedy in against their own president, tore the Democratic Party apart, and led, of course, to a Republican era. If the president is still hanging in to Afghanistan in 2011, 2012, do you see an anti-war candidate coming out of the Democratic Party?
ED RENDELL: It's possible, Pat. It really depends on how far it deteriorates [emphasis mine]. But on the other hand, if troop withdrawal begins in 2011, if there's some signs that we're trying to get out of there, and I heard, I think you were talking about, if there are only 3,000 American troops, we still have a presence. But if we start to begin to reduce our presence, I think that's probably enough to keep an anti-war candidate out of the race."
Also Blogging: Dan Riehl.
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