#1968 election

In 2016, we had a battle between the "old guard" of the Democratic Party and the progressive wing, and though the old guard won the primary, the divisiveness and bitterness of it, sometimes spilling over into open bigotry, nearly torn the party apart (I also think there is exactly zero to be gained from trying to rehash which side was more to blame for that, and will delete any comments doing so).

Then after Clinton became the nominee, we had a chance to elect the first female President. Instead, we lost to Donald Trump, and our country plunged into this ongoing existential threat.

Going back further, in 1968 a Democratic incumbent facing backlash from progressives against an overseas war dropped out, and instead of uniting behind an alternative, the party faced a divisive primary, riots at the convention (also held in Chicago, no less), and a loss in November to Richard Nixon.

Now, we have the Democratic incumbent dropping out ahead of the primary in Chicago- but the party has swiftly united around a strong alternative.

We had big donors and party insiders try to push Biden out, toss the primary results completely, and hold a "mini-primary" of insiders to pick a presumably corporate-friendly nominee- but instead all major wings of the party have swiftly united around a new nominee with a progressive voting record in the Senate to rival Sentors Sanders'.

Now, we again have a woman running for President against Donald Trump once again. And it remains to be seen if history will repeat... or if we will get it right this time.

So many people were dreading a rematch between Biden and Trump. But it seems that instead, Biden's withdrawal and Harris's extraordinarily strong campaign have given us a rare and precious chance to, in a sense, "rerun" some of America's (and the Democratic Party's) greatest failures.

In the months leading up to the 1968 presidential election, the Democratic Party’s leading nominee was Robert F. Kennedy, whose advocacy for social justice issues, civil rights protections, and ending America’s involvement in the Vietnam War made him a popular favorite with low-income Americans, Latinos, African-Americans, and young voters. His candidacy was ended tragically, however, when he was assassinated on June 5, 1968.

Following a funeral mass at Saint Patrick’s Cathedral in New York City on June 8, his coffin embarked on a funeral train that carried his body to Washington D.C. for burial at Arlington National Cemetery. The train moved slowly to accommodate the crowds of an estimated 1 to 2 million mourners that lined up along the tracks to witness its passage. The 225-mile trip, which would typically be covered in around four hours, took eight hours to complete.

This photograph shows the 21-car funeral train, led by Penn Central Transportation Company GG1 electric locomotive number 4901, with number 4903 trailing, as it passed Wolfe Street in Baltimore, Maryland at 7:20 P.M. on this day in history in 1968.

Yes, I have a small selection of campaign buttons:

I always mean to collect more when someone mentions political memorabilia, but never seem to remember to look for them.

Of those that I do have, I really like these ones:

The "We Shall Overcome" button is really cool, and I like the Hubert H. Humphrey's logo from the 1968 election. Humphrey was the original Triple H. The Romney button isn't for Mitt Romney -- it's for Romney's father, Michigan Governor George Romney, who was a candidate for the Republican Presidential nomination in 1968.

These buttons from 1972 are also interesting because Democratic Presidential nominee George McGovern selected Thomas Eagleton as his Vice Presidential running mate at the Democratic National Convention, but Eagleton was dumped from the ticket after just 18 days because it was revealed that he had previously undergone electroshock therapy to treat depression. Because there was such a stigma about mental health at the time, Eagleton was replaced by Sargent Shriver: