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From the edges to the center
"So it’s on to Chicago and let’s win there.”
That was the last we heard from Robert Kennedy, forty years ago last night. Forty years ago today, he was dead.
The line closed a victory speech, that essential victory in the California Democratic primary that made another at the National Convention seem almost inevitable.
The victory and the campaign were the products of an unlikely and unabashedly loose coalition gathered around just as unlikely a candidate.
The coalition was of groups and interests at the periphery, at the edges, of American politics then, brought by the candidate into the center spotlight: the disparate threads of an unraveling civil rights movement, the anti-war movement, a nascent women’s rights movement, the farm workers movement. The dispossessed, those with limited political voice save that given them in a sentient press, those without representation on K Street.
The candidate himself had moved from the conservative reaches of the party and the legal staff of Sen. Joe McCarthy to someplace else, eyes and ears open to what he’d not seen or heard or understood before, open to what he now knew, knew with unlikely certainty, to be central to the nation’s political future.
And the unlikely worked. Never doubt that politics can transform a nation’s concerns and approaches. Nor doubt that politics can transform its practitioners.
Posted by
G.E. “Skip” Lawrence
posted by The Phoenix Files at
8:14 AM
9 Comments:
This post has been removed by the author.
I know that you have a habit of reporting things a week after the event but isn't 40 years an all time best for you?
Can you please use a larger font for us old people?
Wow! It has been three weeks or so, a lot of fluff pieces and limited postings to your blog. Looking at the postings here, this paper still continues to swirl in a downward spiral as the flapper in the toilet closes.
I scan throught the Phoenix now and then and all I see are rotten comments from "Toohey" or "truthshall" and I've noticed the times these posts are written: usually in the middle of the night. You two guys REALLY need to get a life and just stop reading the Phoenix if you hate it so much.
Have you considered a 12-step recovery program for idiots?
It seems clear to me that the Phoenix Blogs (following the removal of the ability to post anonymously) have greatly decreased in relevance.
I think people are still reading them, and I link to them from my postings from time to time at councilmansenley.blogspot.com when updates are posted that support my content.
It's just unfortunate that the openness of the forum is reduced in effectivity.
This is a quicker way to get information presented in a "breaking news" fashion, so maybe it will pare down to that eventually.
Although I'm fairly new in town, someone told me recently that the old format, in which people could comment on virtually any article published in the paper--and anonymously--was more favorable and invited more responses from the community. Even in my limited time here, it's obvious that some of the posters who use an alias are the same person, i.e., Dick. But so what....bring back the old format...let people post anonymously if they choose....will invite more readers and more responses and thereby become more "relevant."
hiya kids hiya hiya
The anonymous posts were not relevant to anything. It was the same people writing over and over. They have a way of detecting the IP address and alas folks, it is true. The “many” posts were just the same persons agreeing with themselves. My feeling has always been when you play…play with others not with yourself.
While I don't feel equal to enter into the present controversey with the previous poster on any subject, much less the notion that the paper checks IP addresses of blog post submissions, and while not denying that he may be uncannily correct in his assertions, still I feel obliged to remark that many of the alleged bloggers who post here have no profiles, so they are, in essence, anonymous too. (And what's wrong with that?) The new you is a little too "intense" or maybe just "hiya."
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