Papa's Got a Brand Old Bag

Last night I wrote a little thing in which I compared a Hillary Clinton presidency to...oh, I'll just quote myself (yikes!)

...part of me sees a Clinton Presidency as something like being at the airport baggage claim waiting for your bag and watching somebody else's same old suitcase go round and round and round the carousel, while your bag never appears.

And somebody commented that it was shameful for me to call Hillary Clinton "an old bag".

Just to keep things straight, I wasn't calling Senator Clinton "an old bag". Instead I am calling the entirety of the following "an old bag":

• Hillary Clinton
• Bill Clinton
• The Democratic Leadership Council
• (insert other centrists "Democrats" here)
  
• Capitulating To President Bush and Company for years
• Madeleine Albright, Robert Reich and the rest of the Bill Clinton Administration
• James Carville
• Failed Health Care Reform 1993
• Trying to out Republican Republicans
  
• Taking the FDR Democratic Coalition for granted
• Dukakis, Mondale, Ferraro, Bentsen, Hubert H. Humphrey
  

In other words, pretty much everything The Democratic Party has represented from 1968 Democratic Convention to the present strikes me as "an old bag". It almost appears that Barack Obama is talking about a Democratic Party pre-Chicago '68. That seems to be attracting some voters, and the idea attracts me.

We'll see as the night goes on if that attraction is enough to keep Obama in the race or if this thing is over. The Massachusetts and New Jersey results point to a Clinton night, but both the number of races and delegates splits instead of winner-take-all make it unlikely a definitive knock-out will be scored.

And then there's California....if anything can be pre-1968 maybe it can, with flowers in its hair....

P.S.: I don't count McGovern '72 above because it always seemed to me that the Democrats themselves abandoned the guy in a way that made a Watergate break-in and "dirty tricks" totally unnecessary. By the way, if nothing else, I'm glad Barack Obama has at least rekindled thoughts back to a time as far back as '72 or '68...how long has it been since anything close to that spirit has surfaced?