Harris polling showed he had 50% of the vote 2 weeks before the primary and only 42% on the day of the primary. His victory edge came entirely from the cities, where he won "the industrial worker vote" and "83 per cent of the Negro vote." Pollster Harris thinks Indiana worked out for Kennedy because of the "lopsided ethnic vote," but that's not going to go well nationally, where his support is "sagging." Upscale professional types prefer Eugene McCarthy.
Me, I love Bobby Kennedy — and I never love politicians. I mean, look at this other article. Bobby was talking to white college students in Nebraska, and they're defending their draft deferments, which of course means that service falls to those who don't go to college. One student justified this state of affairs on the theory that it's a way of "helping Negroes escape from the slums of American cities." Bobby got mad:
"Here at a Catholic university, how can you say that we can deal with the problems of the poor by sending them to Vietnam? There is a great moral force in the United States about the wrongs of the Federal Government and all the mistakes Lyndon Johnson has made and how Congress has failed to pass legislation dealing with civil rights; and yet when it comes down to you, yourselves and your own individual lives, then you say students should be draft deferred."
THE YEAR THAT BLOG FORGOT IS: 1968.
ADDED: Rereading that quote of Bobby's, I have to say it doesn't cohere. It's a rambling set of phrases. He lists problems, then tells them they care about their draft deferments. There is a point in there that could be made, but it looks as though all he did was react emotionally to their selfishness. But are voters not supposed to care about issues that affect them personally? We're all expected to be directed toward the common good all the time?
AND: I tried to find video of that exchange with the students in Nebraska. I didn't find it, but I did find this clip of Bobby delivering the news — 6 weeks ago — that Martin Luther King had been killed. This is an astonishing speech — and it makes me sorry I called attention to what I thought was incoherence:
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