By The River

The 2008 race for the Democratic nomination for President is down to a three person race with the withdrawal of Sen. John Kerry and the flame-out of Sen. Joe Biden. We are left with three good candidates, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York, former Sen. John Edwards of North Carolina, and Sen. Barack Obama of Illinois. I wouldn't count any of them out at this point, nor do I concede that Sen. Clinton is the odds-on favorite despite her formidable lead in fund-raising.

Iraq is the word. Nothing else matters in this race, just as nothing other than Vietnam mattered in the race for the Democratic nomination in 1968. I don't believe any Democrat can win in 2008 unless he or she firmly and decisively repudiates Bush's Iraq War, admits they were wrong if they voted for the Iraq War Resolution, and promises to bring the troops home within a year. It is instructive to look back 40 years to the 1968 campaign.

President Lyndon B. Johnson had by then presided over four years of what was until now the most unpopular and senseless war in American history (I'd call Vietnam and Iraq even at this point). Sen. Eugene McCarthy of Minnesota mounted what was widely seen as a quixotic primary challenge of Johnson in New Hampshire. On March 12, 1968, McCarthy stunned Johnson by getting 42 percent of the vote to 49 percent for the President. Although Johnson technically won, a sitting President should have been able to do far better. Four days later, Sen. Robert F. Kennedy, JFK's brother, entered the Democratic race. On March 31, Johnson announced that he would not seek another term as President. Vice President Hubert H. Humphrey then entered the race.

Humphrey was the Hillary Clinton figure in the 1968 race, the candidate with loads of mainstream party support. Just as Clinton refuses to condemn her original support for the Iraq War, for which she was pilloried in New Hampshire last weekend, Humphrey refused to renounce his support for the Vietnam War until very late in the general election campaign, believing he owed Johnson support for his war policy. He lost because of it. So will Clinton if she doesn't go over to the peace side wholeheartedly. She won't even get the nomination.

Humphrey might not have gotten the Democratic nomination in 1968 if Kennedy, who along with McCarthy had made opposition to the war the centerpiece of his campaign, had not been assassinated by Sirhan Sirhan, a Palestinian, in June 1968. McCarthy had no chance against the institutional Democratic Party support (read: the Clinton network) that Humphrey could draw on in an era when state parties controlled convention delegate selection to a much greater degree than they do today. A perception by the student Left that their antiwar fervor had been for naught led to the riots at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago later that summer.

Improbably, Republican nominee Richard M. Nixon then became the "peace candidate." Nixon hinted at a secret plan for ending the Vietnam War (it remains a secret to this day) and a nation weary of tens of thousands of combat deaths and even more wounded soldiers and P.O.W.'s responded without really delving too deeply into Nixon's "plan." That and the electoral votes in the Deep South that racist independent candidate Gov. George C. Wallace of Alabama took from Humphrey was enough for Nixon to eke out a win. Humphrey was a decent man with a stellar legislative record, but he seemed old and establishment to young Democratic voters. I supported Nixon that year (I was 15 and foolish), the last Republican I supported for President.

If Clinton continues to be wishy-washy on Iraq and faces a Republican candidate who can persuade the electorate that he, too, has a believable plan to end the disaster, a fed-up public may set aside its revulsion toward George W. Bush and vote Republican. But the real question is whether Clinton will bomb out in the primaries, money or no money, institutional support or no institutional support. The difference today from 40 years ago is that primaries choose the candidate. The party leadership can no longer flout public will and install a candidate they like but the public doesn't. And the public wants out of Iraq.

That is why Barack Obama would be a better candidate. Obama has passion, intelligence--you don't get to be president of the Harvard Law Review for anything less than pure talent and intelligence--and a fresh face. He opposed the Iraq War from the beginning, and can dish it out as well as he can take it. He will bring out activists in droves. I suspect blacks will give him the same or better percentages they normally give Democratic candidates, despite the rap advanced by the rightwing black Republican Alan Keyes that Obama is not "real" because he isn't descended from slaves. Something tells me that isn't going to matter a whole lot.

Halfway Hillary, who never saw a squishy, poll-tested moderate position she didn't love, is not who we need to recover from the Bush disaster.