May
23 The RFK Comparison

Hillary Clinton's reference to Robert Kennedy's assassination appears to be an ill chosen choice of words, made to point out other nomination contests that have gone into June. Even then, the comparison is unfortunate, as 1968's convention is obviously not one that Democrats would choose to repeat.

To put it another way, is Hillary's status in the race similar to Kennedy's?

If she takes her fight for the nomination to the convention, there is a good chance that she will have to convince at least some Obama superdelegates to switch their support to her. Had Kennedy lived, he very may have had to find a way to wrest away delegates from Hubert Humphrey.

But it's dicey to compare the nomination battle that year to this one --- because the rules are so entirely different. And while the tragedy of Kennedy's death still inspires wonders of "what if?," almost 40 years later, it's easy to forget the history.

RFK was by no means guaranteed the nomination after his California victory. He would have gone on to Chicago and faced an uphill battle of overtaking Humphrey in the race for the nomination.

After the California primary, Kennedy had 393 delegates to Eugene McCarthy's 258 --- but Humphrey had 561. Under a different and much less democratic set of party rules, Humphrey did not enter any primaries that year and instead concentrated on winning delegates in non-primary states. There was much speculation in the press that Kennedy would have to wrest delegates away from Humphrey if he was to have a chance of securing the nomination.

According to journalist Jules Witcover, on the night of his California victory, CBS News' Roger Mudd even asked him whether the delegates committed or leaning to Humphrey were "squeezable." "Roger. Your language. I don't like either of those expressions!" Kennedy replied in mock offense.

So the chance was still there for Kennedy to win. But he would have had to use his California victory to shift the opinions of party leaders and officials, and in the same interview with Mudd, he pointed to his popular vote total in making just such a case. "I think the Democratic Party would be making a very bad mistake to ignore the wishes of the people and ignore these primaries," he said.  (McCarthy had garnered 39% of the primary votes to Kennedy's 31%, so he had the same argument, too.)

Nevertheless, pundits back then (below) were of the mind that Humphrey had the nomination sewn up. More than half were still uncommitted, but candidates were all working on getting them lined up, working party bosses and others. On primary night, CBS News even did its own calculation and predicted that Humphrey would go to Chicago with 1067 1/2 delegates to Kennedy's 622 1/2, with 1,312 needed to nominate.

As one pundit said that year, "After all, it's delegates, not people, who decide nominees." Sound familiar?