E-Mail This Article to a Friend Do the right thing Where Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden fail — and Gene McCarthy succeeded

Politics can be a thankless business. Sometimes you’re damned if you do, other times you’re damned if you don’t. But we elect our leaders to, well, lead. And that means making choices, choosing sides.

Choosing sides is about holding core beliefs, and that’s why we find Democratic senator Hillary Clinton’s decision to join her Republican colleague, Bob Bennett of Utah, in sponsoring legislation that would make flag burning a federal crime so disappointing, so repugnant, and so disheartening.

Clinton, of course, is running for president — or at least is seriously thinking about it. Connoisseurs of hardball politics see her move as part of a realistic strategy to inoculate herself against conservatives and right-wing nuts who think she is a political devil hell-bent on reviving Communism abroad and installing a gun-prohibiting matriarchy here at home. It’s called "moving to the center." It’s something all liberal, or progressive, or left-leaning politicians are supposed to do these days if they want to even dream about sitting in the Oval Office. Her husband Bill pulled a lesser version of that move-toward-the middle maneuver during his presidency.

Sensing an opportunity to make mischief, George Stephanopoulos — the scamp-in-chief of ABC’s Sunday-morning talk show This Week (and a former disgruntled aide to Hillary’s husband) — asked his guest, Democratic senator Joseph Biden of Maryland, who is himself contemplating a White House run, what he thought about flag burning. After some bobbing and weaving followed by a little legislative soft shoe, Biden said that he too was opposed to it. Then he played his trump card: he had once successfully sponsored legislation to outlaw flag burning only to see his noble act go up in smoke (pardon the pun) when the US Supreme Court nixed it as unconstitutional.

While the game of deciding who will be the next Democratic presidential nominee has barely begun, Biden wins this warm-up hand. He’s already vaccinated himself. Hillary, on the other hand, got spanked by the right (by veterans who doubted her sincerity) and scolded from the left (by the New York Times, which pointed out that while there’s not a lot of flag burning going on right now, it’s free speech and as such is protected by the Constitution).

Memo to Joe and Hillary: cut the crap. You are supposed to be on our side, the side that values free speech and political protest even if we object to the forms they take; the side that values the astringent spirit of the Constitution rather than the vague, even if sometimes laudable, emotionalism of patriotic fervor; the side that will protect the nation from the religious righteousness of fundamentalists. For God’s sake, act like Democrats. Be proud. Be determined. Tell the nation why it’s American, why it’s patriotic, to tolerate dissent. Explain, by all means. But don’t apologize. And that’s what you, in effect, are doing by playing this groveling game of footsie with red-state voters who wouldn’t give you their votes even if the Rapture depended on it.

THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING GENE

Former Democratic Senator Eugene McCarthy, a man who was temperamentally incapable of groveling, has died. He was 89.

For most of McCarthy’s 22 years, from 1949 to 1971, representing Minnesota in Washington — first in the House, then in the Senate — he was a textbook example of what today is known as a Cold War liberal.

That means he was to the left on domestic issues, especially civil rights, and hardheaded in his foreign-policy commitment to anti-Communism. In those days, African-Americans couldn’t vote in the South and the then–Soviet Union still struck fear in the hearts of most Americans.

Despite his genial smile and understated humor, McCarthy was a prickly and principled politician. He raised eyebrows in 1960 when — with a show of party-convention eloquence exceeded only by Franklin Roosevelt in 1924, when he appeared on crutches to nominate New York governor Alfred E. Smith for president — McCarthy nominated Adlai Stevenson to be the Democrats’ candidate for president. That honor, however, was destined to go to Senator John F. Kennedy, of Massachusetts.

McCarthy made history in 1968 when as a long-shot insurgent candidate he so severely wounded President Lyndon Johnson in the New Hampshire primary that Johnson, fearing other defeats, declined to seek re-election.

Opposition to the Vietnam War was McCarthy’s issue. His candidacy galvanized young and idealistic voters in much the same way that former Vermont governor Howard Dean energized those opposed to the war in Iraq.

We all know that Hubert Humphrey — another Cold War liberal, but one without the courage to oppose the Vietnam War — won the nomination and lost the final election to Richard Nixon, but not before a reluctant Robert Kennedy was forced by McCarthy’s crusade to run for president. Kennedy, as we also know, was assassinated.

In the years after his failed glory, McCarthy ran several more times for president. And with each successive campaign his vote tallies dwindled. But it was in the course of those failed bids that campaign-finance reform won the day and led to the candidacies of, among others, Ralph Nader, Al Sharpton, and Howard Dean.

McCarthy’s political career underscores the truth that while political principle may not always win, it always matters.