Wednesday, October 29, 2008

From Washington Post: Return to Grant Park

Return to Grant Park - Harold Meyerson
Wednesday, October 29, 2008; A17
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/10/28/AR2008102802954_pf.html

The Democratic Party will return next Tuesday night to the place where, 40 years ago, its last governing coalition ingloriously died -- in all likelihood, to proclaim its rebirth.

Barack Obama's presidential campaign has announced that it will hold its election night celebration (or, in the unlikely event that he loses, its stunned wake) in Chicago's Grant Park. It's a sensible venue, since a huge crowd is anticipated. But the choice of Grant Park is also historically -- even poetically -- resonant. For it was in Grant Park on a hot summer night during the tumultuous 1968 Democratic convention that the New Deal era in American politics was dispatched to oblivion through the efforts of antiwar demonstrators and the Chicago police, whose conduct that evening a subsequent government report termed "a police riot." Continue reading...

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