Remember Walter Mondale?

This is no knock on Walter Mondale, who these days looks like Paul Wellstone when compared to the likes of Harry Reid. But back in 1984, I worked on the then-insurgent campaign of Gary Hart. (Interesting aside of New Jersey lore: heading up the hart campaign in my town was a young man named Bret Schundler.) Like Obama, Hart at that time came out of nowhere, declaring his candidacy in 1983 into a field that at that time already included Mondale, John Glenn, and Jesse Jackson. Hart put his early energies into New Hampshire, and when he won a surprising 16% of the vote in the Iowa caucuses, was well-positioned for what turned out to be a 10-point trouncing of Mondale in New Hampshire.

The problem with a surprise insurgency, as we found out also in 2004, is that after you start winning, organization becomes important. Neither Hart in 1994 1984 nor Dean in 2004 had the kind of tight organization necessary to continue a sweep through the Super Tuesday states. But Walter Mondale did, and became the nominee in 1984. But it was a pyrrhic victory, for Mondale was soundly defeated by the incumbent, Ronald Reagan, in the general election.

As Thomas Edsall notes in Huffington Post, the Clinton campaign now looks an awful lot like the Mondale camp. Clinton is no longer running for the general election; she's just trying to get past the primaries using Mondale's old strategy:

The former First Lady is planning to fight Obama in South Carolina on January 26, and in the gargantuan nationwide primary on Tuesday, February 5 -- with contests in 19 states, including New York, California, New Jersey, Georgia, Minnesota, Massachusetts, and Colorado. If she remains competitive, Clinton's plan is to continue to compete in Louisiana on February 9, in Virginia and Maryland on February 12, in Wisconsin on February 19, in Ohio on March 4 -- and beyond, if necessary.

In an approach redolent of Walter Mondale's 1984 "Where's the Beef?" tactic against Gary Hart, Clinton has adopted the less memorable slogan "Rhetoric vs. Results, Talk vs. Action."

The Clinton campaign is sparing no effort to pressure the media to lean on Obama's perceived vulnerabilities. Looking to leverage Obama's slender resume, a Clinton operative argued to HuffPost that the campaign will be able to demonstrate that "Obama is just not a plausible person in this environment of international peril," and that the longer the primary campaign can be extended, the better chance Clinton will have to prove that "there is not even a second level to Obama, there is no depth."

To be sure, Obama is not Gary Hart and 2008 is not 1994 1984. Hart was an unbelievably attractive candidate in many ways. He was young, ridiculously handsome, and was one of the "neoliberals" profiled by Robert Rothenberg in Esquire magazine in 1992, appearing on the cover alongside Tim Wirth and Bill Bradley. The point of neoliberalism was to evolve liberalism past its rust belt focus and into the technological world. For all that Hart was the outsider candidate and part of the centrist neoliberal movement, he came into the race with impeccable liberal cred, having been George McGovern's campaign manager in 1972.

To the extent that young people want to blame boomers for what we see today, there's an argument to be made that being seduced by neoliberalism, as many of us were, was where we "sold out." But in 1984, those of us who supported Hart weren't thinking about the philosophy behind the movement. We were only twelve years post-Nixon, and we'd seen the only Democratic president since then trounced by Ronald Reagan. We'd perceived the defeat of Gene McCarthy in 1968 by Hubert Humphrey as a triumph of the hackocracy over necessary change. Today we would love to have someone as liberal as Humphrey, but in 1968, he represented Lyndon Johnson, he represented a war we hated, and by the time of the general election, he represented young people's heads being cracked open by police billy clubs.

By 1984, we wanted to WIN. And along came Gary Hart, with his chiseled jaw and his big blue eyes; a wonk who had worked for George McGovern; a guy who represented liberal values with a new twist that wouldn't scare the daylights out of our parents. It may have been Mondale's turn for the #1 slot, but we knew a loser when we saw one.

Hart didn't have even a tenth of Barack Obama's charisma. He was heart-stoppingly gorgeous in those days, and had a brilliant mind, but was perceived by many as a cold fish. But what he represented was transformational change, not by his mere presence the way Obama does, but a chance for a way out of the old philosophies and methods that had done nothing for us since 1968 but lose.

It is to our eternal shame that like most economic movements that start out with a constructive and optimistic vision, neoliberalism gave rise to the very centrism of the DLC against which we fight today.

At any rate, Gary Hart made a big splash in New Hampshire but we all know who the nominee was in 1984, and we also know how Walter Mondale got his ass kicked.

Today, in a mirror image of 1984, it's the neoliberal/centrist/DLC candidate Hillary Clinton who's the establishment candidate against the young upstart. Obama is more like Hillary Clinton in terms of philosophy than he is like the fiery populism of John Edwards, one which ironically hearkens back to the old school liberalism that came out of Minnesota when I was young. That Hillary Clinton is going back to Mondale's tactic of focusing ahead to the "Super Tuesday" primaries gives me an ominous fear that it could be 1984 all over again, in which the guy to which a generation passes the torch gives that generation hope for a while, only to pull the rug out from under them, because The Hacks Always Win.

Of course Obama isn't a cold technocrat like Gary Hart, and today we have the 24 x 7 news cycle and talk radio and the blogs. There's no incumbent at all against whom the nominee will be running, let alone one with the mythology of Ronald Reagan. And we already know the Republican nominee, unless a white horse we don't know about comes through at the convention (and isn't named "Jeb Bush"), will be completely loathsome. But still -- that 1984 is being mentioned as a model for anyone is troubling, for it is a return to the "It's my turn" politics that gave us a certain loss in 1984.