Wallace is Dead

But he wasn't shot dead.

I enjoy reading Daniel Henninger but he had a major error in fact in today's print edition of the WSJ. He listed a littany of events that happened in 1968 and ended with this:

On Nov. 4 having absorbed all this, the people of the United States voted. They gave 43.3% of their vote to Richard Nixon and 42.7% to Hubert Humphrey. Alabama Gov. George Wallace got 13.5%. Four years later, George Wallace was shot dead while running for president. 1968 lasted a long time.

Wallace wound up paralyzed, not dead. He actually died at the age of 79 in 1998. The online version has been corrected to omit the word dead. Maybe a Lynyrd Skynyrd fan clued them in:

In Birmingham they love the governor Now we all did what we could do Now Watergate does not bother me Does your conscience bother you? Tell the truth

The point of Hennigers column, "1968: The Long Goodbye" is that the sixties are dead. A younger generation wants to get off the psychedelic bus:

In 1968, Nicolas Sarkosy was 13 years old. John McCain was 32 and Hillary Clinton was 21. Barack Obama was 7. It is not beyond imagining that the precocious Messrs. Sarkozy and Obama were alert to events in 1968 but for the first wave of baby boomers just touching adulthood that year, it was the beginning of a strange journey.

I doubt Obama was keyed into those 1968 events. I was also 7 then; I don't know where he was, but I was a second grader in Valdosta Georgia. Our teacher conducted a class "vote" during the '68 presidential campaign. I cast the deciding vote for George Wallace. Not because it reflected my parents views (it didn't - but I didn't know at the time) I did it because that's who my friends voted for. My one and only time being a Dixiecrat.

Four years later I was pretty cognizant of politics. I stayed up to watch the election returns; but I didn't need to stay up late to see another George was going to recieve a pounding. It was the sixties that died in 1972 - not George Wallace. But it has been the Democrats that have been paralyzed ever since then.

UPDATE: Powerline makes additional corrections and comments.

Originally posted in UNCoRRELATED Nov 15, 2007