The Big Tent?

On the issue of sacrificing "the central political question of our time" for "the big tent": Newsweek's Jonathan Alter (The Putting of First Things First) is totally wrong when he says:

And the revival of the romance of the antiwar left is a potential disaster for the Democrats. That's what gave the world Richard Nixon in 1968, when ideologically pure liberals who had backed Eugene McCarthy in the primaries refused to rally around Hubert Humphrey because Humphrey was "complicit" in the Vietnam War machine.

What gave the world Richard Nixon was not the candidacy of Eugene McCarthy, but the bullet that took Robert F. Kennedy off on the night he won the California Primary.