Election year shapes up as strangest since '68

Despite the Republican Party's selection of a sometimes belligerent nominee and Cleveland residents open-carrying assault-type weapons -- or perhaps because they were -- the GOP convention came off relatively smoothly.

This week's Democratic Party convention in Philadelphia is shaping up to be entirely different.

Debbie Wasserman Schultz is resigning as head of the party, after the convention, following release of emails connecting her with anti-Bernie Sanders efforts, and she was greeted with Game of Thrones-like cries of "Shame!" in Florida.

We hope frustrated Sanders supporters and others find ways to vent their anger without violence of the type that a few of us remember from the infamous 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago.

The death of Robert Kennedy -- who visited McCook not long before his assassination -- left his 393.5 delegates uncommitted against Vice President Hubert Humphrey's 561.5 and anti-war candidate Sen. Eugene McCarthy's 258.

Those who object to today's super delegates in the Democratic Party might feel right at home in 1968.

Then, Humphrey was seen as carrying on President Johnson's Vietnam War policies, while Kennedy and McCarthy drew more anti-war votes.

Despite 80 percent of primary voters favoring anti-war candidates, Humphrey was nominated, with Johnson and Chicago Mayor Richard Daley seen as pulling strings behind the scenes.

After Daley's police force virtually rioted against demonstrators, and guards even roughed up reporters on the convention floor, Richard Nixon's home in the White House was virtually ensured.

After many cycles of ho-hum conventions and elections, this year, with Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump in play, is shaping up to be the strangest since 1968.