Here's Kevin Drum attempting to clear up a minor (but endlessly contentious) issue in the annals of American politics: Why, exactly, was PA Gov. Bob Casey denied a speaking slot at the 1992 Democratic convention?

Short answer: Conventional wisdom says it was because he wanted to give a pro-life speech and that's verboten at Democratic conventions. But no: the real answer is that it was because he had refused to endorse the Clinton/Gore ticket — and if you don't endorse the ticket, you don't get to speak.

But is that true? Is that what people actually said at the time? Through the magic of Nexis I pulled up about a hundred news stories from July 1992 that mentioned the Casey controversy and read them all. My conclusion: in fact, he was prevented from speaking because he wanted to give a pro-life speech.

Regular readers won't be surprised to learn that I basically agree with Kevin's sifting of the historical evidence here. (O'Toole agrees with Drum. There's a blogospheric shocker, huh?) But I think I'd probably put the em-PHA-sis on a different syl-LA-ble in my conclusion.

Yes, Gov. Casey's desire to give a pro-life speech was the proximate cause of the dispute. But the reason for it involved a much larger strategic concern -- namely, the Clintonites' determination to show that their guy, unlike Walter Mondale and Mike Dukakis, was tough enough to bring the entire Democratic party, left, right and center, to heel. In other words, the Casey matter was only about abortion to the extent that Sister Soulja was about hate speech or that Clinton's support for the death penalty was about crime control -- which is to say, not much at all. It was mostly about sending the message that Bill Clinton was a different kind of Democrat, the kind who could be trusted to stand up to what was then seen as an undisciplined party of special pleaders and narrow interests -- and, by extension, to anyone who wished decent, law-abiding Americans ill at home or abroad.

That was my take at the time, anyway, and I still think it's the most useful way to think about the Casey controversy. Love him or hate him, you just can't ever assume that Bill Clinton was really talking about what he was talking about. He usually wasn't.

NOTE: I'm offering no judgment here on whether the negative perception of the Democratic party described above was accurate or not -- just recognizing, as Clinton and his people did, that it was pervasive and problematic at the time.