Since November 2004, a friend who writes a weekly column (mostly about economics and occasionally politics) has been trying to convince me that the 2008 election will return the Democrats to the White House and to power in Washington. His argument gained some credibility in the 2006 midterm elections when the Democrats captured control of the House and the Senate -- although the latter by only a razor-thin margin. George W. Bush's failed policy in Iraq and what could easily be the worst presidency in American history also give weight to my friend's argument. How could the country not want to give the reins to the opposition when the party in power has made such a hash of things?
For many reasons, I am not so sanguine that Democrats, after 40 years of wandering in the political wilderness, are finally poised to regain the upper hand. The Republican argument that opponents of the Iraq War are either naïve, unpatriotic, or outright traitors has antecedents dating back to the Vietnam War, when Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger tried to tar all antiwar protestors with the same unpatriotic brush. Politically, the strategy has been working on and off for four decades.
As abhorrent as that strategy is to liberals, it's not at all certain that it can't work again in 2008. Fear is a powerful political motivator, and if Republicans have done one thing well politically since September 11, it is tapping into Americans' fear. The fear of being tagged with the unpatriotic label is what got John Kerry, John Edwards, and Hillary Clinton to vote to authorize President Bush to go to war. In October 2002, no Democrat interested in running for president with a legitimate chance of winning thought he or she could get away with voting against the war and make a successful run for the presidency.
Even if a Democrat were successful in winning the presidency in 2008, it will undoubtedly be way too early to determine whether the election will represent any kind of watershed or major turning point for the nation. The permanent Republican majority that Karl Rove dreamed of in 2004 didn't even survive the 2006 election. The perspective of history, with its time and distance, is essential to understand long-term trends in American politics, particularly now that the 24-hour news cycle fuels public discourse.
Three long-term trends in American political history are generally accepted by a wide array of historians. These include the slave power in national politics up to the Civil War; the emergence of New Deal liberalism under Franklin D. Roosevelt; and the conservative era we're now in, which dates back at least to Ronald Reagan's election in 1980 (although it's possible we're still too close to this period to understand its full implications).
The beginning of the first long-term trend is meticulously documented in Garry Wills' 2003 book "Negro President", which gives the history of the three-fifths clause in the U.S. Constitution and demonstrates how it was originally included to convince the Southern states to stay in the Union. Wills shows how, because of the clause, each non-voting slave was counted as three-fifths of a vote for the purposes of establishing state-by-state representation in the House of Representatives and electoral votes in presidential elections. All of which sheds light on how, why, and how many slaveholders dominated national politics from George Washington's inauguration in 1789 until Abraham Lincoln's election in 1860. It took the Civil War, by far the bloodiest conflict in American history, to break the hammerlock slave power held on American politics, and it would take another 100 years for blacks to gain their civil rights.
The Great Depression and the presidential election of 1932 brought Roosevelt to power, and the long-term trend of New Deal liberalism dominated the national debate for the next half century. FDR's support came from an unlikely coalition: white southerners still fighting the party of Lincoln, northern liberal intellectuals, organized labor, blacks, Jews, and white ethnic immigrants from Europe. The New Deal, Harry Truman's Fair Deal, and Lyndon B. Johnson's War on Poverty created a safety net for the poor, moving millions of Americans into the middle class. In the 1980s, when Ronald Reagan and the emerging conservative majority began their assault on 50 years of anti-poverty programs, then-House Speaker Thomas P. O'Neill of Massachusetts and his Democratic allies complained bitterly that Democratic programs built the middle class, and now that middle class was voting Republican.
Many contemporaneous accounts have pegged the start of the third long-term trend, the rise of conservatism in American politics, to the election of Reagan in 1980. Surely the Gipper was the central figure in this conservative era we're still in. Reagan beat Jimmy Carter, a sitting Democratic president and a native son of Georgia. Carter had been weakened by high oil prices, high interest rates, and his seeming impotence in the face of the hostage crisis in Iran. Reagan, an actor-turned-politician and a former two-term governor of California, was elected on an anti-tax, pro-military platform. He promised to restore America's reputation in the world and renew pride in our armed forces in the wake of our retreat from Vietnam.
Indeed, Reagan lived up to some of his promises. He cut taxes. He cut domestic programs for the poor and the inner city. He dramatically increased military spending. During the 1980 campaign, George H.W. Bush, while competing against Reagan in the Republican primaries, called the Gipper's promise to cut taxes, increase military spending, and balance the budget "voodoo economics," arguing that it wasn't possible to do all three. Poppy had to zip his lip once Reagan picked him to be his running mate, but it turned out the elder Bush was at least partly right.
Deficits ballooned under Reagan. Liberals referred to him as the greatest deficit spender of all time, which he was at least in absolute terms. (That is, until Poppy's son, George W. Bush, came along with the election of 2000.) Liberals made the argument with Reagan, as they argue now with Bush, that the huge deficits served to starve the government and undermine its ability to effect change. By piling up hundreds of billions of dollars in annual deficits, servicing the national debt became so expensive that few options remained for new initiatives or even for properly shoring up underfunded programs such as Social Security or Medicare.
Many of the trends now playing themselves out at the end of George W. Bush's presidency were set in motion under Reagan. Bloated military budgets, short shrift for poor people, weak enforcement of environmental protection laws, handouts for big business, lax enforcement of civil-rights laws, and a government left with little money for new nonmilitary initiatives in education, jobs, housing, or health.
However, a strong case can be made that the current conservative era really started 12 years before Reagan's election, with the election of Nixon in 1968. It was Johnson who successfully pushed through Congress the civil-rights acts of 1964 and 1965 that ended Jim Crow America and gave blacks their civil rights. At the time, Johnson said that he feared the Democrats would lose the South politically for a whole generation -- and he proved prophetic. Red State America, at least in the South, was born in 1964 and 1965. Nixon adopted Kevin Phillips' Southern strategy by wooing white Southerners. And while Democrats have enjoyed huge pluralities among black voters in each presidential election since those acts were passed, what had been the solid South for the Democrats has now turned into a solid South for Republicans, as white Southerners defected to the GOP in droves.
Black power, the Watts riots in Los Angeles, and the riots in other black communities after Martin Luther King Jr. was shot in 1968 further pushed the white majority into the Republican fold. But race-based politics wasn't the only element of the 1960s that affected presidential races for the next 40 years. All of the liberal movements in the 1960s, no matter how crucial to solving long-standing problems or inequities in American life, contributed to the emerging Republican power in presidential politics. The antiwar movement was essential to ending the Vietnam War. It also allowed Nixon and the Republicans to scare what Nixon would call the "silent majority" into thinking that the Democrats were pacifists and un-American, not to be trusted with issues involving national defense. Sound familiar?
The women's rights movement made huge progress in terms of affording girls and women equal status in education, employment (although there is still progress to be done here), and even in college athletics. The 1973 Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision on choice can be directly tied to the women's movement of the 1960s. Women would become reliable Democratic voters in presidential elections. But men would become a reliable Republican constituency.
The environmental movement of the 1960s brought us the Environmental Protection Agency and a growing awareness that we are fouling our own nest, perhaps irrevocably. It also gave Republican presidential candidates the chance to raise money from and curry favor with big business by running against the environmentalists, castigating them as tree huggers who valued endangered species, clean air, and wetlands over economic prosperity and jobs.
All these forces, plus the failed Indochina policy despite a huge military build-up by Johnson in Vietnam, brought Nixon and the Republicans to power in 1968 and marked the beginning of the end for New Deal liberalism as the dominant force in American politics. Liberals really haven't had much to cheer about since. Three of our heroes, John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King Jr., and Robert Kennedy were all assassinated in the 1960s. Watergate, the resulting impeachment effort in Congress, and Nixon's resignation were certainly validations that we are a country of laws and not of men, and since most liberals viscerally couldn't stand Nixon, they cheered his downfall.
But since 1968, there have been only two Democratic presidents, both from the South. Jimmy Carter was elected in 1976 in the Watergate backlash on a promise that he would never lie to the American people. As good an ex-president as Carter has been, he was not an effective president while in office, and he ultimately became a one-termer when Reagan won in 1980. Bill Clinton was a much more brilliant politician than Carter, and for a while he gave hope to liberals who came of age in the 1960s that one of their own would finally make a difference at the presidential level. Indeed, his Earned Income Tax Credit did as much to help the working poor as any law in recent memory, and he presided over eight years of relative peace and prosperity. At the policy level however, conservative majorities in Congress mostly hamstrung Clinton. And his affair with Monica Lewinsky -- and failure to come clean on it -- sullied his legacy. In the end, both the Carter and Clinton presidencies seem more like anomalies to the political trends of the past 40 years than any kind of rebirth of liberalism on the national stage.
So how will we know if 2008 is a watershed marking the end of the conservative era in American politics? The fact is we probably won't know right away. If someone had predicted in 1968 that Ronald Reagan would become a two-term president, that the Bush family would produce two fundamentally conservative presidents covering three terms over the next 40 years, most political cognoscenti then would have asked what that person was smoking. However, there will be some fairly simple marks that will have to be hit for the question to even be considered.
First, the Democrats have to win the White House, still very much an open question with 15 months to go before the 2008 election. Judging from the recent presidential primary debates in New Hampshire and elsewhere, the Republican candidates for president obviously feel that the Democrats are still vulnerable to being tagged unpatriotic, unsupportive of our troops, and the party of retreat and defeat in Iraq. They will play the fear card and try to convince us that putting a Democrat in the White House will embolden the terrorists and invite them to consider another 9-11-type attack on American soil. The fact that 9-11 occurred on Bush's watch will not deter them from this line of argument. The fact that Iraq has been such an unmitigated disaster will not prevent them from claiming that only the Republicans can be trusted on matters of war and national security. Democrats will argue that the country wants a new course in Iraq. In the 2006 elections, the Democrats won this debate. Whether it will work at the national, presidential level remains to be seen.
Second, Democrats have to hold onto their substantial majority in the House and solidify their control of the Senate. Getting 60 votes to close off debate and prevent filibusters in the Senate is out of the question. But picking up a few more seats to strengthen control of the Senate should be attainable, and if there is a Democrat in the White House the fear of a veto is not an issue.
Third, Democrats have to prove to the country's populace that government can be a positive force in their lives once again. National health care comes to mind. So does global warming, which could be the single most important issue of the 21st century.
Fourth, Democrats will have to come up with some fresh thinking on Iraq, and the broader issues of dealing with the Middle East and the Muslim world. With the right set of policies and attitudes -- with a little more humility and a lot less hubris -- the United States could quickly restore its image as a beacon of hope in the world.
Finally the country will see it as a sign of strength and not of weakness if the Democrats get into power and are willing to work with moderate Republicans in a bipartisan way on some issues. Working toward a political rather than a military solution in the Middle East comes to mind. Plenty of mainstream military hawks agree this is the way to go, that there is no military solution to the civil war in Iraq. Fixing health care should be a bipartisan opportunity as well, particularly considering how the high cost of health care is hurting the competitive position of American companies in the world marketplace. A deal on Social Security also is achievable.
Reagan got hammered in the midterm elections of 1982, partly because of a recession when he first took office and partly because the Republicans talked about cutting Social Security benefits. It was during that period that Tip O'Neill's wise counsel, the late Kirk O'Donnell, coined his phrase for the ages: that Social Security is the third rail of American politics, and anyone who goes near that issue risks political suicide. After the 1982 elections, Reagan and the Republicans got some religion on the topic, and agreed to a bipartisan commission. The result: a compromise of tax increases and cuts in the growth of benefits that stabilized Social Security trust funds for decades into the future.
George W. Bush, by comparison, thought that his re-election in 2004 meant that he could privatize Social Security and dismantle one of the remaining legacies of the New Deal. But he overreached, and it helped the Democrats win the congressional elections in 2006. The same kind of bipartisan approach that worked in 1983 should be workable again if the Democrats, once in power, want to keep a popular program solvent for years to come. Needless to say, they'd need a receptive audience from Republicans.
Finally there is the question of the presidential candidates themselves. Liberals have a general feeling that their candidates as a group are of a better quality than the Republicans running for office this time around, even if actor and former Sen. Fred Thompson of Tennessee joins the Republican field. But when you get down to individual candidates, there are specific challenges and hurdles for each.
Can Hillary Clinton drive down her own negatives, which are extraordinarily high for a front-runner? Can she convince the country that it is ready for a woman president? Can she do so without sounding so hawkish on the Middle East that she loses judgment on that crucial issue, as happened with her war authorization vote in 2002? Is the country prepared to accept the notion that if Hillary is elected, only members of two families, the Bushes and the Clintons, will have controlled the presidency since 1993?
Barack Obama has star power, particularly among younger voters, but is he ready for the presidency or does he need more seasoning? Is the country ready to elect an African American as president? And is John Edwards credible as a candidate? Can any of the others, Chris Dodd, Joe Biden, or Bill Richardson escape second-tier status? And even if elected, can any of them do anything about the corrupting influence of money in politics that has so corroded political life in Washington over the last 40 years?
Hugely important events or political fights precipitated the major sea changes in American politics since the country's founding. It took the election of Abraham Lincoln, secession, and the Civil War to end slavery and break the slave holders' control over the nation. Liberals came to power in 1932 because of the Great Depression. Conservatives came to power after all the revolutions of the 1960s. George W. Bush's incompetence, the disaster in Iraq, the inability to deal with the aftermath of Katrina, the tax giveaways to the rich, the widening income gap, the hollowing out of the middle class, and the failure to address global warming make for a sorry record.
But is it bad enough to put liberals back in power and give them a chance? The answer will be decided in November 2008, the most exciting election for liberals since at least 1960, and the most important one since 1932.
