While We Weren’t Looking
It was just a little more than eight years ago that presidential candidate Barack Obama said in an interview with the Reno Gazette Journal that he aspired to be a president who would change the trajectory of American politics the way that John Kennedy and Ronald Reagan did and Richard Nixon and Bill Clinton failed to do.
Reagan and Kennedy changed the landscape by converting their own party and by shaping the new generation of voters. Before Reagan rank and file of the Republican Party liked the description as moderate. Young people tended to be more liberal. Reagan left a party where the rank and file described themselves as decidedly conservative and liberal parents were shocked to see their kids grow up to be conservative. There is a good play called the Conversation playing here in DC on the subject right now.
Now let’s take a look at the entrance polls of Democrats this primary season after seven years of Obama as President. The rank and file have identified themselves as liberal in every state voting so far except Oklahoma. Young people across the board are very liberal and many are supporting Bernie Sanders.
This is the final and most important point. There are divisions in both parties but they are mirror images. On the Democratic side, there is wide support for the direction that Obama has taken us and the divisions that do separate us are whether he has moved fast enough or hard enough. The Republican Party has turned on their leaders because they sense correctly they are losing control over the narrative.
The automatic consensus for military intervention is gone. The assumed dominance of white men is over. Gay marriage is the law of the land, and Democrats now run on it, where eitht years ago they were running away from it. Don’t be confused by the day to day battles. If you were at Gettysburg on July 3, 1863 you might have though Lee's Army was the one with the initiative. But Lincoln knew every day the northern war machine got stronger and the south’s strength was waning. Pickets charge was really a demonstration of desperation.
As someone who was on the other side of the political divide in the 1980s, I know what the Republicans are going through. And I expect that down the road some smart man or woman will, like Bill Clinton, be able to reshape the Republican message and get elected as a New Republican. But if past is prologue, the fundamental direction has been reset for a generation