As Rick Perlstein recounts in the opening of Nixonland, an ambitious and entertaining history of the political ferment of the late 1960s, Lyndon Johnson’s crushing victory over Barry Goldwater in the 1964 presidential election represented the apotheosis of liberal self-confidence. Seemingly the entirety of the American political class was in agreement: Conservatism was being relegated to the dustbin of history, and ordinary Americans were united in their support of an emerging liberal consensus.
In short, for those who shared the ascendant liberal ideology, it was a time of transcendent hope. “These are the most hopeful times since Christ was born in Bethlehem,” a supremely confident—and more than a little complacent—Johnson told the nation in December 1964. Change was in the air. Liberals believed the United States was about to be remade, and for the better, by an ambitious, and popular, social welfare and racial justice agenda. Aside from a fading rump of discredited conservatives, who could argue with the uplifting promise of the Great Society?
Things didn’t work out quite as expected, of course. Change was in the air, but not the sort the wise heads of the political class were expecting. As Johnson’s transformative domestic agenda sailed through Congress, the political landscape was itself being transformed. The political story of the late 1960s, despite the loud and leftist counter culture protest movement, turned out to be a story of backlash, a reaction born of overreach on the part of mainstream liberal elites clueless about the skyrocketing racial, economic and cultural resentments of working class whites feeling pressured by rapid social change. And it is the story of the insight of politically shrewd Republican leaders, first Governor Ronald Reagan and then Nixon, who realized those resentments could be sharpened and exploited to create a new conservative majority that would largely dominate American politics for a generation.
Even before the dispiriting election results from the Massachusetts Senate race, the parallels between 1964 and 2008 seem evident. The story of 2008 was—it seems like a distant memory now—about much more than wiping the slate clean from the dark, fear-driven, ethically questionable, plutocratic years of the Bush ascendancy. It was about more than electing a smart, fresh, and liberal Democratic president. It was, in the perception of many liberals, a paradigm shift in American politics. If American could elect an openly liberal, African-American man (with the middle name of “Hussein,” no less), then something fundamental had changed. It was the dawning of a new era of liberal hope.
Or so it seemed at the time.
Now, a year later, a new political wisdom is congealing among the harrumphing punditocracy, one that draws on what happened in the 1960s. Supposedly, Obama and the Democrats are the victims of their own ideological overreach. Clueless about the anxieties of rural and small town voters, and of suburban independents, they have planted the seeds of their own political destruction by pushing forward a partisan liberal agenda. The victory of a Tea Party Republican in the race for the Massachusetts Senate seat held by Ted Kennedy for 46 years is being heralded as a wake up call that Democrats need to scale back their ambitions and seek accommodation with conservative Republicans.
This narrative is powerful—witness the panicky backpedalling of feckless inside-the-Beltway Democrats in the last couple of days, and the new talk from Obama of sharply scaling back health care reform in the search for bipartisan cover—but it is also implausible. What exactly has the administration done that is too liberal or too partisan? Obama inherited the economic meltdown from his predecessor, and his policies of government bailouts for shaky financial institutions (and for the auto industry) are little different than those put in place by the Bush administration. He has avoided moving forward on popular liberal campaign promises like progressive tax reform and ending the anachronistic Clinton-era Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell compromise on gays in the military. With the administration’s approval, Senate Democrats repeatedly watered down health care reform in a fruitless quest for even a single Republican vote.
There is a simpler explanation to explain recent Democratic setbacks, drawn from a more recent example: the Reagan presidency. We are exactly a year into the Obama era. Consider where Ronald Reagan stood a year into his administration.
In January 1982, the country was mired in the worst recession since the Great Depression. The deficit, after Reagan’s big tax cuts, was spiraling upwards. Unemployment stood at 8.6 percent (and peaked later that year at 10.8 percent). A president known for his superior communication skills and his likeability had lost control of the political narrative. Reagan was being written off as a failure, a sure one-term president. Yet he went on to become one of the most transformative presidents in American history, successfully incorporating right-wing ideas previously thought to be far outside the political mainstream into the center of American political life.
In fact, as a recent polling analysis indicates, the decline in Obama’s approval ratings closely mimics the sharp decline in Reagan’s ratings over his first year in office. As that similarity suggests, the real explanation for what is going is not a story of liberal overreach. It’s the economy. That is particularly true when it comes to low-information, less ideological independent voters, who tend to vote their anxieties over their pocketbooks. When the economy is in trouble they take it out on the party (and president) in power. Reagan’s approval ratings plunged as the unemployment rate rose; he made some mid-course corrections, but largely stood firm on his core agenda. And his ratings rose as the economy recovered, and he went on to a landslide victory in 1984.
The same will happen with Obama—provided Democrats don’t self-destruct. There are already positive signs of economic recovery. If those continue to grow over the next six months, the mid-term elections will turn out much better than the dire forecasts being bandied about today in the midst of a predictable post-Massachusetts overreaction. Even if the economic recovery does not come in time – the Republicans under Reagan lost 26 House seats in the 1982 election—it will come eventually.
In the meantime, D.C. Democrats should become more ambitious, not less. The greatest political danger for them is not that they will be perceived as overreaching, it is that they will be seen as failures at governance, and incapable of delivering on the fundamental change Obama promised during the 2008 campaign. They are still the party in power, with the White House and large majorities in both Houses. They need to deliver, not dither. Rather than watering down health care reform further, the House should quickly pass the Senate health care reform bill as is. There will be enough time enough to improve on it later. Democrats should push hard on the administration’s proposal to tax the big banks to pay for the financial bailout. D.C. Democrats should get serious about reining in CEO pay. How about an old-fashioned public works jobs bill? Media pundits might sneer, but it would be popular with voters.
Back in January 2008, Obama created a stir when he expressed his admiration for Ronald Reagan . He said then, “I think Ronald Reagan changed the trajectory of America in a way that Richard Nixon did not and in a way that Bill Clinton did not. He put us on a fundamentally different path because the country was ready for it… he just tapped into what people were already feeling, which was we want clarity we want optimism, we want a return to that sense of dynamism and entrepreneurship that had been missing.” He was right. But will he—and Congressional Democrats—take the Reagan example to heart?
If Obama acts with clarity and dynamism now, and Democrats on the Hill rally behind him, they will be well positioned to reap the political benefits when the economy recovers, just as Reagan did. But If he flounders and fails to act, he will set themselves up to emulate another ultimately disappointing presidency that began with so much promise: That of LBJ, who headed back to Texas after one term as conservative Richard Nixon took office.
