Some elections are much more important than others. Some elections have not only a winner and a loser, but a mandate that can extend into the future for a generation or more. Three such elections were those of Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1932, John F. Kennedy in 1960, and Ronald Reagan in 1980. Each of these elections defined an era.
Dwight D. Eisenhower in the Roosevelt Era, Richard Nixon in the Kennedy era, and Bill Clinton in the Reagan Era all played somewhat similar and internally contradictory roles: they both limited and extended the public mandate that the major President of the opposition party of their era had won. They were Presidencies of limited dissent from the consensus of their era that to a substantial degree wound up reinforcing the ideological framework of their era.
I am not totally without admiration for Ronald Reagan. When pressured by Walter Mondale to negotiate with Gorbachev, he did an excellent job. When given excellent legislation to sign that I was involved in at a state level--such as 60 day notice for plant closings, making Martin Luther King's birthday a state holiday, extending the voting rights act for twenty-five years--he signed it. When American casualties in Lebanon passed 400, he wisely prevented future casualties by withdrawing American troops. He also is the only President to have served as a union president, and the only Republican President to have campaigned for Franklin D. Roosevelt and Harry Truman and against the election of Richard Nixon to the Senate.
When Pennsylvania House Democrats were invited to participate in a memorial service for Ronald Reagan, I was the only one who accepted. I got applause from the assembled overwhelmingly Republican audience for mentioning Reagan's more liberal side; they asked for bipartisanship and they got it. But I have not been invited to eulogize any other Republican since then, and I may never be again, as my remarks of praise for the occasional flexible yieldings to reality of the recently deceased Ronald Reagan could well be seen as a thinly veiled attack on George W. Bush.
The full truth of Reagan's career is that he moved America farther to the right than it had been since the Presidency of Calvin Coolidge, Reagan's favorite President. The full truth of Reagan's career is that he worked hard and successfully to deligitimize government and collective problem solving. The full truth of Reagan's career is that he largely succeeded in converting the dominant mood of America from an idealistic belief in great societal possiblities to a cynical belief that government and societal efforts at problem solving are mere scams to suck money up from Americans both hard-working and retired as managers of well-deserved family inheritances.
One of the paradoxes of politics is that those who occupy the same political space are often bitterly hated by others on similar ideological wavelengths. They are seen as competitors for the same base more than as allies in the same cause.
The support of the Clintons for job-destroying free trade, family-destroying welfare cuts, dignity-destroying "don't ask, don't tell" and other similar concessions helped fuel the vast right-wing conspiracy against them: the Clintons were seen as the worst kind of liberals of all, cleverly deceptive ones who appealed to elements of the Republican Party.
I want the Reagan Era to end. If I had my way, it never would have begun. 28 years of the Reagan Era is much too much. Four or eight years of President Hillary Clinton fighting for more liberal versions of conservative themes, doing good here and there largely by stealth--likely followed by four or eight years of a Republican pledging to restore conservative themes to their original meaning--is not what America needs most.
It is time for a new script. It is time for a new era. It is time for a new beginning. It is time for Barack Obama and a new generation of leadership. It is time for an American leadership that can mobilize Americans to raise their expectations, to expand their capacity to love and trust their neighbors, and to raise aspirations to include the lifting of the people as a whole.
When I was at the Obama headquarters in Keene, New Hampshire on Saturday, December 1, I heard veteran New Hampshire primary activist Dayton Duncan, the author of GRASSROOTS, a history of the New Hampshire primary, say that of all the Presidential primaries he had participated in back to the 1960's, this was the most important. The more I think about this, the more I agree with it.
It is time to restore the possibilities of American politics. It is time to have many more young people decide they want to go into politics for all the right reasons. It's time to have patriotism mean living for our country instead of just dying for our country. It's time to elect a President whose dominant identification will be with the future instead of the past. It's time for Barack Obama and a new meaning and a restored meaning of the purpose of American politics.