Jon Meacham: America remains a center-right nation—a fact that a President Obama would forget at his peril
It was a grand evening. On Thursday, Dec. 5, 1985, at the Plaza Hotel, William F. Buckley Jr. rose to toast the president of the United States on the occasion of the 30th anniversary of National Review. Charlton Heston was the master of ceremonies; the audience included William J. Casey, Nancy Kissinger, Roy Cohn and Tom Selleck. Thirteen months earlier Ronald Reagan had been re-elected, carrying every state in the Union except Walter Mondale's Minnesota. "As an individual you incarnate American ideals at many levels," Buckley said to the president. "As the final responsible authority, in any hour of great challenge, we depend on you." Buckley was 19 when America dropped the bomb at Hiroshima, he said, and he had just turned 60. "During the interval I have lived a free man in a free and sovereign country, and this only because we have husbanded a nuclear deterrent, and made clear our disposition to use it if necessary. I pray that my son, when he is 60, and your son, when he is 60 … will live in a world from which the great ugliness that has scarred our century has passed. Enjoying their freedoms, they will be grateful that, at the threatened nightfall, the blood of their fathers ran strong."
You can almost hear the trumpets. The scene from the Plaza, in a ballroom resplendent with flowers, full of guests cheered by wine, is glittery, and emblematic of the days of the Age of Reagan. Buckley's cold-war remarks were primal, reflecting the ancient human urge to protect one's own from gathering dangers.
A month before, in November 1985, Al From, the former staff director of the House Democratic Caucus, had been in North Carolina, flying from Raleigh to Greensboro, on a trip to talk wavering Democrats into staying in the fold after Mondale. "The common charge we heard from voters was that 'we didn't leave the Democratic Party, the Democratic Party left us'," says From, whose organization, the Democratic Leadership Council, was trying to move the party rightward toward the center. Dick Gephardt, Joe Biden, Sam Nunn and Lawton Chiles were among those flying with From, and things were not going well. "It was a miserable day, and our trip was about to be aborted," From says. There was congressional business in Washington, and From had already canceled the last leg of the journey, an event in Charlotte. Landing in Greensboro in the rain, the group made its gloomy way to an airport hotel for a fundraiser. "We were sure no one would show up," From says. "But when we got there we saw people lined up out the door." As he recalls it, the message of the occasion was straightforward: "We were trying to reconnect the Democratic Party with mainstream America."
In these two moments from a now distant year—the dinner at the Plaza and the gathering in Greensboro—lie the roots of our politics. It is easy—for some, even tempting—to detect the dawn of a new progressive era in the autumn of Barack Obama's campaign for the presidency. Eight years of Republican rule have produced two seemingly endless wars, an economy in recession, a giant federal intervention in the financial sector and a nearly universal feeling of unease in the country (86 percent of Americans are dissatisfied with how things are going, and 73 percent disapprove of the president's performance). Obama—a man who has yet to complete his fourth year in the United States Senate—is leading John McCain, and Democrats may gain seats on Capitol Hill. In 2007, the Pew Research Center published a 112-page report subtitled "Political Landscape More Favorable to Democrats," and the most recent ABC News/Washington Post poll found that 55 percent believe Obama's views are neither too liberal nor too conservative but are "about right."
But history, as John Adams once said of facts, is a stubborn thing, and it tells us that Democratic presidents from FDR to JFK to LBJ to Carter to Clinton usually wind up moving farther right than they thought they ever would, or they pay for their continued liberalism at the polls. Should Obama win, he will have to govern a nation that is more instinctively conservative than it is liberal—a perennial reality that past Democratic presidents have ignored at their peril. A party founded by Andrew Jackson on the principle that "the majority is to govern" has long found itself flummoxed by the failure of that majority to see the virtues of the Democrats and the vices of the Republicans....
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You can almost hear the trumpets. The scene from the Plaza, in a ballroom resplendent with flowers, full of guests cheered by wine, is glittery, and emblematic of the days of the Age of Reagan. Buckley's cold-war remarks were primal, reflecting the ancient human urge to protect one's own from gathering dangers.
A month before, in November 1985, Al From, the former staff director of the House Democratic Caucus, had been in North Carolina, flying from Raleigh to Greensboro, on a trip to talk wavering Democrats into staying in the fold after Mondale. "The common charge we heard from voters was that 'we didn't leave the Democratic Party, the Democratic Party left us'," says From, whose organization, the Democratic Leadership Council, was trying to move the party rightward toward the center. Dick Gephardt, Joe Biden, Sam Nunn and Lawton Chiles were among those flying with From, and things were not going well. "It was a miserable day, and our trip was about to be aborted," From says. There was congressional business in Washington, and From had already canceled the last leg of the journey, an event in Charlotte. Landing in Greensboro in the rain, the group made its gloomy way to an airport hotel for a fundraiser. "We were sure no one would show up," From says. "But when we got there we saw people lined up out the door." As he recalls it, the message of the occasion was straightforward: "We were trying to reconnect the Democratic Party with mainstream America."
In these two moments from a now distant year—the dinner at the Plaza and the gathering in Greensboro—lie the roots of our politics. It is easy—for some, even tempting—to detect the dawn of a new progressive era in the autumn of Barack Obama's campaign for the presidency. Eight years of Republican rule have produced two seemingly endless wars, an economy in recession, a giant federal intervention in the financial sector and a nearly universal feeling of unease in the country (86 percent of Americans are dissatisfied with how things are going, and 73 percent disapprove of the president's performance). Obama—a man who has yet to complete his fourth year in the United States Senate—is leading John McCain, and Democrats may gain seats on Capitol Hill. In 2007, the Pew Research Center published a 112-page report subtitled "Political Landscape More Favorable to Democrats," and the most recent ABC News/Washington Post poll found that 55 percent believe Obama's views are neither too liberal nor too conservative but are "about right."
But history, as John Adams once said of facts, is a stubborn thing, and it tells us that Democratic presidents from FDR to JFK to LBJ to Carter to Clinton usually wind up moving farther right than they thought they ever would, or they pay for their continued liberalism at the polls. Should Obama win, he will have to govern a nation that is more instinctively conservative than it is liberal—a perennial reality that past Democratic presidents have ignored at their peril. A party founded by Andrew Jackson on the principle that "the majority is to govern" has long found itself flummoxed by the failure of that majority to see the virtues of the Democrats and the vices of the Republicans....