A Liberal’s Lament

Barack Obama has chosen to deliver the most important speech of his young political career in a setting that suits his spectacular campaign in the presidential primaries. In front of 75,000 roaring, adoring Democrats at Invesco Field at Mile High stadium in Denver, he will give one of his uplifting arena-rock performances, while also evoking the spirits of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. (on the 45th anniversary of the March on Washington) and John F. Kennedy (who moved his own acceptance speech in 1960 from the convention hall to the Los Angeles Coliseum).

Obama's most ardent admirers, who include much of the political press and practically all of the liberal intelligentsia, will almost certainly report and analyze the event as a mammoth historical occasion, and quite possibly praise the speech as one of the greatest political orations ever. But will Obama, amid the pulsating theatrics, also attempt the less glamorous and more difficult task of explaining specifically where he wants to move the country, and how he proposes to move it, above and beyond reciting his policy positions? History, as well as recent public-opinion polls, suggests that he badly needs to do so. As a lifelong Democrat who supported Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton during the primaries, I would like to see him succeed in fulfilling his promise.

Since the end of World War II, every Democrat who has sought the presidency has attempted to update the legacy of Franklin Delano Roosevelt's New Deal. From Harry Truman to Bill Clinton, those elected president have refreshed the liberal tradition by promising to put their own stamp upon it, and then doing so. After 40 years of mostly Republican control of the White House, it should be clear that mistakes and overreaching have hampered liberalism's evolution. But by renewing the idea that government has an important role to play in expanding the opportunities and well-being of ordinary Americans, the basic Democratic tradition has survived through thick and thin.

Senator Obama's efforts to reinterpret the Democratic legacy have thus far amounted chiefly to promising a dramatic break with the status quo. His rhetoric of "hope" and "change" has thrilled millions of Democrats and helped secure the party's nomination. Yet millions of other Democrats still find his appeals wispy and unconvincing, and the persistent coolness within the ranks worries some party veterans. Democratic governors have already urged him to be more explicit about how he intends to adjust the party's principles to meet today's challenges.

Obama might find instructive President Truman's example of 60 years ago. Suddenly thrust into the presidency when FDR died, Truman quickly shifted gears from winning World War II to contend with the nation's former ally, Stalin's Soviet Union. Truman's most notable early achievements in foreign policy, including the Marshall Plan and the Truman doctrine, implemented the new concept of containment that guided American policymakers of both parties for the next two generations. At home, Truman tried to augment the New Deal by calling for a national health-care system, and he expanded his party's fledgling support for civil rights by ordering the desegregation of the armed forces.

Truman's Fair Deal liberalism, firmly anti-communist but pro-labor and favorable to blacks, caused both the left wing of the party and the Southern Democratic segregationists to defect in the 1948 election, but Truman regained the White House after a stirring campaign. Truman's cold-war liberalism—what the young, pro-Truman historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. called the politics of "the vital center"—provided the central ideas for a new generation of mainstream Democrats.

Kennedy, in 1960, explicitly invoked the New Deal and Fair Deal as "bold measures for their generations," but also laid out the basic framework for his own New Frontier as a set of specific challenges, international and domestic. The foreign policies of Kennedy and his successor, Lyndon B. Johnson, produced both triumphs (the peaceful resolution of the Cuban missile crisis, the nuclear Test-Ban Treaty of 1963) and fiascoes (the Bay of Pigs invasion and, worst of all, rapid escalation of U.S. military intervention in the Vietnamese civil war). As they stayed the course of nuclear deterrence and anti-communist containment, Kennedy and Johnson addressed domestic challenges left unmet by Roosevelt and Truman, in a booming, affluent consumer society very different from the America of the 1930s and 1940s.