A Liberal’s Lament

Most important, JFK and LBJ, at first cautiously and then wholeheartedly, embraced what Kennedy as early as his acceptance speech called America's "peaceful revolution for human rights" by formulating and then enacting landmark legislation against racial discrimination. Their determination fundamentally changed the Democratic Party by causing the political implosion of the formerly solid Democratic South, while making the Democrats the new political legatees of Abraham Lincoln. Kennedy and Johnson also attended to other glaring social needs, through new federal programs (Medicare, Medicaid and Johnson's multifaceted war on poverty, announced in his first major address as president) and public service (Project Head Start in early childhood education; Johnson's VISTA program, based on Kennedy's Peace Corps). LBJ's Great Society represented the full flowering of New-Deal-style liberalism before it was stalled by the financial and political costs of Vietnam and urban racial unrest.

As for the one-termer Jimmy Carter, Democrats ignore his different brand of politics, and its fate, at their peril. Carter ran against "Washington" on the slogan "A Leader, for a Change," and on his brains and personal authenticity: "Why Not the Best?" After he only narrowly defeated Gerald Ford, he came to office with the advantage of enormous Democratic majorities in both the House and the Senate (where he had a filibuster-proof 62 Democratic seats). In the wake of the Vietnam debacle and the Watergate scandal, Carter—an outsider and a decidedly non-imperial anti-politician—stressed the virtues of truthfulness, efficiency and technical expertise above either partisanship or new federal programs. In foreign policy, recoiling from Vietnam, he focused on the use of diplomacy to advance the ideal of human rights around the globe.

Yet little seemed to go right for the earnest president. The economy, hit by repeated oil shortages and hikes in oil prices, remained trapped in a combination of high unemployment and runaway inflation. Impatient with and at times heedless of the political prerogatives jealously guarded on Capitol Hill, Carter quickly found his relations with his own congressional majority deteriorating.

Although he won notable victories in foreign affairs, including the Panama Canal Treaty and the Camp David accords, Carter's "soft power" approach was overwhelmed by the capture of American hostages in Iran and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. In an extraordinary speech in mid-1979, Carter blamed the troubles on a "crisis of confidence" of the American people themselves. His gloomy diagnosis of the nation's malaise set the stage for the entrance of the beaming conservative champion, Ronald Reagan.

Bill Clinton was the first president to take office after the collapse of the Soviet Union, and he began his presidency committed chiefly to reducing the federal deficit and the economic inequities created during the administrations of Reagan and George H.W. Bush with a Democratic liberalism updated for the 1990s. By the end of his second term, he could boast that he had helped turn crippling deficits into the largest federal surpluses in American history. He also could point to a prolonged economic boom that benefited Americans across the lines of class, race, region and ethnicity. Following calamities in Bosnia, Somalia and Haiti, and after the Western nations' catastrophic inaction in Rwanda, Clinton had shifted course and both revived and revised America's forceful sense of purpose in world affairs, from the Balkans to Northern Ireland.

Clinton suffered through major domestic blunders as well, above all the political debacle concerning his ambitious health-care proposals. Some of Clinton's initiatives—signing the North American Free Trade Agreement, a welfare-reform bill and balancing the budget—infuriated the left of his own party. Meanwhile, right-wing Republican efforts to demolish him bore bitter fruit with his impeachment. Yet amid the peace and prosperity of his final year, with his public popularity soaring, Clinton appeared to have created successfully a new, post-New Deal liberalism that was moving the country beyond Reaganite conservatism—reversing regressive fiscal policies that had virtually bankrupted the federal government; spreading economic growth more broadly; finding a new balance of American force and diplomacy in foreign affairs, and countering racial polarization and right-wing antigovernment fervor with appointments, policies and speeches that promoted what Clinton called the ideal of "One America."

But the election of 2000 stopped the Clintonian experiment short, for reasons ranging from the destructive left-wing campaign of Ralph Nader, to Al Gore's strategic error of distancing himself from a successful record, to the dubious, one-vote majority decision in Bush v. Gore. George W. Bush's administration, despite its thin mandate, moved federal policy sharply right—a heavily politicized shift that accelerated under the cover of Bush's War on Terror following the atrocities of September 11, 2001.