Who Can Lead the Democrats Out of the Desert?

WP: Democrats Out of the Desert
By Harold Meyerson
Wednesday, January 30, 2008; Page A15

....Barack Obama promises to turn out record numbers of young people and African Americans and to win the votes of upscale independents, but he has shown no great strength so far among working-class whites. Hillary Clinton commands more allegiance from the Democrats' working-class base and among female voters, but she also elicits far more antipathy than Obama does. Worse, in tandem with her husband, she has imperiled her prospects in the general election by estranging black and young Democratic voters -- a remarkable accomplishment, considering that the Democrats' historic rifts usually reflect major policy differences, of which this year's contest has none....

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For 40 years now, since 1968, the Democrats have wandered in a political desert. From Nixon to Reagan to the current Bush, it's been a conservative era, and the genius of Bill Clinton, the most successful Democratic politician of that time, was primarily defensive -- devising stratagems as a candidate to keep the Republicans from winning over Democrats on social issues, and then as a president to keep Republicans from abolishing government altogether while conceding that the era of big government was over. The times themselves mandated incrementalism and triangulation, wars without movement fought behind battlements and moats, and no one learned the lessons of that era more brilliantly than Hillary Clinton. In a 51 to 49 nation, she is probably the best the Democrats have to offer.

But can the Democrats ever push beyond the politics of entrenchment?

Now that conservatism is in tatters, can they build a progressive majority that delivers us from an ideology that has led us to invest less and less in the American people? That will take a leader whose genius is not for the defensive wars of the past but for movement, for crafting a new majority, addressing the new, cross-party anxiety over America's future with a call to a common purpose, convincing us that we are divided against ourselves at our own peril. That leader may be Barack Obama, who already has shown himself more able than any American in a very long time to help us transcend some of our most crippling differences.

Or it may not be Obama, not yet, not ever; his power to persuade may fail to convince his compatriots that the country must change. But he is, at least, as Hillary Clinton cannot be, a leader with that transformative potential. The desert does not claim him; his promise is that he can end its hold on us.

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