September/October 2009

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President Ronald Reagan smiles as first lady Nancy Reagan waves to guests at the Ball for Young Americans at the D.C. Armory in Washington, D.C., on January 21, 1985. President Reagan re-enacted his oath of office earlier in the day in the rotunda of the Capitol. PHOTO: AP PHOTO/IRA SCHWARZLast year, a book of mine appeared, entitled The Age of Reagan, covering American politics since the Watergate scandal. I wanted not simply to analyze the politics of the 1970s and 1980s but to take the story through the 1990s and the first eight years of the new century. Although I believe that Ronald Reagan was the outstanding national political figure of the last 40 years, I also wanted to show that the era that Reagan dominated began long before he entered the White House in 1981, and that Reagan’s influence remained powerful long after his departure eight years later. I also had it in mind that the age of Reagan was rapidly coming to a close.

Historians predict at their peril. Still, when I was putting the last touches on the book at the end of January 2008, there were at least strong signs that the conservatism that Reagan epitomized had become exhausted. The public had clearly turned against President George W. Bush and the Republican Party. The Democratic victories in the mid-term elections of 2006 suggested that the electorate had recovered from the traumas of September 11, 2001, and that the radicalized Reaganism of the Bush administration had discredited conservative politics. It seemed to me that even if the self-declared maverick Republican nominee, Senator John McCain of Arizona, succeeded in winning, something new and different would be in the offing, given McCain’s well-known moderate proclivities and given what were almost certain to be enlarged Democratic majorities in Congress.

Now that the 2008 elections are over and the results are known, the future remains indeterminate. Nonetheless, McCain’s defeat, and the other major political events since early 2008, have reinforced my conviction that the age of Reagan is over.

On the evening of November 4, 2008, untold thousands of jubilant Chicagoans gathered in Grant Park to celebrate Barack Obama’s victory. It was, by any measure, a momentous occasion, marking the first election of an African-American man to the Presidency. Yet it was historic in other ways as well.

Just barely more than 40 years earlier, in August 1968, very different crowds gathered in Grant Park, to protest the Vietnam War amid the Democratic National Convention. Those scenes of sometimes violent discord affirmed a deep division inside the Democratic Party that had become practically unbridgeable after Senator Robert F. Kennedy’s murder the previous June. Those divisions would help the Republican Richard Nixon eke out his victory over Hubert Humphrey that autumn; and, thereafter, they would help usher in an era of conservative domination in American politics.

But all seemed to have changed utterly in Grant Park in 2008. The election of Senator Obama capped one of the most extraordinary ascents in American political history, not the least extraordinary because of its swiftness. To millions of Americans — including many Republicans who had voted for John McCain — the outcome seemed to prove that the dreams and sacrifices of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and other civil rights pioneers had not been in vain. Yet Democrats also had more conventional political victories. The Obama-Biden ticket won a majority of the popular vote — the first Democratic ticket to do so since Jimmy Carter and Walter Mondale in 1976, and by the widest margin in more than 40 years, since Lyndon B. Johnson’s landslide victory in 1964. Since the Civil War, only one other Democrat besides Johnson, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, had matched Obama’s victory. The Democrats also carried several states they had previously ceded to the Republicans, including Virginia and North Carolina, and picked up 21 seats in the House to enlarge significantly the majority they had won in 2006. In the Senate elections, as of January (when one close race still remained to be decided), the Democrats had won at least 58 seats, a pickup of nine that brought them within a whisker of gaining a filibuster-proof majority of 60 seats.

The scale of the victory persuaded some commentators — prematurely, I think — that the Democrats had forged a new commanding national majority. Much less, though, was said about the dismal state of the Republican Party. The televised scenes of the forlorn gathering in Phoenix on Election Night that heard John McCain deliver a gracious concession speech — before a crowd consisting chiefly of older, affluent white voters — was a strong visual indication that the Republicans had become an exhausted coalition, out of touch with the diverse, energized American majority of 2008. But the signs of decay had been evident for many months, beginning with the Democrats’ triumphs in the 2006 midterm elections, and all the more so at another event at the very start of the 2008 Presidential contest.

On May 3, 2007, 10 aspirants to the Republican Presidential nomination kicked off the long primary campaign with a debate at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley, Calif. The candidates disagreed about the issues and their respective qualifications — but each claimed Reagan’s mantle.

“I think it’s important to remember,” said Mike Huckabee, the former governor of Arkansas, “that what Ronald Reagan did was to give us a vision for this country, a morning in America, a city on a hill.” John McCain talked about Reagan’s fiscal austerity: “Ronald Reagan used to say we spend money like a drunken sailor.” Tommy Thompson, the ex-governor of Wisconsin, threw in a stilted but apposite observation: “We forgot to be coming up with new ideas, big ideas like Ronald Reagan.”

Given the venue — and with Nancy Reagan in the front row — the candidates were being polite, although they were also being sincere. Chiefly, they wanted to gain legitimacy with Republican factions that believed their politics were unsound. Tellingly, the candidates only once mentioned George W. Bush, who, until his popularity collapsed during his second term, had been touted within the party as a born-again Reagan. Instead, all of the candidates looked backward, beckoning to the restoration of a conservatism that had somehow lost its way.

What some experts envisaged, only two years earlier, as a permanent Republican majority now began to look like a mirage. Certainly, the Republicans could no longer count on reassembling, yet again, some version of the Reagan national coalition that had won their party the White House in six of the previous nine elections. “It’s gone,” Ed Rollins, Reagan’s White House political director, later conceded about the Reagan coalition. “It doesn’t mean a whole lot to people anymore.”

The electoral tallies a year later bore out Rollins’ evaluation and affirmed the impression that the nation had reached the end of an extraordinary era in its political history. After Barry Goldwater’s crushing defeat in 1964, the conventional wisdom held that a liberal consensus thoroughly controlled American politics. That consensus began to unravel in the late ’60s, but it was by no means obvious that the right wing of the Republican Party would replace it. Even after Reagan won the Presidency, many commentators regarded him as a fluke. David Broder of The Washington Post wrote off Reaganism early in 1983 as a “one-year phenomenon” and declared that the Reagan administration had reached its “phase-out.”

Yet, by 2008, the surge of conservative politics that Reagan personified had survived brief interruption and temporary reversal and, like it or not, defined an entire political era — an era longer than that of either Thomas Jefferson or Andrew Jackson, longer than the Gilded Age or the Progressive Era and nearly as long as the period of liberal reform that stretched from the rise of the New Deal to the demise of the Great Society.

Any periodization of history is, of course, arbitrary and debatable. And, to be sure, the age of Reagan — the most sustained conservative political era in American history — does not, at a glance, seem as significant as other major periods. Reagan fell far short of eradicating either Franklin Roosevelt’s revolution in government or the reforms of the 1960s. Contrary to the heroic portrait painted by his admirers (and, more recently, by some liberals with second thoughts), his Presidency either caused or indulged enormous damage, ranging from the savings and loan catastrophe to the Iran-Contra affair. His success at times owed as much to the divisions and disarray among the Democrats as it did to his own strength.

Still, like Jackson and Franklin Roosevelt, Reagan took over a political order in crisis, powerfully pronounced the principles of a new order and, on some crucial issues, bent the nation to his will. He took ideas that had once been relegated to the ideological margins and carried them into the very core of American politics. By hastening the end of the Cold War and altering some of the basic instruments of liberal reform (above all the federal courts and progressive taxation), the Reagan era changed the sum and substance of government at home and abroad. Given the era’s longevity, the question is when and why it ran out of steam.

All history is shaped by the unexpected — yet, to an unusual degree, contingency has altered American politics since 1960. If not for the assassination in Dallas, a liberal age of Kennedy might have dawned. Without Vietnam, Lyndon Johnson could well have emerged as the overshadowing figure of the ’60s. Had the crimes of Watergate been left unexposed, the ’70s and after might belong to the age of Nixon. Instead, out of crises that upended both parties, Ronald Reagan and the right came to power.

The Democrats never fully recovered from their divisions over Vietnam. Likewise, the Republican establishment never fully recovered from Watergate, another unexpected consequence of Vietnam. Overwhelming Democratic victories in the midterm elections of 1974, followed by Jimmy Carter’s election two years later, seemed to inaugurate a rebirth of the liberal consensus. But it was an illusion. Carter’s blend of high-minded morality and Southern Progressivism alienated him from the party’s left wing, which in turn hampered his efforts to rescue a failing economy. Finally, Carter’s inability to master world events — particularly the breakdown of Cold War realpolitik in Iran, Nicaragua and Afghanistan — doomed his administration.

Reagan and the Republican right did not, to be sure, win the Presidency by default. Adding newly organized evangelical Christians to his coalition consolidated the Solid Republican South pioneered by Barry Goldwater and Strom Thurmond and enlarged, temporarily, by Richard Nixon. A plethora of right-wing think tanks rejuvenated or founded in the ’70s gave Reaganism an aura of innovation. By placing on his ticket, in 1980, the man whom he had defeated in the primaries, George H.W. Bush, Reagan astutely completed a merger of the Republican right with the party’s old battered establishment.

Reagan did not then proceed quickly to unite the American people behind him. At different points — when he survived his shooting by John Hinckley Jr. in 1981, when the economy recovered from the so-called Reagan recession in 1983 and after he embraced Mikhail Gorbachev in 1987 — Reagan’s public standing soared. But Reagan’s average performance ratings in office rank only in the middle tier among modern Presidents, on par with Bill Clinton’s and below John F. Kennedy and Dwight D. Eisenhower. Reagan also was, in many ways, a divider more than he was a uniter. Based on the polling data, the gap between how Republicans and Democrats viewed him dwarfs that of his successor, the unheroic one-termer George H.W. Bush.

Reagan did have a knack, though, for peaking when it counted: during his reelection year in 1984 and in his final year in office. He also proved a shrewd operator regarding the two issues he cared about most — taxes and the Cold War. His two major tax cuts, in 1981 and 1986, redistributed wealth upward to the already wealthy and sent deficits soaring. He ultimately secured his chief objective, which was to skew the progressive tax system. It is almost impossible to imagine the top marginal rate on personal income ever climbing back up to 70 percent (the figure when Reagan was elected). That change alone has dramatically curtailed the possibilities for liberal government.

In foreign affairs, the aggressive so-called Reagan Doctrine, actively supporting anti-communist insurgencies and governments around the globe, became, in some of his admirers’ mistaken view, the key to Reagan’s success. In fact, the doctrine won minor triumphs in places like Grenada, put enormous pressure on the Soviet invaders in Afghanistan (while arming Islamist radicals), caused a bloodbath in Central America, ran aground in Lebanon and finally led to a severe constitutional confrontation with the Iran-Contra affair. Yet Reagan was also able to look beyond the right-wing vision, reject the advice of most hard-line conservatives, recognize Gorbachev as a genuine reformer and launch the reversal of U.S.-Soviet tensions that ended the Cold War. It was Reagan’s greatest accomplishment and arguably the greatest of any President of the United States since 1945.

Reagan was also able to look beyond the right-wing vision … and launch the reversal of U.S.-Soviet tensions that ended the Cold War.

Reagan’s performance in other areas was, at best, mixed. Although he left the economy in far better shape than he found it, the draconian anti-inflation policies of his Federal Reserve chairman, Paul Volcker, as well as declining oil prices in the mid-’80s, deserve most of the credit. On the social and cultural issues dear to the religious right — from abortion to prayer in public schools — the administration delivered mainly lip service. The pro-business Reagan revolution hastened the decline of organized labor (and contributed to declines in real hourly wages), but it failed to reduce the size of the federal government, and its signal successes in deregulation and indifference to oversight contributed to various scandals (among them the looting of the Department of Housing and Urban Development). Aside from taxation and foreign policy, Reagan’s most substantial legacies were stocking the courts with like-minded young conservatives and turning old right-wing nostrums like trickle-down economics into something approaching the conventional wisdom, at least within the Republican Party.

Reagan shakes hands and shares a laugh with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev following a summit meeting in 1985. PHOTO: DENIS PAQUIN, © REUTERS/CORBISThe chief political problem for the Reagan Republicans in advancing Reagan’s policies after 1988 lay in choosing his successor. Lacking another popular conservative of Reagan’s stature, the party turned to Reagan’s loyal Vice President, George H.W. Bush, the old establishment favorite, who had moved rightward on issues ranging from taxes to gun control. If the Democrats had found a convincing way to cohere as more than a collection of interest groups, it is possible the Republican ascendancy might have ended in 1988. But, after long experience as a congressional party — where distinct interests became entrenched — the Democrats nominated a colorless liberal, Michael Dukakis. After enjoying a large lead in the polls after his convention, Dukakis insisted on stressing his “competence” but declined to combat ferocious attacks. Most importantly, Reagan’s rising popularity, wrought after Iran-Contra and during his partnership with Gorbachev, helped lift his Vice President into the White House. The age of Reagan would continue. Yet its unraveling had begun.

Both of Reagan’s successors tried, from different sides of the political spectrum, to foster renewed moderation. Both were hampered by the costs of Reagan’s stewardship as well as by the political furies from the left and the right, still galvanized by the crises from the 1960s and ’70s.

George H.W. Bush faced the task of bringing the Cold War to a close in a detached, realist fashion very different from Reagan’s — yet he completed what Reagan had started. His major foreign policy triumphs — helping to achieve the reunification of Germany and assembling an international coalition to reverse Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait — could not have succeeded without the personal working relationship he carefully built with Gorbachev. Public reaction to the Gulf War victory pushed Bush’s approval figures to historic new heights.

But, on domestic matters, Bush found himself pilloried from the right. He might have foreseen the attacks as early as his nomination acceptance speech, when, alongside a tough-guy pledge not to raise taxes, he promised to offer a “kinder and gentler” America. (“Kinder and gentler than who?” Nancy Reagan is reported to have asked.) The Reagan years left behind not only a growing debt but additional costs from the savings and loan crisis that Reagan’s zealous deregulation policies had precipitated. Faced with an intransigent Democratic Congress, Bush bowed to reality and raised taxes, immediately and forever persuading some Reaganites that he was a secret liberal. Bush’s attempts to placate the right — by nominating Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court and by allowing Pat Buchanan to deliver a hair-raising culture wars opening-night speech at his re-nomination convention — alienated independents without fully winning over the right.

The bizarre third-party candidacy of Texas billionaire Ross Perot in 1992 showed how Bush had lost the popular confidence many had placed in Reagan. Perot, who got his political start supporting Nixon, was also a product of the age of Reagan — presenting himself as a no-nonsense businessman pitted against Washington insiders, playing up a twangy Texas populism that Bush imitated unconvincingly.

Political analysts disagree about whether Perot’s candidacy did more harm to Bush or to the Democrat who defeated him, Bill Clinton. But the fact that Perot won 19 percent of the popular vote exposed the volatility of the electorate and an abiding alienation from politics — alienation that had first helped elect Jimmy Carter but by now had gone haywire. The fractured vote augured poorly for a recreation of the political center.

Clinton offered the Democrats hope of reuniting the party’s left wing and its traditional working- and middle-class base, at odds since the late 1960s. But, before Clinton’s inauguration, news that the Bush budget deficits — the lingering ills of Reaganomics — would be even larger than predicted helped persuade him that he would have to shelve the middle-class tax cut he had promised in favor of deficit reduction. Clinton’s shift dismayed some liberals, which portended a renewal of old intramural fights among the Democrats. Only in time did it become clear that Clinton’s policies were the foundation of the ’90s boom, which lowered poverty rates and raised earnings in all income groups and across racial lines.

Clinton continually contended with the left wing of his own party as well as right-wing Republicans — and with his own personal demons. The failure of his health care initiative in 1994 capped nearly 18 months of missteps. Compounding Clinton’s woes, left-wing Democrats and labor unions, already disturbed by his conversion to deficit reduction, rebelled at his support of the North American Free Trade Agreement. The recapture of the House by the Republicans in 1994 forced Clinton to adjust and adopt more measured and sometimes defensive tactics.

Clinton recouped by occupying the political ground between the right-wing hotspurs and the doctrinaire left. He seized Republican rhetoric about family values and filled it with his own liberal politics — a co-optation that the left would misunderstand and disparage as cynical “triangulation.” Even worse, in liberals’ eyes, Clinton signed a welfare-reform bill that he himself thought too punitive in some respects (and that he would later help ameliorate), believing it would be his only opportunity to overhaul what had become a degrading, divisive, and self-defeating welfare system.

On his right, Clinton faced a Republican Congress so dominated by its ideologues that even Senate Majority Leader Robert Dole, one of the surviving traditional Republicans, grudgingly went along with the hard-right agenda. Yet Clinton outfoxed Republicans in battles over the budget that led to two government shutdowns. Instead of the Republicans forcing Clinton to capitulate to their demand to slash Medicare and cut taxes, the President held steady, and the public blamed Congress. And, when right-wing terrorists bombed the federal building in Oklahoma City, Clinton regained the initiative by effectively denouncing the anti-government mood being stoked by the Republican right.

Clinton’s comeback and his reelection seemed, at last, to establish a shaky political center — but his second term, and the election of his successor, saw that center collapse. This collapse insured that, despite Clinton’s successes, his Presidency would belong to the age of Reagan. First, right-wing Republicans refused to accept the legitimacy of his reelection — House Majority Leader Dick Armey, for one, referred to Clinton as “your President” — and stepped up their efforts to destroy him. The discovery by right-wing operatives that Clinton had had a series of trysts with a young White House worker gave them the opportunity to set in motion the events that would lead to Clinton’s impeachment. In Washington, and in the formally liberal metropolitan press, mounting fury at Clinton fed the impression that the right was in the saddle once again. Yet the partisan impeachment fight was profoundly unpopular with the public, and it brought back to Clinton even left-wing Democrats (including in the intelligentsia) who had regarded him as a betrayer of liberal principles.

With Clinton’s popularity soaring, it looked as if 2000 would bring a solid Democratic victory. But nothing went right for the Democrats. Al Gore, who believed that scandal had made Clinton a liability, distanced himself from the very administration he had served so well. Bush, a cipher to most, ran as a “compassionate conservative” who would uphold Reaganite principles but in the kinder, gentler mode of his father. The press gave credence to a string of bogus scandals and cast Gore as a privileged, self-regarding dissembler. The left retreated into its discontent with Clinton’s politics of feint and maneuver and rallied to the protest candidacy of Ralph Nader. Like Dukakis, Gore failed to defend himself from the relentless Republican attacks. Thanks to Nader, and to the intervention of four Reagan-era appointees on the Supreme Court and the man Reagan named chief justice, George W. Bush became President. Clinton’s precarious center had not held.

Contrary to what his campaign seemed to promise in 2000, Bush governed as a radical, taking Reaganite ideas to their logical conclusion and beyond. Except for the shocking attacks of September 11, 2001, Bush might not have garnered the patriotic backing that earned him public approval that, in the short run, exceeded what his father enjoyed after the Gulf War and later remained just high enough to win him a second term. During the painful years thereafter, his manifest failures led him to suffer through the longest run of public disapproval yet recorded for any President.

Repeatedly, the Bush administration exposed the exhaustion of Reaganism. The debacle in Iraq through 2006 challenged conservatives’ claims to superior wisdom in foreign and military affairs, which for decades has been their prime claim to competence. The turn to regressive tax cuts helped create monster deficits. Other disasters, above all the government’s handling of Hurricane Katrina, exposed the dark consequences of small-government dogma. The Terri Schiavo affair, as well as some spectacular sex scandals, galvanized the public’s revulsion at the hypocrisy of the religious right. The uncovering of massive corruption at the party’s highest levels, notably in the Jack Abramoff case, prompted even Republicans to wonder if the GOP had been in power too long.

With the Bush legacy now tarnished, there was no dynastic succession that could hold together the disparate elements of the old Reagan coalition. The Republicans were left with a clutch of Presidential contenders each standing for a fragment of a coalition in disarray.

The chief political problem for the Reagan Republicans in advancing Reagan’s policies lay in choosing his successor.

From the 2006 midterms on, 2008 loomed every larger as a Democratic year. But what followed was anything but smooth and predictable. Hillary Rodham Clinton, supposedly the Democrats’ destined nominee, found herself locked in an unexpected tight battle with an untested newcomer, Barack Obama. Obama’s handlers successfully positioned him to the left of Clinton, notably on the war in Iraq. The Obama campaign, with the aid of its supporters in the political press, made it seem as if he were the anti-war candidate and Clinton the pro-war candidate — a rerun, of sorts, of 1968, but with the anti-war forces now in the ascendancy. Lingering mistrust of Clinton as part of what her critics called the unprincipled “triangulating” administration of her husband, internal discord among her staffers and the first hints that the slightest perception that she was making subtle racial appeals would be seized upon by her adversaries — all of this put her on the defensive. By tapping into an energized core of college students and affluent liberals, the Obama campaign won a surprising victory in the Iowa caucuses; then, after Clinton comebacks in New Hampshire and Nevada, the Obama campaign focused on South Carolina where, its national campaign co-chair Congressman Jesse Jackson Jr. noted, a large proportion of the Democratic primary vote would come from African-Americans. Jackson insinuated that Clinton, who had wept on the campaign trail in New Hampshire, had shed no tears over the victims of Hurricane Katrina — a blatant slur that showed how rough the campaign was becoming.

George H.W. Bush served as Reagan’s Vice President and succeeded him in the Presidency in 1989. PHOTO: RON EDMONDS, © BETTMAN/CORBISThe hard-fought and at times bitter battle between Clinton and Obama continued into the late spring. After Obama’s long string of victories in state caucuses in January and early February, the political tide began to turn as Clinton won important primaries, including those in the crucial battleground states of Pennsylvania and Ohio. The contest lasted until the primaries ended at the beginning of June, when Obama, enjoying a slender lead in the pledged delegate count, began picking up enough support from the party’s super-delegates to secure the nomination. On June 7, Clinton suspended her campaign and endorsed Obama.

The presumptive nominee spent much of the summer in the spectacle-driven electioneering mode that had dominated his campaign during the fight for the nomination. At the Democratic National Convention in Denver, Obama’s strategists arranged for him to deliver his acceptance speech in a professional football stadium filled with adoring supporters as well as convention delegates. Yet the speech was more subdued than Obama’s earlier campaign orations and conveyed command as well as conviction. The political highpoints of the convention, essential for the Democrats and Obama, came when Hillary and Bill Clinton separately addressed the delegates to back the candidate, thereby helping to heal the persisting breaches in the party’s ranks. Obama’s choice for Vice Presidential running mate of Joe Biden, a longtime senator from Delaware with strong foreign-policy credentials as chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, disappointed some who had hoped that Obama would select Hillary Clinton, but Biden added experience and authority to the ticket.

The Republicans, meanwhile, faced a quandary having chosen McCain, a figure distrusted by many of the party’s core supporters, especially social conservatives and the Christian evangelical right. McCain reportedly wanted a running mate whose politics were much like his own — not an orthodox party man but a non-conformist such as the renegade Democratic Senator Joe Lieberman of Connecticut, who had been supporting McCain for the entire campaign and would attack Obama’s patriotism. But Lieberman was unacceptable to the Right. At the last minute, McCain opted for Governor Sarah Palin of Alaska, a newcomer who had favorably impressed influential neo-conservatives and social conservative — and the first female to run on a national Republican ticket. Palin’s down-to-earth, unflinchingly conservative acceptance speech thrilled the delegates and gave Republicans hope that the underdog McCain might pull off a victory in November.

Immediately after the Republican convention, Obama’s lead disappeared and McCain-Palin pulled ahead. Suddenly, though, in mid-September, the Lehman Brothers investment bank, one of the most prestigious old firms on Wall Street, announced that it was on the brink of bankruptcy — a grave new turn in the sub-prime mortgage and credit crisis that had been evident since 2007. (The crisis had worsened significantly over the summer, when liquidity crises forced two giant government-sponsored mortgage lenders, familiarly known as Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, to be placed under public conservatorships.) Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy on September 15, stock market prices tumbled and soon after, the Merrill Lynch investment house and the huge AIG insurance firm announced that they, too, were about to go under. On September 17, the chairman of the Federal Reserve, Ben Bernanke, advised Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson that a large amount of public money was required to stabilize the collapsing financial system.

The onset of the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression augured an economic slump far more devastating than the entire political class of both parties foresaw when the Presidential campaign began. The political fallout was unprecedented, for never before had such a sudden, enormous shock, occurring so close to Election Day, so dramatically altered the terms of a Presidential election. What had begun as a campaign dominated by issues of foreign policy and national security was now focused on the failing economy.

The crisis — the calamitous result, it appeared, of decades of Reagan Republican-style deregulation (with bipartisan support on housing policy from Democrats) — was bound to hurt Mc¬Cain and the Republicans badly, but McCain attempted a startling political breakthrough. On September 24, while Congress was assembling in special session to consider a proposed $700 billion bailout plan for the finance industry, McCain announced that he was suspending his campaign, returning to Washington and devoting himself to working on the emergency — meaning that he might not participate in the first Presidential debate, scheduled for two days later. This peculiar, risky move might have paid off had Congress quickly approved the bailout plan, thereby permitting McCain to claim credit for helping to manage the crisis. But McCain ended up looking ineffective as well as eccentric when, three days after the debate (in which he did, finally, participate), conservative Republicans in the House, along with a significant number of liberal Democrats, declared the proposal an unfair sop to Wall Street predators and killed it. (The House finally approved a revised version of the bailout bill on October 5, and President Bush immediately signed it into law.) McCain’s judgment came in for additional criticism when shaky and uninformed remarks by Governor Palin in an interview with CBS News anchor Katie Couric raised doubts about her readiness to serve as President — a legitimate concern, given McCain’s relatively advanced age (the second oldest non-incumbent ever to run for President) and medical history (which included several bouts with skin cancer).

The Republicans never recovered from the Wall Street collapse. Obama took a measured approach in his public statements, while McCain plugged away at old Reaganite themes, including the paramount need for tax cuts, which sounded predictable and stale. In their televised debates, Obama was reassuringly calm and collected, and even complimentary to his opponent, while McCain seemed to be flailing, as he tried to conjure up the old Reagan magic while denouncing Obama’s middle-class tax cut proposals as a socialist plot. The Democrats regained the lead in the polls, and for the final two weeks of the campaign the outcome looked like a foregone conclusion.

The scale of the victory persuaded some commentators that the Democrats had forged a new commanding national majority. Obama certainly held on to the core constituencies that had propelled him to the nomination. His candidacy galvanized African-Americans to turn out in record numbers and give him 95 percent of their votes. Young voters and first-time voters backed Obama over McCain by margins of two to one. So, significantly, did Latino voters, who had preferred Hillary Clinton in the primaries and had given a significant minority of their votes to the Texan George W. Bush in 2000 and 2004. Obama also cut significantly into the Republican majority among white male voters, a result that appeared to have been linked to the dire economic news.

The Democrats, to be sure, had yet to prove to be an effective and united governing party. The severe and baffling financial crisis along with continuing enormous problems abroad, especially in Iraq and Afghanistan, would sorely test the new President, his administration and the Democratic Congress. In more narrowly political terms, a single national victory and majorities in both houses of Congress did not prove that a solid new political majority, much less a historic realignment like the New Deal coalition, was in place. Both Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton, after all, had come to power with sizeable congressional majorities, only to find themselves often stymied and on the defensive — and eventually to find themselves succeeded by Republicans. Just as Franklin D. Roosevelt’s election in 1932 and Ronald Reagan’s in 1980 marked a repudiation of the existing political order, so Barack Obama’s election in 2008 marked the rejection of Republican rule as conducted by George W. Bush. The acid test for any new majority would come in 2012.

Still, as the transition to a new administration began, there was an almost palpable sense that a great change was at hand. Obama enjoyed closer relations with the Democrats on Capitol Hill than either Carter or Clinton had when they took office. The almost rapturous response of the news media and political press to Obama’s candidacy and then his election — which caused some writers to liken him to Abraham Lincoln, even before he had been sworn in — seemed to offer the new President welcome political cover, at least during the early stages of his Presidency. Above all, Obama’s early appointments — including his choices of Hillary Clinton as secretary of state, Steven Chu as secretary of energy and Peter Orszag as budget director — indicated both the depth of Democratic talent available to be tapped for leading roles in the administration, and Obama’s determination to lay aside the kinds of fractious intramural differences that had plagued the party since 1968.

What kind of political era will arise over the years to come, of course, remains unknown and unknowable. So far, President Obama has shown a readiness to undo swiftly some of the conservative policies of the Bush years, on issues ranging from the handling of suspected terrorists and the staffing of the National Labor Relations Board to the future of stem-cell research. His speech before a joint session of Congress on February 24 repudiated Bush’s approach to executive power and, in making the case for federal involvement in economic and social development, exorcised the spirit of Ronald Reagan. Yet Obama has also taken a measured stance on social issues (retaining, for example, Bush’s Office of Faith Based Initiatives) as well as on foreign policy that has caused frustration among some of the more wide-eyed, impressionable of his campaign supporters. The party-line vote on his economic stimulus proposal, and the rancor from Republicans amid the debate over the stimulus, flew in the face of the President’s appeals for a new bipartisanship. And on the truly pressing financial crisis, including the banking fiascos, the administration has been more vocal in attacking reprehensible behavior by the malefactors of great wealth than in laying out a strategy for the middle-term or even the immediate future.

Still, the inability of the Republicans to articulate any sort of coherent alternative on any of these issues — let alone the insistence by some Republicans that they should refrain from offering alternatives — reinforces the impression that conservativism has, for the time being (and probably for sometime to come) exhausted itself. Today’s scenes in Washington affirm that the Republican Party has traveled a long way since the days when Tom DeLay and Newt Gingrich strutted through the capital with supreme self-assurance, let alone since the days of Ronald Reagan. A new political era is struggling to be born, but an older one, the age of Reagan, lies in ruins.

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