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Elvin Lim is Assistant Professor of Government at Wesleyan University and author of The Anti-intellectual Presidency, which draws on interviews with more than 40 presidential speechwriters to investigate this relentless qualitative decline, over the course of 200 years, in our presidents’ ability to communicate with the public. He also blogs at www.elvinlim.com. In the article below he looks at Howard Dean. See Lim’s previous OUPblogs here.

The year is 1964, the high watermark of Liberalism. Lyndon Johnson takes 61.1 percent of the popular vote in his election contest against Barry Goldwater, an electoral feat that was bigger than Franklin Roosevelt’s 60.8 percent in 1936 and one that has not been surpassed in the years since. The Democratic tsunami sweeps down Pennsylvania Avenue to the Capitol, where Democrats would out-number Republicans two to one in the 89th Congress, and in the Senate they take 68 seats – the biggest supermajority held by any party to this day. The era of Liberalism had entered its Golden Age.

Unified by the inspiring memory of John Kennedy, Democrats were able to enact health-care legislation that even Franklin Roosevelt, the father of modern Liberalism did not have the stomach to attempt as part of his New Deal. It would be Lyndon Johnson, not Harry Truman, not FDR, and not his counsin, Theodore Roosevelt (running as the Progressive Party candidate in 1912) who would enact the single biggest health-care legislation in US history, offering single-payer, comprehensive health-care benefits to seniors over the age of 65 (Medicare) and an option for states to finance the health-care of the indigent (Medicaid) in the Social Security Act of 1965.

We remember the New Deal, and perhaps the Fair Deal, but it is the Great Society that is the apotheosis of 20th century Liberalism. And if 1965 is Liberalism’s high water-mark, then those who would stymie health-care reform today because of the lack of a robust (or indeed, any) public option have gravely gotten their decades mixed up.

There was a time when Liberals did not have to call themselves “Progressives.” That was four decades ago, when Lyndon Johnson attacked Barry Goldwater for wanting to roll back social security and openly campaigned for a further expansion of the welfare state. Times have changed. Today’s Progressives must cagily wrap their Liberal agenda with talk of choice, competition, and bending cost curves. And if the era of Liberalism as FDR and Johnson knew it is over, The Age of Reagan lingers on in the Tea Party Movement. Despite his aspiration to build an even Greater Society than Johnson, Barack Obama’s electoral mandate is 18 percent short of what Johnson possessed in 1965; the Democratic majority is the House is much smaller; and, despite the new cloture rules post-1975 in the Senate which has reduced the fraction of votes needed to end debate from 2/3 to 3/5, Joe Lieberman et al remind us every day that the Senate is anything but filibuster-proof.

To Governor Dean and his compatriots, it is 2009, not 1965.

Elvin Lim is Assistant Professor of Government at Wesleyan University and author of The Anti-intellectual Presidency, which draws on interviews with more than 40 presidential speechwriters to investigate this relentless qualitative decline, over the course of 200 years, in our presidents’ ability to communicate with the public. He also blogs at www.elvinlim.com. In the article below he looks at President Obama’s trip to the G-20 Summit. Read his previous OUPblogs here.

If there was one message President Obama wanted to send to allies in his trip to the G-20 Summit in Europe, it was to say that he is not George Bush, and the era of arrogant American unilateralism is over. In Strasbourg, France, the President said, “We exercise our leadership best when we are listening … when we show some element of humility.”

Does humility engender respect or does it evidence weakness? This week in Europe, President Obama was applauded and cheered, but this soft power didn’t seem to translate to much. The score is 0-1 in Round One of Liberalism versus Realism. I think the President knows this, and is merely waiting to cash in the store of goodwill he banked this week. As the major decisions of the presidency are made quietly behind the desk at the Oval Office, not in international summits, we should not mistake Obama’s courtesies as the prologue of things to come.

The President could not have missed the setbacks he encountered in this trip. Sure, he successfully mediated the disagreement between Chinese President Hu Jintao and French President Nicolas Sarkozy so that the G-20 would “take note” rather than fully endorse a list of rogue offshore tax havens. But the American president’s new found respect for the world did not engender newfound cooperation or an increased willingness to take America’s lead. (And we should not have expected otherwise, for courtesies are exchanged only up to the point when conflicting interests are at stake.) Europe was not malleable to the president’s call for a larger global stimulus package, and far from enthusiastic at his call to welcome Turkey into the European Union.  NATO allies only agreed to sending 5,000 more non-combat troops to aid the US war effort in Afghanistan. And of course, the President stood before a crowd of 20,000 people in Prague painting a Utopian portrait of a nuclear-free world just hours after the North Korea successfully tested a long-range missile launch.

President Obama’s European trip was a very well orchestrated and executed photo-op.  There is no doubt that Europe is feeling the love, but it is unclear if she is returning it in real ways that matter. The dance of diplomatic and royal protocols may have thrilled the public and the media, but on things that matter, the president squarely confronted the limits of symbolism and gesture.

After all, the president did let slip in the same speech in which he was extolling humility that “when we recognize we may not always have the best answer but we can always encourage the best answer.” In the end, (even ) the Liberal Way  is still the American Way. And I expect, as Theodore Roosevelt once counseled, the president’s soft voice will soon be amplified by a big stick.

Elvin Lim is Assistant Professor of Government at Wesleyan University and author of The Anti-intellectual Presidency, which draws on interviews with more than 40 presidential speechwriters to investigate this relentless qualitative decline, over the course of 200 years, in our presidents’ ability to communicate with the public. He also blogs at www.elvinlim.com. In the article below he looks at regulation. Read his previous OUPblogs here.

Government regulation of the market in American has always been either too invasive or too superficial, never just right. This tells us more about ourselves than the day-by-day report card of Obama’s fledgling administration.

The Obama adminstration’s firing of GM CEO Rick Wagoner seem to some to have been a power grab and an overkill; yet others feel that the administration’s plan to help to buy up some of the toxic assets owned by banks will be too easy on the banks.

We swing between the extremes of excessive regulation and unfettered laissez faire - indeed we have majority factions within both major parties staunchly defending both extremes - because our country has never properly worked out the tension between the two.

Consider the last time an economic crisis of even greater proportions rocked the country. The New Deal and in particular the National Industrial Recovery Act (NRA) represented an even greater power grab by the Roosevelt administration than the one Obama is being accused of today, including the right by the president to approve of a set of “codes of fair competition” for every industry regulating minimum wages and maximum weekly hours. The Supreme Court unanimously declared the NRA unconstitutional in 1936.

As a country born without the feudal baggage of the old world and one which has constructed the self-fulfilling myth of the American Dream, we have never had to fully confront the crisis of capitalism that industrialization provoked elsewhere. Even having experienced the Great Depression, we still have not found, and no politician has successfully articulated, a sustained national consensus about the relationship between the state and the economy. Our love-hate relationship with the federal government explains American exceptionalism, but it also the source of our current woes.

Because ours is a capitalist economy which concedes the value of government intervention and regulation, we must lived with mixed (and hence often botched) solutions to our current economic crisis. We can neither nationalize the banks - and hence control how they are run including how executive compensation is structured, nor can we leave the banks alone - no politician would dare risk a depression on the heels of his/her inaction. In trying to find a compromise between market liberalism and political control of the market, we often end up achieving neither. So the Obama administration will alternately be accused of sleeping with Wall Street or witch-hunting it; decades after we have weathered the current crisis, we will still be debating whether or not what Obama did helped or worsened the problem. This is America, where we have a right, nay, a duty, to earnestly debate - as our Founders did - the necessity of even having a federal government at all.

Elvin Lim is Assistant Professor of Government at Wesleyan University and author of The Anti-intellectual Presidency, which draws on interviews with more than 40 presidential speechwriters to investigate this relentless qualitative decline, over the course of 200 years, in our presidents’ ability to communicate with the public. He also blogs at www.elvinlim.com.  In the article below he reflects on the rehabilitation of liberalism. Read his previous OUPblogs here.

Whatever happens at the polls in two weeks, the pendulum has swung back in Liberalism’s direction. Economically, culturally, and ideologically, liberal answers are regaining legitimacy.

After all, even though the Democratic party nominated a liberal anti-war candidate over a more moderate establishment candidate this year, and the Republicans turned to a maverick with a reputation for bi-partisanship, the Democratic candidate is ahead in practically every battleground state that George Bush won in 2004.

How quickly times have changed. Whereas John Kerry was swiftboated in 2004, Obama (like Reagan) is developing Teflon powers as he continues to ride his surge in the polls despite stories about Jeremiah Wright, Bill Ayers, and ACORN. When terrorism was issue number one, people preferred a Republican president; but when the economy becomes issue number one, people prefer a Democratic president.

This is why Sarah Palin’s charge that “‘spreading the wealth‘ sounds a little like socialism” isn’t getting much traction. Spreading the wealth sounds like sharing the wealth, and these days such thoughts aren’t all that unpopular. After all, the Bush administration’s decision to obtain equity stakes in several private banks in return for a liquidity injection isn’t exactly laissez faire.

Culturally, the country appears to have moved on from those culture wars we heard so much about just four years ago. Just this year, the California and Connecticut Supreme Courts’ decisions to legalize same-sex marriage and the lackluster response from the conservative community indicates the shifting cultural tectonics. Abortion isn’t such a hot button issue this year either. Anti-abortion Catholics have endorsed Obama in significant numbers. If anything, McCain’s selection of a running mate who will not make an exception to her pro-life position for rape and incest reveals a campaign completely in illusion about where the country is culturally. McCain’s contempt for the “health” exception for women will seriously damage his chances with women.

We also see the ideological shift in cross-party endorsements for Obama. Breaking a century and a half year old tradition, the Chicago Tribune has endorsed Barack Obama. Christopher Buckley’s defection is both substantially and symbolically powerful, as were the endorsements of Chuck Hagel and Richard Lugar. And now Colin Powell has joined the bandwagon, characterizing Obama as a “transformational” leader. The last time we saw such language being used to describe a potential president was during the landslide and realigning elections of 1932 and 1980.

In the days to come, Republicans will push back to insist that this is still a “center-right” country - as Karl Rove and Charles Krauthhammer have done - and they will try to remind Americans that Democratic control of all branches of government may not be a good idea. But if the result of the White House race is still unclear, no one doubts that the Democrats will strengthen their majorities in both the House and the Senate. Average Joe, the median independent voter has moved to the Left of Plumber Joe, the median Republican voter. It may be time to excavate “liberal” and “liberalism” from the dictionary of political incorrectness.

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Ethan Rarick’s Desperate Passage: The Donner Party’s Perilous Journey West is an intimate portrait of the Donner Party and their unimaginable ordeal in the Sierra Nevada Mountains. Of course, what most of us remember about the Donner Party are the gruesome tails of cannibalism. In the interview below with radio host Dorian Devins, Rarick discusses the cannibalism aspect of the story. Hear other Rarick clips here.

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