Is Era of Dominance Over for Conservatives?

NYT: Is Era of Dominance Over for Conservatives?
By JOHN HARWOOD
Published: October 5, 2008

....The first stirrings of conservative ascendance came in the 1950s, after Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal Coalition won five straight elections. The cultural divisions of the 1960s lent new force to Republican candidates. But it was stagnating incomes in the 1970s that allowed Ronald Reagan to knit free-market economic policies with cultural and foreign policy conservatism into a Republican revolution. In 1994, Newt Gingrich matched his achievement in Congressional elections. Democratic politicians like Bill Clinton adapted, ending the federal welfare entitlement and declaring the era of big government over.

With the collapse of the markets, the party traditionally identified with big government — the Democrats — has reason to wonder if public sentiment has decisively shifted in its direction. “Are we looking at another inflection point today?” Michael Barone, a political analyst and historian, wrote in National Review last week. “Maybe so.”...

“In a crisis Americans want decisive action,” said Representative Tom Cole of Oklahoma, who is chairman of the National Republican Congressional Committee. And in the first vote rejecting the bailout, he said, the party was unable to demonstrate that to voters.

Majority Democrats cast their greater willingness to back President Bush as “the first step” in recasting economic policies away from laissez-faire. They look to gain support from upscale constituencies on Wall Street and elsewhere, who lately have felt estranged from Republicans on social issues.

Democrats acted as “problem solvers,” argued Mr. Cole’s counterpart, Representative Chris Van Hollen of Maryland, who is the House Democrats’ campaign committee chairman. Republican “ideology got us into this mess,” he said, “and their ideology made it more difficult to get out of this mess.”

The results have clearly lifted the Democratic ticket. Mr. Obama’s lead over Mr. McCain in polls consistently exceeds the margin for error. Surveys have shown Mr. Obama leading in “red” battlegrounds like Florida, New Mexico and Ohio, while Mr. McCain has pulled back his effort to take the 17 “blue” electoral votes in Michigan....Strategists in both parties see similar effects on Congressional races....

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/06/us/politics/06caucus.html

I think not only is their era of dominance over but also that if Obama can establish an electoral bloc like the New Deal coalition we could see Democrats dominate from now decades into the future like Roosevelt, Truman and Kennedy did. The New Deal coalition Congress dominance did not even end until 1994. But Obama has to get elected on November 4 to even begin to contemplate such a coalition.

I think it's better to say that the ers of conservative unity is over. I won't try putting forward any guesses about what is to be dominant. Back in the days of FDR and the New Deal, there were many Right-wingers who hated him and threw around insults like "the Jew Rosenvelt." But they never had any semblance of cohesiveness that could allow then to translate such bitterness into a political program of action. In contrast, the coalition which FDR was able to assemble cast a very effective impression of national unity. Many semi-conservatives who might not otherwise have supported a liberal Democrat were sufficiently turned off by the factional feuds tearing the Right apart that they chose to accept the Roosevelt administration. All of this started to change in the Cold War as conservatives began to feel as if they had found their cause. At the same time, the coalition which FDR had been able to build with sectors of the Left fell apart as Cold War liberals were challenged by the New Left movement of the 1960s. Conservatives now came to appear as the representatives of national unity while liberals were increasingly slammed as "multiculturalists." The most significant thing about Alex Jones, in my opinion, is that no matter how you may evaluate the frequently poorly thought-out arguments on his show, Jones represents the renewed tendency of conservatives to splinter apart into factional feuds. It was always predictable that with the end of the Cold War, the semblance of unity which conservatism had built in that context would fall apart. For the first decade after they managed to keep up the "hate Clinton" slogan as a way of maintaining a common unity. There was also a spirit of arrogant triumphalism after the end of the Cold War, and this helped keep things together for awhile. But it was easy to see that when a Republican took office and launched off on a new war that the old fissures were reemerging. Now that the financial damn has burst, I don't expect that anything will restore the old unity among conservatives. But that's not the same thing as guessing who will hold office in the future.