After his 1984 convention, Walter Mondale polled better than Ronald Reagan.
Then came the Reagan bandwagon. What I remember was not just “Democrats for Reagan,” but signs for other groups normally assumed to be with Democrats.
It didn’t hurt that the economy was finally recovering, after the inflation horrors of the 1970s. We were still at war. There was Grenada, there was Lebanon, there was Afghanistan and Nicaragua. The Cold War heart was still beating. But these were small compared with the horrors of Vietnam.
The point is that, if you can get a bandwagon effect rolling, you can change the shape of American politics for a generation.
Ever since 1984, America has been described by the media and by most Americans, as a “center-right” country. Anyone who questions that assumption isn’t invited to the Washington salons, to the halls of power.
Joe Biden spent his entire political career on defense. Among Democrats, his was the “yeah, but” generation. The 1994 crime bill he supported was among the cruelest acts Americans have ever perpetrated on one another. He was even bullied into supporting the Iraq War, as were others who should have known better. Even with a 60-vote majority in the Senate, Obama and Biden barely got a Romney health care bill through Congress.
Then Came Trump
The headline of Trump was the Reagan Coalition going to war against demographic reality. He lost the 2016 election by 2 million votes but stole it, thanks to Russia, David Pecker, and the cover-up of his sex life.
America has still to recover from the trauma.
The Democratic campaign against Trump in 2020 was a desperate affair. The party turned to Biden because he was non-threatening, because he’d made all those compromises back in the day. The party wasn’t necessarily for anything. It was just against Trump, against dictatorship. It was narrowly against chaos.
Now we come to 2024.
I believed, back in 2008, that Barack Obama would usher in a new “Thesis of Consensus.” I believed then, and still believe, that the gating factor to economic growth in our technology age is human talent. Find it wherever it may be. Nurture it whatever it may be. Reward it and sow the seeds from which more will emerge. The story of Jensen Huang is only possible here. Same with the stories of Satya Nadella, or Sundar Pichai, or hundreds of thousands of others, in every field, from sports, to the arts to business to politics.
Every other nation is locked in a specific ethnic and/or religious identity. Only here can anyone, from anywhere, raise their hand, recite an oath, and become one of us, equal in every respect to every other American. While China and Russia keep losing population, America keeps renewing itself.
The Trump threat isn’t economic so much as it is demographic. The clearest point in his politics is to make America identify as a white, European, Christian nation, celebrating only certain types of Americanism, denigrating everyone else. That’s not just bad politics, and horrible social policy. It’s bad economics.
The Opportunity
Economics always drives American politics. We don’t just follow the money. We obey it.
Few political pundits are willing to question the thesis that the 2024 election will be very close, tighter than a tick as they say in the South.
It doesn’t have to be. The model of our politics created in 2000 can be broken. The last great act of Joe Biden’s life has been to break it.
The policies of Kamala Harris and Tim Walz are favored by a large majority of the American people. They’re not socialist, not communist, and certainly not fascist. We are a mixed economy. We have been for almost a century. The idea of leaning into building what no single company or individual can build for itself is now part of our DNA.
That’s how America tackles the big problems. Together.
There is a consensus for what Kamala Harris is offering. There is fear, because Hillary Clinton offered similar things. But there is hope, because Barack Obama also offered similar things, and won two majorities.
The genius of the campaign, so far, is its grounding in hope, in joy, in the positive energy of 16 years ago. It is the opportunity for America to reboot the Obama Administration, this time without fear, without yeah-but, and without the assumption that we’re a “center-right” country.
We’re not.
We’re a center-center country. We’ve been off center for 40 years.
This election doesn’t have to be close.
