Here is a great article that gives very strong reasons to remain optimistic about the Democratic Party's future. Will this phenomenon manifest itself this election cycle? Will Obama get a landslide? Or are we just seeing the beginnings of something that will take shape in the near future? Just one caveat: it's a pretty long read (but worth it). Check it out:
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/05/26/080526fa_fact_packerThe Fall of Conservatism
Have the Republicans run out of ideas?
by George Packer
The era of American politics that has been dying before our eyes was born in 1966. That January, a twenty-seven-year-old editorial writer for the St. Louis Globe-Democrat named Patrick Buchanan went to work for Richard Nixon, who was just beginning the most improbable political comeback in American history. Having served as Vice-President in the Eisenhower Administration, Nixon had lost the Presidency by a whisker to John F. Kennedy, in 1960, and had been humiliated in a 1962 bid for the California governorship. But he saw that he could propel himself back to power on the strength of a new feeling among Americans who, appalled by the chaos of the cities, the moral heedlessness of the young, and the insults to national pride in Vietnam, were ready to blame it all on the liberalism of President Lyndon B. Johnson. Right-wing populism was bubbling up from below; it needed to be guided by a leader who understood its resentments because he felt them, too.
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