Word: reaganization
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...Your predecessors dealt with church attendance in various ways. Jimmy Carter taught Sunday school at a Baptist church in Virginia while he was President. Ronald Reagan didn't go to church at all, citing the hassle of making a church set up security screening for parishioners. The Clintons drove down the street every Sunday to Foundry United Methodist, where Chelsea sang in the youth choir. George W. Bush never became a regular member of any local church, preferring to worship most often at the chapel at Camp David...
...Consensus There are fault lines in the Obama coalition, to be sure. In a two-party system, it's impossible to construct a majority without bringing together people who disagree on big things. But Obama's majority is at least as cohesive as Reagan's or F.D.R.'s. The cultural issues that have long divided Democrats - gay marriage, gun control, abortion - are receding in importance as a post-'60s generation grows to adulthood. Foreign policy doesn't divide Democrats as bitterly as it used to either because, in the wake of Iraq, once-hawkish working-class whites have grown more...
...disorder that panics Americans now is not cultural but economic. If liberalism collapsed in the 1960s because its bid for cultural freedom became associated with cultural disorder, conservatism has collapsed today because its bid for economic freedom has become associated with economic disorder. When Reagan took power in 1981, he vowed to restore the economic liberty that a half-century of F.D.R.-style government intrusion had stifled. American capitalism had become so thoroughly domesticated, he argued, that it lost its capacity for dynamic growth. For a time, a majority of Americans agreed. Taxes and regulations were cut and cut again...
...government out of the way and pro-government conservatives who want Washington's help. If Obama moves forcefully to restore economic order, the Wall Street Journal will squawk about creeping socialism, as it did in F.D.R.'s day, but many downscale Republicans will cheer. It's these working-class Reagan Democrats who could become tomorrow's Obama Republicans - a key component of a new liberal majority - if he alleviates their economic fears. (See pictures of former Presidents Clinton and Bush...
...politics, crisis often brings opportunity. If Obama restores some measure of economic order, kick-starting U.S. capitalism and softening its hard edges, and if he develops the kind of personal rapport with ordinary Americans that F.D.R. and Reagan had - and he has the communication skills to do it - liberals will probably hold sway in Washington until Sasha and Malia have kids. As that happens, the arguments that have framed economic debate in recent times - for large upper-income tax cuts or the partial privatization of Social Security and Medicare - will fade into irrelevance. In an era of liberal hegemony, they...