White House/Pete Souza

On November 4, 2008, Barack Obama was elected president of the United States by 53 percent to 46 percent, the biggest presidential victory since the election of George H.W. Bush 20 years earlier. The achievement was his but also his political party's. Democrats won the popular vote for the House of Representatives by 53 percent to 44 percent and expanded their majority to 257-178. It was the first time since 1988 that either major party had hit 53 percent. In the Senate, the Democrats initially captured seven seats, which put them within reach of a 60-vote majority impervious to the threat of filibusters.

The results of the 2008 election signaled the end of a long period during which both parties appealed to approximately equal segments of the American electorate. After the cliff-hanger 2000 election, The Almanac of American Politics described America as a 49 percent nation. After the 2008 election, it appears that this is, at least for the moment and possibly for a long time, Obama's nation.

The 2008 campaign was the first since 1952 in which neither a president nor a vice president was a candidate. It produced a dramatic expansion in the size of the electorate from George W. Bush's first election in 2000. The only comparable eight-year growth spurt occurred between 1944 and 1952, when the GI generation first voted in large numbers. After many years in which political analysts bemoaned low voter turnout, the presidential electorate grew from 105 million in 2000 to 131 million in 2008, a 25 percent increase during a period of 8 percent population growth. About 60 percent of eligible voters participated in the 2008 presidential election, a level exceeded only rarely in modern times: in 1952, 1960, 1964, and 1968. America elected its first black president with about the same high level of involvement that it displayed in choosing its first Catholic president in 1960, Democrat John F. Kennedy.

Turnout did not rise evenly across the country. It went up more in target states, those places that were seriously contested by the presidential campaigns, and less elsewhere, although it rose by at least 10 percent in every state and the District of Columbia. In Pennsylvania and Ohio, the increase in turnout from 2000 to 2008 was 22 percent, while population growth was only 1 percent. Uncontested California and Texas experienced surges in political participation of 24 percent and 26 percent, respectively, driven only partly by population increases of 8.5 percent and 17 percent.

Nationally, this rush of political adrenaline was fueled by a combination of interest in the candidates and the organizational heft of the two campaigns. Collective enthusiasm worked to the advantage of Republicans in the 2002 midterms and in the 2004 presidential election, but in 2006 and 2008, it worked to the advantage of Democrats even more. Both parties made a concentrated effort to boost turnout, but the Obama campaign's organizing overshadowed Republican operations. In the 2004 exit poll, 26 percent of people said they were contacted by Democratic nominee John Kerry's campaign and 24 percent heard from Republican Bush's campaign. In the 2008 exit poll, 26 percent reported contacts by the Democrats and only 18 percent by the Republicans.

The fact that Obama won in 2008 with nearly the same 7.7-percentage-point margin that gave George H.W. Bush his victory in 1988 has been cited by some scholars as further evidence that the Republican era that began in the 1980s has been superseded by a Democratic era that solidified some time during George W. Bush's second term. Compelling arguments can be made for this view, and Democrats looking forward from 2008 seem to have more reason than Republicans did in 1988 to believe that their party is on its way to an enduring majority. But the 1988 election and the 2008 election happened in markedly different political periods.

In the last quarter-century, the United States experienced relatively long periods of trench-warfare politics, during which the divisions between the parties were stable and the political battles were fought along familiar lines. There were relatively brief periods of open-field politics, in which highly unstable voting behavior produced unlikely electoral outcomes. The period between 1983 and 1991 was one of trench-warfare politics: Americans voted Republican for president and Democratic for Congress to the point that political scientists said the former had a lock on the presidency and political commentators did not even bother to calculate the odds of a Republican majority in Congress.

Then came a period of highly unstable, open-field politics from 1991 to 1995, in which the unthinkable happened. Third-party candidates led in polls for the presidency--Ross Perot in 1992, Colin Powell in 1995--and a Republican president who presided over a successful war was defeated soundly by a young Democrat with no experience in national office. Then, two years later, voters elected a Republican House and a Republican Senate for the first time in 42 years. The turn of events was so dramatic that the term "Republican revolution" was coined to describe the change in control of Congress.

There followed, from 1995 to 2005, another period of trench-warfare politics. This time, the nation was almost evenly divided between the two parties. Democratic President Clinton was re-elected with 49 percent of the vote in 1996. And in the next two presidential elections, the popular vote was divided 48 percent to 48 percent, and 51 percent to 48 percent. In five successive House elections, from 1996 to 2004, Republicans won between 47 percent and 50 percent of the popular vote while Democrats won between 45 percent and 49 percent. Then, starting in 2005, after the public began to sour on the Iraq war, after Hurricane Katrina presented tests that nearly everyone on the political front lines failed, and after Congress wrapped itself in bribery and corruption scandals, Republican Party identification fell, as often happens to the party in power. Democrats won majorities in both chambers of Congress in 2006. The popular vote in House elections was 53 percent to 45 percent in favor of Democrats, almost a precise reversal of the Republicans' 52 percent to 46 percent in their breakthrough year of 1994. In 2008, Democrats won both the House popular vote and the presidency by almost the same numbers.

But the course of the 2008 campaign suggests that these results were not inevitable. In the first place, the two parties' nominations were not won in the usual way. From 1972, when the parties began selecting most of their delegates in primaries, through 2004, contested nominations were won by the candidate who swept the primaries. This was not so in 2008.

Sen. John McCain of Arizona won the Republican nomination by winning narrow pluralities in early primaries--by 5 percentage points in New Hampshire, 3 percentage points in South Carolina, 5 percentage points in Florida, 1 percentage point in Missouri, and 7 percentage points in California. Thanks to Republican winner-take-all delegate allocation rules, he was able to convert those squeaker victories into an insuperable lead by early February. A shift of just 3 percent of the votes from McCain to former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney in all of the primaries up to that point would have left the two of them virtually tied in delegates, with Romney in better financial shape.

The Republican contests showed a party splintered into various warring groups. Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee carried evangelical Christians, Romney tended to carry affluent suburbanites, and McCain won those betwixt and between. Up through the same-day contests on Super Tuesday, February 5, McCain won 50 percent of the vote only in New Jersey, New York, and Connecticut--hardly the base of the party these days.

On the Democratic side, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York actually won more popular votes and more delegates than Obama in the primaries (if you include the results in Florida and Michigan, which were only partially counted by the Democratic National Committee after a dispute with the states over their decision to move up their primary dates). But the Democrats' proportional representation delegate allocation rules left her with fewer delegates than Obama was able to win in his mostly lopsided victories in 12 of the 13 caucus states. That narrow delegate lead persuaded most of the Democrats' numerous superdelegates to endorse Obama. Party officeholders and insiders were not about to deny the nomination to an African-American candidate who, after a spectacular February and a dreary March and April, clung to a narrow but precious lead in pledged (i.e., won in primaries and caucuses) delegates.

Without its superior organizational efforts, the Obama campaign might not have prevailed. The Democratic Party was divided along demographic lines. Clinton consistently carried older voters, downscale voters, Latino voters, and older Jewish voters. And she got her largest majorities in the Appalachian territory stretching from western Pennsylvania southwest through the mountains and west to Arkansas and Oklahoma. Obama consistently won younger voters, upscale voters, and African-American voters. The result was an odd-looking political map, with Clinton carrying most of the northeast and southwest quadrants of the country and Obama winning most of the southeast and northwest quadrants.

A Well-Run Campaign

In the general election campaign, Obama started with great advantages. The Republican president had low job-approval ratings, the Republican Party identification had sharply declined since 2004, and Democrats had a greater share of voter enthusiasm. Despite his protracted battle with Clinton in the primaries, Obama was able to minimize defections in November. The exit poll showed that only 16 percent of Clinton's primary voters moved to McCain. The Obama campaign made brilliant use of the Internet to create and mobilize communities of Obama supporters. And it raised enormous and unprecedented sums of money--so much money that it would have been an act of folly for Obama not to break his pledge to accept federal financing in the fall.

Still, there was some movement in opinion over the course of the campaign. About 14 percent of voters shifted between candidates in the 12 months before the election, with 9 percent switching from McCain to Obama and 5 percent from Obama to McCain, according to a series of AP/Ipsos polls. During the campaign year, opinion moved against the Democrats on two major issues. The perceived success of President Bush's troop surge strategy in Iraq eliminated a major Republican negative, and $4-a-gallon gasoline stirred most Americans to favor offshore oil drilling and energy exploration in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. For most of 2008, Obama led McCain in the polls, often by significant margins. But coming out of the two party conventions in September, McCain led Obama for about two weeks. That lead may have just been an unsustainable post-convention bounce or, possibly, a sustainable change in alignment. But events intervened.

The collapse of Lehman Brothers on September 15 led to the crisis in the financial services industry and the subsequent $700 billion government bailout. On September 18, Obama overtook McCain in the RealClearPolitics website's average of recent polls. Obama's cool demeanor in response to the crisis contrasted with McCain's relatively impulsive decision to abandon campaigning and return to Washington. McCain's choice of Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin as his vice presidential nominee, initially an asset because of the enthusiasm she aroused among conservatives long indifferent to him, came to seem, through the lens of the financial crisis, as more evidence of impulsiveness. Opinion shifted little after that, and most pre-election polls were very close to the actual results.

Obama carried the electoral vote by 365 to 173. The big spread is testimony to the organizational strength of his campaign and the shrewdness of his strategists. Without the four states he carried with 50 or 51 percent of the vote--Florida, Indiana, North Carolina, and Ohio--he would have had 292 electoral votes, just 22 more than the needed majority.

He carried all 19 states (plus the District of Columbia) that Kerry won in 2004 and he prevailed in two that had been furiously contested in 2000 and 2004--Florida and Ohio--with only 51 percent of the vote. He captured nine states that had gone for Bush in 2004. In Nevada and New Mexico, his campaign did a superb job of registering and turning out newcomers and Latinos, and he won 55 percent and 57 percent, respectively, in what had been exquisitely close states in 2000 and 2004. In Iowa, where the state Democratic Party has had great organizational success and where Obama campaigned extensively before the caucuses, he won 54 percent. He also won 54 percent in Colorado. He received 53 percent in Virginia, where the elections of Mark Warner as governor in 2001 and Tim Kaine in 2005 led to a Democratic resurgence, especially in the Washington suburbs of Northern Virginia.

Obama carried two states that had seemed far out of reach on the basis of the 2004 results. Indiana, a 60 percent to 39 percent Bush state in 2004, went for Obama 50 percent to 49 percent, with the biggest Democratic gains in metro Indianapolis. North Carolina, a 56 percent to 44 percent Bush state even with home-state Sen. John Edwards on the Democratic ticket in 2004, experienced a 10-percentage-point increase in voter turnout, the biggest in the nation and enough to produce a 49.7 percent to 49.4 percent victory for Obama. The Democrat barely missed, by only 3,903 votes, adding Missouri's 11 electoral votes to his tally. In metro Omaha, Neb., he did just well enough to carry the single electoral vote of the 2nd Congressional District.

A comparison of Obama's state percentages with those of Kerry's yields more evidence of his campaign's skill in targeting and turning out voters. The Democratic share of the vote rose 11 percentage points in Indiana; 8 percentage points in New Mexico; 7 percentage points in Colorado, Nevada, and Virginia; 6 percentage points in North Carolina; and 5 percentage points in Iowa. It was up 9 percentage points in Montana and North Dakota, states that Bush had won and that Obama targeted. Obama's percentage was below Kerry's in Arkansas, Louisiana, Oklahoma, Tennessee, and West Virginia, as well as in Appalachian counties in western Pennsylvania. Some might be tempted to blame racism, but there is countervailing evidence: In 1989, southwestern Virginia counties voted for a black governor, Douglas Wilder. Turnout in these areas changed only negligibly from 2004 to 2008, suggesting a lack of enthusiasm for both candidates in 2008.

Building Blocs

Several interesting things can be said about the Obama majority coalition. First, he benefited from increased turnout by African-American voters, who were 13 percent of the electorate in 2008, up from 11 percent in 2004. They voted 95 percent for Obama, up 7 percentage points from the level of support they gave Kerry. The Obama campaign seems to have done an excellent job of increasing black turnout, not only in central cities but also in rural counties in Virginia and North Carolina. In addition, black turnout surged in Georgia, which played a role in reducing overall support for the Republican candidate from 58 percent in 2004 to 52 percent in 2008. Overall, Obama's bigger African-American majorities, not to mention his greater support from nonblack voters who were attracted to him in part because of his race, seem to have offset any losses from people who would have voted for a Democrat but not a black Democrat.

The very small percentages of votes cast for Obama by whites in Deep South states, such as Mississippi and Alabama, seem to reflect mostly partisan sentiments. White Democratic candidates in statewide elections there have not done much better among whites in recent years. And the public opinion polls taken before the primary and general election were not wildly out of sync with the election results, as was arguably the case in the 1982 and 1989 gubernatorial races in California and Virginia, which featured black candidates and pre-election polls showing the black candidates with more support than they actually got.

Obama also ran well with Latinos and Asians. The exit poll showed that 9 percent of voters were Latinos, up from 8 percent in 2004, and that they voted 67 percent to 31 percent for Obama. That was a huge increase for the Democrats from 2004, when the split in their favor was 53 percent to 44 percent. Bush ran nearly even with Hispanics in Texas and carried them in Florida; McCain lost Hispanics in both states, and that switch alone could account for Obama's 51 percent to 48 percent victory in Florida. Latinos' lopsided votes for Clinton in the primaries seem not to have represented an aversion to Obama, or, as some suggested, the perception of a rivalry between blacks and Latinos. And McCain's advocacy of a bill to give illegal immigrants a shot at citizenship seems to have won him little of the warm feelings that Latinos had for Bush in some states. Hispanic voters have been especially vulnerable in the real estate bust. The four states with the highest foreclosure rates in 2008 were all states with large Latino populations: Arizona, California, Florida, and Nevada.

Asian voters, heavily concentrated in a few heavily Democratic states, voted 62 percent for Obama. They cast 2 percent of all votes, the same as in 2004. White voters were 74 percent of the electorate, and they voted 43 percent for Obama, 2 percentage points more than for John Kerry. It's safe to assume that switches among whites accounted for about one-third of Obama's 2-percentage-point gain over Kerry, while blacks, Latinos and Asians accounted for about two-thirds of it.

Second, Obama created a top-and-bottom coalition. He carried voters with household incomes under $50,000 and those with household incomes over $200,000, while narrowly losing the 56 percent of voters with incomes in between. Fully 26 percent of voters reported incomes over $100,000, and they were split 49 percent to 49 percent, an astonishing result for those of us old enough to remember when high earners voted heavily Republican. In the 1980s and early 1990s, high earners' opposition to tax increases led them to vote Republican by large margins. By the mid-1990s, cultural issues led many of them to vote Democratic.

There was no sign in 2008 that Obama's promise to raise taxes on households earning more than $250,000 caused him political damage. Obama's 52 percent support among $200,000-plus voters was a huge increase over Kerry's 35 percent. There is an irony here. As the party that typically decries economic inequality, Democrats did well by it electorally in 2008 by carrying the expanding number (at least in this election) of voters from the two income extremes.

Similarly, taking education levels into account, Obama attracted people at the bottom and the top; among those in the middle, he did less well. He won 63 percent of voters who did not graduate from high school, many of them older blacks, and 58 percent of voters with postgraduate degrees. Among the 79 percent in the middle, Obama won a comparatively modest but sufficient 51 percent of the vote. Among white voters, he won 47 percent of college graduates and just 40 percent of noncollege graduates--the best proxy for the white working class of all the exit-poll demographics.

At the Democratic National Convention in August, speaker after speaker talked about the party being in touch with ordinary working families. That message was evidently not entirely persuasive. But white noncollege graduates, once a clear majority of the American electorate, accounted for only 39 percent of all voters, a percentage that is likely to keep declining. They are almost outnumbered already by the 35 percent who are white college graduates and who voted 51 percent to 47 percent for McCain.

The third thing that is striking about the Obama majority coalition is that it is heavily weighted toward the young. Voters age 30 and older favored Obama by only 50 percent to 49 percent. Voters 18 to 29 voted 66 percent (16 percentage points more than their elders) to 32 percent for Obama. This is the biggest difference between the young and the old since the exit poll began in 1972. That year, Republican Richard Nixon carried the under-30 group by 52 percent to 46 percent, and the 30-and-older group by 66 percent to 33 percent. In 2004, voters under 30 preferred Kerry, but only by 54 percent to 45 percent. Put it another way, Obama got about 22 percent of his support from young voters and McCain only about 13 percent.

At the same time, there was no unusually large surge in the young voter turnout. Nationally, young voters made up 17 percent of the electorate in 2004 and 18 percent in 2008. An examination of county election returns suggests that the Obama campaign did a splendid job of registering and turning out young voters in university towns and in singles' apartment neighborhoods in metropolitan areas. This success is particularly apparent in Indiana, New Mexico, North Carolina, and Virginia--all Bush 2004 states that Obama carried in 2008. Still, young people participated less than their elders. They accounted for 22 percent of the voting-age population but just 18 percent of the electorate.

Gallup polls in May 2009 showed that among voters younger than 35, Democrats had a 10-to-18-percentage-point advantage in party identification, similar to the 12-to-16-percentage-point Democratic advantage in party identification among people 55 to 64, the older half of the Baby Boom Generation. In their youth, Boomers accounted for the unusually high percentages of voters who favored anti-war Democrat George McGovern in 1972. Overall, according to the 2009 Gallup results, the Democratic advantage in party identification was 8 percentage points among seniors (ages 64-85), 10 percentage points among Baby Boomers (45-63), 7 percentage points among Generation X-ers (30-44), and 14 percentage points among what Gallup calls Generation Y and others call the Millennial Generation (18-29).

Trends Favor Democrats

Straight-line extrapolations from the 2008 election results reveal an America in which the Obama majority coalition is slated to grow. Millennial Generation voters will be an increasing part of the electorate, as will, most likely, relatively affluent and highly educated voters, and Latino and Asian voters. African-American turnout and Democratic percentages may, however, have peaked in 2008 (though they could be high again in 2012 if Obama seeks re-election), just as the Democratic percentage among Catholics peaked in 1960 at 78 percent when Kennedy ran for president. McCain carried young voters in only eight states, with 51 electoral votes between them; he did not carry black, Latino, or Asian voters in any state.

Some countervailing data favor the Republicans, but not as strongly. White evangelical Protestants continue to form one-quarter of the electorate; their numbers were actually up from 23 percent in 2004 to 26 percent in 2008, and they continued to vote Republican by 3-to-1. The trend in evangelical churches to take up anti-poverty and environmental protection causes, symbolized by the Rev. Rick Warren of the Saddleback Church in Lake Forest, Calif. (he delivered the invocation at Obama's inauguration), has not yet modified evangelical voting behavior in a major way. And young voters who have no religious commitment may develop one, as members of earlier generations did as they grew older and took on more family obligations.

The fastest-growing parts of the country still voted Republican in 2008, though less so than in 2004. McCain carried 86 of the 100 fastest-growing counties with populations over 10,000 in 2008. Bush won 97 of the fastest-growing counties in 2004. McCain lost three of the five fastest-growing--Kendall County, Ill.; Flagler County, Fla.; and Loudoun County, Va. And he lost the three largest fast-growing counties--Riverside County, Calif.; Clark County, Nev.; and Wake County, N.C. While there is no doubt that party identification changed to the detriment of Republicans--in 2004, 37 percent of voters were Republicans and 37 percent were Democrats, versus 32 percent Republican and 39 percent Democratic in 2008--there has also been a shift of attitude among self-identified independents, who tended to resemble Democrats on many issues in the last years of the Bush presidency. In the first months of the Obama presidency, independents tended to resemble Republicans on some issues, for example, by opposing the massive government bailouts of the financial services industry and the domestic automakers.

Whether the country's period of open-field politics continues or the 2006 and 2008 election results turn out to be the beginning of another period of trench-warfare politics (this time with a small but decisive Democratic majority) is not yet clear. The nation faces new and unfamiliar issues. The continuing troubles of the financial system are unlike anything Americans have experienced since the 1930s, and anyone who was an adult then is older than 90 now. Unprecedented government intervention in the economy has provoked dissatisfaction. The 2008 exit poll showed that 56 percent of respondents opposed the $700 billion bailout for the financial services industry voted by Congress in October 2008, while 39 percent supported it. Continued government infusions of vast sums into banks, mortgage lenders Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, Detroit's automobile companies, and insurance firms raise questions of propriety and favoritism. And Obama's 2010 budget asks Americans to support or reject a vastly larger and more intrusive government. Moreover, the costly Obama programs to provide government health insurance and to regulate carbon dioxide emissions affect different regions of the country differently, in ways that split both parties' constituencies and potential constituencies.

Voters in November 2008 believed, by 47 percent to 23 percent, that the economy would get better in the coming year, according to the exit poll. Within a few months, those expectations seemed antiquated. Against the backdrop of fast-changing conditions, public opinion can shift quickly, as it did after September 11, 2001.

The United States continues to face major challenges in the world, and in early 2009, Obama decided to continue military operations in Iraq and to step them up in Afghanistan, to the consternation of some on the Democratic left who were so enthusiastic about his candidacy. He decided to continue holding unlawful combatants indefinitely and to try them in military tribunals, both controversial policies with Democrats and some independents during the preceding Bush administration. Obama faces the continuing challenge of dealing with the vicious mullah-cracy of Iran, which has been bent on obtaining nuclear weapons to threaten Israel. The Iranian problem is one that neither the diplomacy nor the aggressive military posture of the previous administration was able to address effectively. Obama also faces a truculent Russia, which seems disinclined to cooperate on any issue from missile defense to the Iranian nuclear program, and a stern China, which provides the United States with a bounty of consumer goods and helps finance its government debt but may not care to do so indefinitely. Any of these challenges could erupt into crisis, with unpredictable repercussions in American public opinion.

The most volatile factor in our politics in the first decade of the 21st century is the balance of enthusiasm. Voter turnout has generally been rising, but the balance of enthusiasm seems to determine which party's supporters increase their turnout most. In 2002 and 2004, that balance favored the Republicans somewhat, and in 2006 and 2008, it favored the Democrats somewhat more.

The question for Republican strategists is how they can excite potential voters. The question for Democratic strategists is how to maintain the level of enthusiasm apparent in the 2008 election results. Off-year and special elections provide some clues. Democratic victories in special elections for House seats in 2007 and 2008 in Illinois, Louisiana, and Mississippi showed the balance of enthusiasm working in the party's favor. Special elections in Georgia, Louisiana, and Virginia from December 2008 to February 2009 showed a bigger drop-off in turnout among Democrats than among Republicans. The 2010 midterm congressional elections will provide more clues.

A Turning Point?

Obama's election and his reform program raise the question of whether America has reached another inflection point in the balance of opinion on the relationship between government and markets. Such inflection points are rare, and seem to have come at 40-year intervals. To oversimplify much, the economic distress of the 1930s, symbolized by the breadlines of the Great Depression, convinced most Americans that markets didn't work very well and that government did. The economic distress of the 1970s, symbolized by the gas lines of the stagflation era, convinced most Americans that government didn't work very well and that markets did.

In this view (with many exceptions and caveats), the 1930s produced a natural Democratic majority for a long generation, and the 1970s produced a natural Republican majority for a long generation, which may now have come to an end. It may be time for another inflection point, for Americans to decide that markets don't work very well and that government does.

But the picture is incomplete. For the change in the balance of opinion owed much not only to the economic distress of the 1930s and 1970s but also to the success, both in economic policy and in America's position in the world, of the 1940s and 1980s. In the 1940s, the United States was the incredibly productive arsenal of democracy in World War II, and then, in the postwar years, it was the engine of world economic growth. In the 1980s, the United States won an almost entirely bloodless victory in the Cold War and embarked on a quarter-century of low-inflation economic growth--"It's morning in America," as Ronald Reagan's 1984 ad proclaimed. Franklin Roosevelt and Reagan both seemed to turn the American economy around, although economists are still arguing to what extent and in what respects. They led the nation to magnificent victories over the fascism of Nazi Germany and the Communism of the Soviet Union. Those triumphs fortified the opinion of the American people that the nation was both great and good.

It is possible to imagine that the American economy may recover sharply and resume its bounteous productivity in another quarter-century of low-inflation economic growth, thanks to, or in spite of, Obama's economic policies. It is more difficult to imagine how the United States can emerge as brilliantly successful against the Islamist terrorists and Iranian mullahs who wish our destruction as it was against Germany and Japan in 1945 and during the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. But one must remember that it was difficult to imagine those outcomes when the United States under Roosevelt was aiding a lonely Britain against the alliance of Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia in 1940, and when Reagan was proclaiming to the disdain of almost all supposedly enlightened opinion in 1983 that communism would end up on the "ash heap of history."

America has had great leaders, but they have had a great country to work with. Maybe this will prove true again.

Michael Barone is a resident fellow at AEI.