The following is an edited excerpt from author and political analyst Michael Barone's recent speech at the Teatro Salon Series. The series brings internationally acclaimed speakers to Calgary to talk about the pressing issues facing Canada and the world. The National Post is its media partner.

Resident Fellow Michael Barone

One possible consequence of Barack Obama's election is a substantial change in the relationship between government and the private sector in the United States. There have been inflection points in this relationship every 40 years or so. The last two times they have been a response, not just to momentary problems, but to long-lasting experiences, which sunk deep into the lives of ordinary people.

The Great Depression of the 1930s, the breadlines that formed then, convinced Americans to oversimplify somewhat that markets didn't work and government did. A whole series of public policies followed that judgment. The stagflation of the 1970s, the gas station lines, produced the opposite inflection. Americans began to oversimplify and decided that government didn't work and markets did.

The latter experience has been dispositive for much of U.S. politics and public policy in the years since, because people who remembered the 1970s were averse to big government. Bill Clinton won in 1992 by saying, "Hey, I'm not going to be a big-government Democrat, I'm going to be a new Democrat." But when he seemed to be governing contrary to that--the Clinton health care plan--the Republicans were swept into Congress. President Clinton and the Republican congress compiled a record that can reasonably be described as a new Democratic record, respectful of markets, including things like the conclusion of the North American Free Trade Agreement in 1993.

Back then, politicians were dealing with an electorate where almost everybody remembered the '70s. This year it was different. The median-age voter was born around 1963-65. The median-age voter never sat for an hour in a gas line waiting to fill up. The median-age voter never paid family bills out of a cheque book with declining real income, paying inflationary bills and wondering how they would make it. He or she never had to try to get a mortgage at 18 percent or 21 percent mortgage rates like those in the late '70s and '80s.

They're more open-minded on whether we need bigger government or not. They're more open to Barack Obama. And you know the reaction of some of the younger votes among whom Obama has done terrifically is: "Oh the government will provide me with health care, health insurance, cool. Hey, there's no problem with that."

That's the sort of reaction you get, because people are formed by their experiences. Political scientists are always trying to make internal rules about political behaviour and I think it's a failing venture, because human beings make decisions based on the things they know. And the things you know if you experienced the 1930s or the things you know if you experienced the 1970s are different from those who did not have those experiences.

Not many people study history so intimately or so vividly that it affects them in the ways that people who actually lived through those times were affected. I still hear from my mother who's 89 years old about going to bed hungry in the 1930s. And when her father used to buy a lot of houses and rent them out to people and lost all his houses because he couldn't pay the taxes and the mortgages--that's still a vivid experience for an 89-year-old voter.

The good news for Republicans (now looking to rebuild after Obama's victory) is that there aren't that many 89-year-old voters; the number's not going to go up. But the bad news for Republicans is that the number of people who remember the 1970s is not going up either.

Michael Barone is a resident fellow at AEI.