Come Home, America

The Liberals' Moment

The McGovern Insurgency and the Identity Crisis of the Democratic Party

by Bruce Miroff

Kansas, 355 pp., $29.95

The Bulldozer and the Big Tent

Blind Republicans, Lame Democrats, and the Recovery of American Ideals

by Todd Gitlin

Wiley, 336 pp., $25.95

The 2006 election put a spring in the step of many on the left who saw in its outcome the herald of a liberal revival. Still, reflective liberals who came of political age in the 1960s tend to be thrice haunted. They carry with them not only the wounds inflicted by the collapse in quick succession of the New Left and then of the 1972 McGovern campaign, but also of the false springs of 1988, when Reagan was on the ropes, and 1998, when the GOP seemed to be collapsing in on itself.

Two such thoughtful liberals, Bruce Miroff, in The Liberals' Moment, and Todd Gitlin, in The Bulldozer and the Big Tent, have written hortatory texts aimed at avoiding yet another disappointment.

Miroff, a veteran of the McGovern campaign and now a professor of political science at the State University of New York at Albany, argues effectively that, window dressing aside, the McGovernites succeeded in taking over the Democratic party, lock, stock, and barrel. This is more than a matter of the now-famous political names such as Hillary Clinton, Gary Hart, Robert Shrum, Bill Clinton, Jesse Jackson, John Podesta, and Samuel Berger, who emerged from the campaign. As Miroff notes, Mondale, Carter, Dukakis, and Gore all lost presidential elections, yet we talk of McGovernites, not Mondaleites, Dukakisites, or Goreites.

"The 1972 campaign," Miroff explains, "was the last time Democratic activists could wear their heart on their sleeve all the way up to Election Day."