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“After Barack Obama’s victory in the presidential election last November,” Michael Tomasky writes in The New York Review of Books, “the question arose whether the result should be seen as a realignment—a fundamental shift in party dominance that would continue for a good many years.” He credits Obama and his team with holding their political coalition together, but

now we enter a new phase. Passing trillion-dollar legislation on, for example, health care reform, in which, by law, revenues have to equal outlays, is considerably harder than passing a stimulus bill on which no such demands were made (and even passing that legislation, as we saw, wasn’t easy). Big legislation makes walking the tightrope far more difficult, because “in legislation,” as one person told me, “there are winners and losers.” So now opposition will come not only from Republicans, but also from some Democrats. The next six months—especially with regard to health care, climate change, and the disposition of the Guantánamo issue—may go a long way toward determining the President’s fate.

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Tomasky’s article is an excellent primer on the difficulties and implications of passing these bills (some of which are winding their way through Congressional committees right now). And what if they make it to the President’s desk?

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Passing bills on health care and climate change and nailing down a deal to close Guantánamo would surely make for an impressive rookie year. But, to go back to where we started, would they herald Democratic dominance? No. The reforms, once passed, have to work.

And what then? Even if Obama’s (to the extent that they’re his; any bill ready for his signature will be a compromise) reforms work, will that usher in an age of Democratic Party dominance?

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I don’t think so, at least not for any amount of time you could call an “age.” Suppose America adopts a reasonably successful system of universal healthcare. Suppose Obama and the Democrats get the credit for it. Entitlements are the “third rail” of American politics. If the system is popular, Republicans will be forces to adapt, as they were forced to do with Social Security.

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If Obama’s reforms work, there probably wouldn’t be any long-term political realignment. But there would be an evolution. Party positions change but party names do not. In America, popular reforms drag Republicans and Democrats along with them. Demographics, on the other hand, are another story. Republicans are growing older and whiter, and that should scare them.

-Greg Waldmann

Politics galore in the latest New Yorker. Elizabeth Drew has a very saavy piece about Barack Obama’s style of governance (deliberative and pragmatic) and the potential meaning of his victory. Obama will certainly be free to make fewer sops to interest groups. Drew notes that

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On election night, the most perceptive of the television analysts this year, Chuck Todd, NBC’s political director, said that Obama owed his victory to no particular segment of the population, that “no one group put him over the top.” Todd added that Obama could have won without a single vote of young people, Hispanics, or blacks.

And he ran a cleaner campaign, to boot. Does this mean the end of the so-called Rove era? Drew thinks so, and she goes even further:

The 2008 election may mark the end of Rovian politics, the strategy of dividing the country over cultural issues, such as abortion; of trying to scare voters into fearing for their security if the opposition candidate won. It may also mark the end of the culture wars that had been with us since the Sixties. Obama, the first post-baby-boomer presidential candidate, made those issues irrelevant.

A bit too hopeful perhaps, though the very thought must make bipartisanship fetishists like Ronald Brownstein salivate. In the same issue Michael Tomasky, one of the more astute political observers, is more cautious:

We must consider the question of realignment in light of the current financial crisis and the structural economic problems with which the new president must grapple….Whether Democrats will still be running successfully against George W. Bush in 2028 will depend very directly, it seems to me, on how Obama and the Democrats in Congress respond to the moment. With the current world situation fraught on so many fronts, certainly President Obama will have a singular opportunity to move his party beyond its post-Vietnam image of soft incoherence and show that a less bellicose foreign policy than Bush’s…But the economy will clearly occupy the center of the stage.

And we here in the literary corner can certainly second Joan Didion, celebrating the fact that

For the first time in the memory of most of us a major political party was moving in the direction of nominating a demonstrably superior candidate – a genuinely literate man in a culture that does not prize literacy, an actually cosmopolitan man in an arena that deems tolerance of the world suspect by definition.

We make no endorsements (though turn here for an OLM primer on Obama), but we heartily second the idea of a President that reads for pleasure.