HOW THE DEMOCRATS GOT THEIR GROOVE BACK

They've been flinching ever since Reagan, but the party has finally figured out who they are.

- CHARLES P. PIERCE

IT WAS A JANUARY DAY IN 1981, COLD AND CLEAR. TWO MONTHS EARLIER, RONALD Reagan had swept aside incumbent Jimmy Carter to win the presidency. The Republicans had also gained a majority in the Senate for the first time since 1955, flipping nine Democratic seats and defeating liberal Democratic stalwarts Frank Church of Idaho, Birch Bayh of Indiana, 
Gaylord Nelson of Wisconsin, John Culver of Iowa, and George McGovern, the 1972 Democratic presidential nominee and senator from South Dakota. It was a historic and massive electoral bloodbath.

In the ensuing two months, a feeling of cold dread had come over the lame-duck elements of the government. Reagan was a radical conservative, at least in the polite context of the center-left consensus that had prevailed in Washington since the end of World War II. He represented the reaction to the unrest of the 1960s and the backlash against the civil-rights movement. And that reaction and that backlash had congealed into a powerful political movement in which the Republican establishment had moved away from Wall Street and New England to go south and west, never really to return.

Over the weekend before Reagan’s inauguration, there was a kind of frenzy in Washington. I spent the night before with staffers from the office of the outgoing vice president, Walter Mondale, who taught me the words to the “Minnesota Rouser.” I also spent time with representatives from the embassy of Ireland, who were well into the whiskey hours because some congressman from South Carolina had invited the Rev. Ian Paisley, the Protestant firebrand from Northern Ireland, to the ceremony the next day. (This was long before his awakening to the peace process and the Good Friday Agreement.) It was a night on the edge, but nobody knew the edge of what, exactly.