In 1970, Ben Wattenberg published a book. He had written speeches for Lyndon Johnson, worked as an aide to Hubert Humphrey and was to be a mainstay of Senator Henry Jackson’s tilt for the Democratic nomination in 1972. Yet Wattenberg’s book, The Real Majority, was most avidly read by Richard Nixon and his advisers.
Forty years later, the book is still worth reading by anyone who wants to understand the danger that now faces Barack Obama.
For what the author realised was the vulnerability of the Democratic coalition. For years, an alliance of the dispossessed had swept all before it, installing Democrats in the White House again and again. But now the passage of the Civil Rights Act had helped to split the white working class from the liberal ideologues, the social reformers, the very poor and ethnic minorities.
With Wattenberg’s book to guide them, Nixon’s Southern strategy forged a real majority out of social conservatives, splitting them from the economic liberals. The success of this alliance meant that, until Mr Obama’s victory, the last Northern liberal to win the presidency was that son of Massachusetts John F. Kennedy.
Mr Obama won in 2008 by putting Kennedy’s coalition back together again. His message of hope, his rhetorical brilliance and his magnificent handling of the racial question reunited Democratic voters. He handled social issues carefully, appearing a centrist on gun control and crime. The financial crisis helped to broaden the Democratic fold, with hard-pressed working families willing to vote alongside, for instance, culturally optimistic liberal students.
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The extraordinary defeat suffered by the Democrats in Massachusetts on Tuesday is thus important for two reasons. The first is that it shows that those who came together to elect Mr Obama are now dividing. The voters who abandoned the Democrats were largely from the white working class and the party’s candidate did particularly badly among the elderly.
That the candidate, Martha Coakley, was incredibly inept did not help. But Massachusetts voted against Mr Obama more than against Ms Coakley. He has not governed with the same care to keep his coalition together as he showed when he campaigned. This was the same failing for which Bill Clinton was punished in the 1994 midterm elections.
Perhaps the best example of this lack of attention came over the summer. The Administration was unable to persuade those with health insurance that they were not being embroiled in some vastly expensive scheme to aid the uninsured — a classic division between the white working class and the poor and ethnic minorities. And it is in healthcare that the second, but more immediate, impact of the Massachusetts defeat will be felt.
The mathematics and the politics of health care reform have just become monumentally more difficult for the presidency. Both the power to stop the reform and the political incentive to do it have been greatly strengthened.
Mr Clinton recovered after 1994, when all seemed bleak for him. He did so because he took the verdict of the voters seriously. He made clear that he was returning to the centrism that had brought him his original victory. Mr Obama must now do the same thing.