Alonzo L. Hamby | Book Review | The Journal of American History, 87.4

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Alonzo L. Hamby | Book Review | The Journal of American History, 87.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Reinventing Democrats: The Politics of Liberalism from Reagan to Clinton . By Kenneth S. Baer. (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2000. xiv, 361 pp. $29.95, ISBN 0-7006-1009-X.)

Thirty years ago, commentators began to observe that New Deal liberalism, the ideological rationale of the Democratic party, had lost a unifying message and fragmented into the disparate agendas of numerous interest groups. This widely sensed development would be followed quickly by the George McGovern debacle of 1972, the failed presidency of Jimmy Carter, and the ascendancy of Reaganite conservatism. In his first book, Kenneth S. Baer, a Washington-based writer who has studied American political history at the University of Pennsylvania and Oxford University, recounts the efforts of the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC) and its sibling, the Progressive Policy Institute (PPI), to reshape the Democratic "public philosophy" along lines more palatable to the broad center of American politics. Utilizing many interviews and access to DLC records, he recounts a long struggle by "New Democrats," culminating with the Clinton presidency and the realization, after Bill Clinton's initial stumbles, of the New Democratic philosophy of governance. . . .

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