It is typical in most presidential elections that the party in power paints a positive view of the state of the country, while the challenger is negative.
One notable exception to this rule was the 1980 presidential election, when Republican Ronald Reagan ousted Democratic incumbent Jimmy Carter by exuding optimism and a belief in America’s greatness to overcome the malaise that had afflicted both the Carter administration and the nation.
Interestingly, President Barack Obama, in his speech Wednesday night, borrowed a page out of the Reagan playbook, even evoking Reagan’s “shining city on a hill” reference to American exceptionalism.
“America is already great. America is already strong,” Obama proclaimed while delivering an enthusiastic endorsement of fellow Democrat Hillary Clinton and a full-throated repudiation of her Republican challenger, Donald Trump.
As powerful as Obama’s speech was, it should be noted that the majority of the nation is not quite so positive. As David Brooks, a conservative New York Times columnist who has been part of public television’s coverage of the convention, noted, 70 percent of the nation says in opinion polls that it is dissatisfied with America’s present course. That ranges from the right-wing base with whom Trump’s angry, fearful appeals have resonated to the left-wing supporters of Bernie Sanders, the socialist who gave Clinton more fits in the Democratic nomination fight than most would have expected.
There is an undeniable anxiety and uncertainty in the nation — over globalism and the economic dislocation that has cut into the earnings power of the working class; over terrorism abroad and at home; over racial tensions that have bubbled up in shootings by police and against them; over dramatic social changes, such as same-sex marriage, that don’t square with the traditions and religious beliefs of many older Americans; over the changing ethnic composition of the nation, fueled in large part by the seeming inability to curb illegal immigration.
The Democrats’ case, as eloquently put forward by Obama, is that this country can work through all these changes and tensions together, and that Donald Trump’s demagoguery would only make them worse. Obama said this election is not just about who is better qualified to be president (Clinton, hands down, according to the Democratic president who beat her in 2008 and then recruited her to be his secretary of state). It’s also about whether America’s founding principle of self-government — that it shapes its destiny through collaboration and consensus — endures or it turns power over, out of fear, to a pompous, self-declared savior.
In truth, things are not as good as the Democratic Convention makes out, nor are they as bad as the Republican Convention portrayed last week. The reality, as it has been during most of this country’s history, is somewhere in the middle. If the majority of the electorate comes to the same conclusion, the odds are good that the Democrats will hold the White House.
