Before I respond to Thomas Spragens's commentary on my book, I want to thank him for the thoughtful and gracious tenor of his review. Despite our differences about the legacy of the McGovern campaign of 1972, we agree that the campaign was a watershed in the development of contemporary liberalism and that it deserves reexamination by those who seek to address liberalism's future in American politics.

Spragens devotes considerable space in his review to a critique of George McGovern for arguing during the campaign that Americans had gone morally astray in their conduct of the war in Vietnam. I agree with him that McGovern's passionate moral condemnation of the war was impolitic for a general election campaign—although without such rhetoric, a junior senator from South Dakota would never have attracted the following that carried him to the Democratic presidential nomination in 1972. Further, I agree that McGovern's language about the war should have been more sensitive toward the sacrifices of the working class, whose sons (white and black) had disproportionately done the fighting and dying in Vietnam. Where I part company with Spragens is on the sharp distinction he draws between prophets and presidents in the uses of the jeremiad. As I briefly note in my book, Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt employed the tropes of the jeremiad and asked Americans to come to terms with moral failings. To deride this type of discourse as nagging and rule it out of bounds for political figures is to restrict the room for moral leadership in American public life.

Spragens's fundamental disagreement is with the concluding section of The Liberals' Moment, which takes up what I call “the identity crisis of the Democratic Party.” In the last part of the book, I argue that a legacy of the McGovern campaign is that while the base of the Democratic Party has become more thoroughly liberal since the 1960s with the departure of conservative southerners and Cold War neocons, Democratic leaders, fearful of replaying the electoral disaster of 1972, have positioned the party in the center for presidential elections. Spragens takes issue with my depiction of the Democratic base, specifically my claim that contemporary American liberals share core convictions about economic justice, social equality, and international peace; these convictions, he suggests, are neither clear nor unanimous on the Left. That there is ambiguity and argument about Democratic convictions I readily acknowledge. Nonetheless, there is ample evidence from opinion surveys and congressional voting patterns supporting my perspective on what Democratic liberals believe.

The evidence is especially strong in the area of international affairs: From the views and votes of liberals against American intervention in Central America during Ronald Reagan's presidency to liberals' unhappiness in 2009 about Barack Obama's increase of American forces in Afghanistan, the bitter memory of the war in Vietnam has continued to haunt the base of the Democratic Party. There is also substantial evidence in the surveys and voting data that Democratic liberals care a great deal about economic justice (e.g, in attitudes toward the minimum wage, universal health care, and taxing the rich) and social equality (e.g., in attitudes toward immigrant rights, abortion rights, and same-sex marriage).

Another disagreement with Spragens involves my critical characterization of Democratic centrists. Sandy Berger told me that his evolution from McGovernite to Clintonian reflected a “process of political maturation”; Spragens evidently agrees with Berger and wonders why I did not reckon with his statement. If Berger meant that he and other members of the Clinton network outgrew the youthful excesses of 1972-style New Politics liberalism, I can agree. But is it true that Bill Clinton and his fellow centrists came up with a “mature” public philosophy—or a winning political formula?

I remain skeptical. Although the arguments of “centrist or neoliberal” intellectuals like William Galston or Spragens himself are cogent, the notoriously small-bore and shifting initiatives of the Clinton presidency hardly expressed a public philosophy that endured after he left office. Clinton won the presidency twice—aided not only by his own exceptional talent but by a troubled economy in 1992 and weak Republican opponents both times he ran—yet other Democratic candidates who sought the center ran defensive and dispiriting campaigns in 1988, 2000, and 2004. In short, the philosophical and political appeal of Democratic centrism has not been impressive, one reason why a reenergized Democratic Party moved more to the Left in 2008.

Both Spragens (in the final pages of his book) and I (in the preface to the paperback edition of my book) spy hope for American liberalism in the election of Barack Obama. However, Obama's travails during his first year in office raise doubts about whether liberalism, viewed from either of our perspectives, will fulfill the grand aspirations of 2008. Obama may yet straighten out the tangled identity of the Democratic Party—or his presidency may represent only a higher stage in its long-lasting crisis.