National Perspective: Democrats Have Another Chance To Do What They Haven't in the Past

Three times in American history, Democrats faced the difficult task of defining their character and regrouping for the political battles ahead. Each time, they flinched.

For roughly a half century after the election of Abraham Lincoln, the once-proud party of Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson struggled to shape an identity that appealed to a country freed of slavery and open to a growing federal role in American life. For a dozen years beginning in 1920, the party floundered in the wilderness as the economy boomed and then nearly went bust. For two dozen years beginning in 1968, broken only by the single Jimmy Carter term, Democrats staggered aimlessly in a political landscape controlled by Republicans from Richard Nixon to George H.W. Bush.