COMM 386: Two reasons to read this story ...

It's this week's cover story in Time magazine by Peter Beinhart on the "death and rebirth of American liberalism." but Beinhart takes a long, historical view of national policy. He's a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, so he's well equipped to do so.

Beinhart's analysis is hard to sum up in a few words, but he comes close with this:

The coalition that carried Obama to victory is every bit as sturdy as America's last two dominant political coalitions: the ones that elected Franklin Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan. And the Obama majority is sturdy for one overriding reason: liberalism, which average Americans once associated with upheaval, now promises stability instead.

In Beinhart's analysis, the Nov. 4 election was decided on issues as fundamental as in the elections of 1932 and 1980.

That's one reason to read the story.

The other reason is that our final exam question kind of assumes the mass media coverage of this year's election has been shallow and gossipy. This story is neither. Which kind of throws a monkey wrench into my assumptions, but in all fairness ought to be recorded.

Later: But then, again, as Chris Cillizza reminds us in Sunday's Washington Post, the media always spin post-election tales of mythic proportions ... and Cillizza, who writes "The Fix" for political junkies, ought to know. Among five myths he spots in this month's coverage, is this one:

3. Now that they control the White House and Congress, Democrats will usher in a new progressive era.

Not likely. At first glance, the numbers do look encouraging for proponents of a new New Deal era in government: Obama claimed at least 364 electoral votes and more than 52.5 percent of the overall popular vote, while Democrats now control at least 57 seats in the Senate and 255 in the House. But look more closely, and you see a heavy influx of moderate to conservative members in the incoming freshman Democratic class, particularly in the House. ...

The fact that roughly a third of the Democratic House majority sits in seats with Republican underpinnings (at least at the presidential level) is almost certain to keep a liberal dream agenda from moving through Congress. The first rule of politics is survival, and if these new arrivals to Washington want to stick around, they are likely to build centrist voting records between now and 2010.

(Besides, look what happened to Illinois Democrats when they got control the governor's office and both houses of the state Legislature.)

It doesn't matter which side of the issue(s) these writers argue. What matters is that they're arguing them at all.