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Evangelical élites could be heard in the foyers and fellowship halls, on retreats and at private gatherings, insisting that a person could not be a Christian and a Democrat.
—Charles Marsh, Wayward Christian Soldiers: Freeing the Gospel from Political Captivity
Really? I guess I don't hang out with the right people. Some of my best friends are Democrats, not to mention Books & Culture's editorial board, where Democrats are well-represented. Me, I'm a Republican Absurdist, which is handy as we enter the climactic year of the 2008 campaign. (By the way, for a take on evangelical élites that differs in some ways from Charles Marsh's, see Michael Lindsay's new book Faith in the Halls of Power, reviewed on p. 33 by Brad Wilcox.)
America's publishers, conscious as always of their civic duty, are cranking out all manner of books geared to the election cycle. There's Matt Bai's The Argument: Billionaires, Bloggers, and the Battle to Remake Democratic Politics (Penguin Press) and Amy Sullivan's The Party Faithful: How Democrats Can Close the God Gap, due in February from Scribner. Also coming in February, and highly recommended, is Beyond Left and Right: Helping Christians Make Sense of American Politics (Baker), by Books & Culture contributor Amy Black. There are campaign biographies galore (some of them featuring subjects who are already out of the running). There's even a book by a professor of psychology at Emory University, Drew Westen—The Political Brain: The Role of Emotion in Deciding the Fate of the Nation (Public Affairs)—tracing recent Democratic failures to the party's touching but misplaced faith in rational argument. Republicans, on the other hand, have thrived because they've learned how to tap into voters' emotions.
The best book I've seen so far to prompt reflection on what we're doing as we prepare to elect a new president is Edward Larson's A Magnificent Catastrophe: The Tumultuous Election of 1800, America's First Presidential Campaign, just published by Free Press. The campaign pitted the incumbent, John Adams, against Thomas Jefferson. George Washington had served two terms uncontested, with Adams as his vice president, and declined to consider a third term. Hence in 1796, for the first time, several candidates vied for the presidency, though they did not actively campaign to be elected. In the system in place at that time, each elector in the electoral college voted for two candidates. To win, a candidate had to receive a majority of the electors' votes. (If no candidate managed to do so, the vote went to the House.) In 1796, Adams received 71 votes from the 139 electors, giving him the presidency. Jefferson, the runner-up with 68 votes, became vice president, as the Constitution then required.
In the election of 1800, Adams represented the Federalist Party, whose guiding force was Alexander Hamilton (by then working subtly to undermine Adams, who was too moderate for Hamilton). Jefferson represented the Republicans (not to be confused with the Republican Party as it later developed; rather, Jeffersonian Republicans metamorphosed over time to become the Democratic Party). The philosophical differences between the two—the Federalists favoring a strong central government with a strong executive, the Republicans favoring a minimalist central government; the Federalists wary of the mob, the Republicans wary of dictatorial power—have led some commentators to exaggerate the stakes in this contest. The distinguished historian Jill Lepore, reviewing Larson's book in The New Yorker (September 17, 2007), describes the choice between Adams and Jefferson in 1800 as "the most important election in American history."
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