What if, in fact, we're seeing a restoration of a secular national trend toward liberalism - a preference among voters and the American populace more generally toward liberal solutions to national problems and to the Democratic Party as the repository for those solutions?
This would be the trend that was in evidence on Election Night 2000. If you add up the votes of the two left-liberal presidential candidates that year - Al Gore and Ralph Nader - you come up with 54 million. That's 3 million more than George W. Bush and Pat Buchanan combined.
In other words he believes that, absent a clear and present threat, American voters prefer what Democrats have to offer. Podhoretz offers some current polling statistics to back up this assertion.
What Ribbing and Podhoretz disagree about is the degree to which U.S. voters see Islamic terrorism as the number one problem they want their federal government to confront. I hope for all our sakes Ribbing's view is the correct one.
